> Why is it so difficult for the younger folks to concede that older folks have something solely by the virtue of being old?

It's difficult to talk about this sort of stuff without sounding like I'm a kid throwing a fit, but I guess it's worth a shot:

Growing up it feels like older people should be, fairly uniformly from the perspective of a child, incredibly formidable.
You've had three or four times our experience and you should really know your stuff. You should have done your homework on your opinions and actions, you should be more self-controlled, more insightful, more... everything that doesn't relate fairly directly to muscles really. And you don't exactly try to deny that either - build up this image of yourselves as people whose judgement should be deferred to and ... when does any of it ever get backed up?

When we talk to an adult, it's very rare to feel like we're dealing with someone more knowledgeable or experienced than us at all, let alone three or four times so.

Adults lock kids up in school for the a lot of their waking lives and even your average kids still manage to get up to a competitive standard with your average adult in a year or so. The difference on forty years of age should not be a single year.

Maybe part of that's selection bias, adults just never get to do anything particularly difficult in front of us - but I don't think so in this case. Unlike many people my age in this country, I've worked a real job before - doing things that require thought - and the job wasn't hard to learn or anything like that. The people there, while friendly and nice, didn't strike me as being people with positive multiples of my own skills, despite some of them being multiples of my age.

Which isn't to say that some old people can't be incredibly formidable, from time to time you run into such people and can learn a lot from them - but most people seem to get to, say, their first job after school and some of the damage that school did them fades a bit, and then they just stop growing. If a kid like me can match or exceed most of the older people she meets, then there's something very wrong in the idea that you get something extra just from being old.

An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?

You don't get better by ageing, I think - at least, not solely by virtue of being older. Age represents opportunities to seek out new experiences and knowledge, and thus to get wiser. However, lots of people never take them and make much of themselves at all.

My fifty year old father's response to locking his washing in the washing machine was to run another wash cycle, and when that didn't work to run the spin cycle - it was only when I came along and released the child-lock that he was able to get his washing. The manual was right there besides the machine.

And he's not suffering from dementia or anything like that. It's tempting to think he is but he isn't. He's just spent all his life working the same mediocre arts job and sitting in front of the TV every spare moment he gets.

Respect that, as better than me just because he's older? It's like looking at a cripple. But... he's still meant to be healthy, he was always that smart. And so many adults are like him. There doesn't seem to be anything biologically wrong with them. And I love him dearly, but what does he have that I don't? And if he doesn't have anything just by virtue of being older, why should I assume that anyone else does -- if age is the sole criteria?