I don't care what I sound like to others, much as they won't care what they sound like to me.
If people want to, they'll pay attention - unless they know (or think they know) the topic already. If nobody wants to listen, that's not my loss or my problem.
Who gives a crap what I sound like tp a shallow idiot with no ability to think outside the box and hates anyone over 30? The opinions of anyone that would judge me by my age rather than my words of wisdom, can kiss it. I would never try to act younger than I am. I am young and I am not acting. Anyone who dismisses me because they don't think I am young, probably is someone who judges people by what they expect to hear, and will not open their mind anyway.
The days of worrying and feeling shame because you have hit a mark that lables you old, are OVER. I have ended it. It is cool to be old. It is somethng to look forward to. People who are stupid enough to fear age are people who have nothing much to offer in the way of enlightened thinking. People who hate age are people who fear death and worship youth. Youth is something that the wise do not wish to return to. We have passed that barrier and have earned the wisdom of the ages.
Old is gold and if you know how to live? No one will ever accuse you of being old like it is a bad word.
I do hear this often from Millennials: "I hope I am just like you when I am your age". That is the best compliment I can imagine.
This post was edited by WM BARR . =ABSOLUTE TRASH at December 19, 2016 6:39 AM MST
I don't think the OP was about fear of being old, but rather of young people dismissing their elders' opinions and experiences as "old" hence irrelevant or nonsense, from their (the young's) own lack of understanding.
Perhaps it's the so-called "millenials" who fear aging. (I don't know quite what age-range or characteristics that means, but it's always been fashionable and very occasionally convenient, to classify people like the goods on supermarket shelves). They fear it so try to belittle it from a misguided sense of self-defence.
And before we feel too comfy in our cocoon of decades' experience let's remember those of us who were in our teens in the 1960s were just as prone to belittle our parents' and grandparents' ideas etc, calling them "squares" for harrumphing at we "delinquent" new-fangled creatures called "teenagers" who invented sex and listened to "beat music", and - horror of horrors - whose males grew their hair below their collars.
Though there may be a difference from the cosseted, Internet-powered teens and 20s of now and we, their 1960s predecessors. Apart from 1960s people having to use dial-telephones and hand-writing. For especially in Britain and Europe, own elders had lived through a dreadful war at first hand, followed by the years of "Austerity" shortages, uniformity, drabness and for the boys, National Service for little or no genuine reason (though some fought in Korea). Also they'd nothing as young people to call their own, so while proverbially writing to newspapers harrumph-letters signed "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells", were perhaps secretly jealous when rock-and-roll and new clothes fashions fought their way to the surface a generation too late for those good folk of the Kent town.
There's nowt new under the Sun, and even some Classical Greek writers forgot their own youth when harrumphing about young people, 2 millennia and more ago!
"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" By Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Durdle 