I am sorry if this is offensive to any elderly, but I am getting so sick of my soon-to-pension father who does nothing but complain about other people. They do everything wrong with the undertone, but never explicitly said, that he knows better than them.
Especially journalist, oh he loves complaining about them and how they are hiding the truth because they didn’t report about something that he knows is true in a short news article or clip (often the fact he mentions is true, but it is a really niche knowledge and he has always struggled with the idea that other people don’t know everything he knows).
This has gotten worse and worse as he gets older. We used to always discuss politics and what works and what doesn’t and I enjoy those conversations, but lately he is getting stuck on topics and gets very very repetitive. He is also getting sensitive about it, getting upset and raising his voice when I don’t agree with him.
have anyone else experienced this with their beloved elders? This is common stereotype for elderly, especially elderly men, but it is so true for him! I do remember my grandpa also being like this, although he never talked about politics.
Many reasons. The older one gets, the more stuff if not wealth one has acquired, the more one stands to lose. That has most people make a turn for conservative viewpoints if they weren’t there already.
Also, as the Peter Principle in the workplace (I paraphrase: everybody gets eventually promoted to a position they are not qualified to do well) old people get to an age where they overestimate their worldly knowledge.
Getting old is shit. Your joints hurt, hair grows out of weird spots, people around you move to farms upstate. Things you loved from when you were crisp and shiny get swept by the wayside by progress. You have a lot more to complain about now because you also have more time for it. And you wait an awful lot at doctor’s clinics.
Not all people do all of these things all the time but there average person will tick at least two of these broad boxes. There is nothing you can do really. Listen but don’t take to heart the crap. I draw a line at right-wing politics and hurtful -isms. If my parents didn’t cross into that territory I turned my head into an extractor fan.
When you were little, they wiped shit out of your ass crack and worried about you when you were sick. As a bonus they now get you annoy you. The circle of life.
If I had wealth I don’t think I would become more conservative. Not that I’m ever going to but I don’t know why having enough money for a house was suddenly make me hate Mexicans
They don’t wake up one morning and yell small government. The more liberal social frog inside of you will also get boiled eventually by imperceptible temperature changes in the water over a long time. Conservative thinking isn’t generally synonymous with xenophobia. It’s more about low taxes, no handouts to anyone, tough on crime, that sort of thing. The xenophobia aspect is a perversion of that, which sadly isn’t uncommon but not a forgone conclusion generally speaking. The fact that the MAGAs have made this synonymous with conservative thinking in the US speaks to the success of their movement built on fear, lies, hate, and generations worth of people failed by their education system.
Yeah, that’s what I have decided to do, to stop contradicting him with his extreme views. Just try to change topic instead. It is no use, he is too old to change now, if anything the change is just deeper into what he already was.