Our youth obsessed culture as is increasingly seen everywhere, flies in the face of our ageing western societies. I think that this trend is sabotaging us as we head into the future, displacing perfectly adequate older people who, day by day, are becoming a larger and larger majority. Older people are no less productive than younger people, and hold the advantage of life experience, which tempers there expectations. Youth culture is full of avarice and self interest, and above that, more often copies from the past rather than creating real ‘cutting edge’ trends. Fashion, essentially, id cyclical, and to claim that youth culture is the great inventor of all today’s trends is to ignore the rich depth of our historical culture.
And the process this can bring out in young people — often creating body amorphism and other psychological disorders, adding to the pressure on our celebrity obsessed culture — differentiating between the media and real life can be difficult. Constantly being bombarded with perfect photo-shopped images puts pressure on us all, leaving older people feeling excluded. Something in this mad-cap media savvy world needs to give a knee-up to the older, frustrated generation, before we’re all too old.
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