Why do we become more conservative with age?
ALL WE HAVE GROWN THE MASS OF QUESTIONS TO THE SELF AND THE WORLD, with whom there seems to be no time or not to go to a psychologist. But convincing answers are not born when you talk to yourself, or to your friends, or to your parents. We started a new regular section where professional psychotherapist Olga Miloradova will answer pressing questions. By the way, if you have them, send to [email protected].
Why do we become more conservative with age?
With horror looking at our own photographs from the past and comparing them with the "I" of today, we, of course, seem to ourselves now more reasonable and restrained. As a teenager, we are amazed at how boring adults look and in every way we strive to at least stand out. With age, adolescents begin to annoy us with their fanciful absurdity. But if we dig deeper, besides all this external and superficial, if we analyze the changes in our thoughts, feelings, point of view, are we really becoming more conservative?
Olga Miloradova psychotherapist
Many studies by psychologists, sociologists, and even gerontologists show that reality contradicts the popular belief that with age we become more conservative. In fact, everything is exactly the opposite: over time, the views of people from more conservative change to more liberal. Even when comparing the opinions of 25-year-old and 35-year-old people on various burning issues, it was noted that the latter with great understanding and tolerance belong to different demographic groups, much less prone to racism, sexism and other isisms, and 60-year-olds and did show themselves open to a variety of points of view and experiments. In general, it is more logical that people who have seen something in life are less prone to maximalism and the division of the world into black and white and allow for the existence of various features. Moreover, they themselves probably did not always follow a number of their initial convictions and were able to subject them to critical analysis and the resulting changes.
Try to remember how many years ago there and how your views have changed during this time.
Where did this myth come from? Mostly the wrong comparison of disparate groups is to blame. That is, if you compare yourself with your grandmother, then surely she will be more conservative (although there are exceptions here), but not because of her old age, but because you and your grandmother were brought up at different times, with different cultural characteristics and in a different social environment. Judge for yourself, it’s one thing to grow in a world where same-sex marriage is practiced on half the planet, it’s quite another at a time when such connections were criminally punishable. In general, it is not your grandmother who needs to be compared, but your grandmother at the age of 20 and now how she and her value system, her world view, her acceptance of otherness have changed.
In the same way, it is impossible to compare you and someone 10 years younger, try to remember the version of yourself how many years ago and think how your views have changed during this time. After all, surely they have changed? Most girls believe in one love for life, despise those who sleep with married women, intolerantly towards those who work too much and devote too little time to children. Most women understand that shit happens, people get divorced, they can fall in love again and sometimes not very suitable people, and that children tend to somehow grow themselves. So with age we do not at all become conservative crackers, on the contrary - we gain wisdom and more readily make compromises.