Listen to Grandma

The radio is playing quietly in the kitchen.

An old song comes on.

Someone younger recognizes it because old songs don't really disappear anymore. They wait in playlists until another generation finds them.

His grandmother recognizes it for a different reason.

She remembers when it was new.

For a while they listen from opposite ends of the same room.

Then she says, "We thought songs like this were about being strong."

He looks at her.

"Weren't they?"

She thinks about it.

"Sometimes."

That's about as far as the conversation gets.

Later, though, I keep thinking about the answer.

There are things we learn because they help us survive particular circumstances.

Don't trust too easily.

Don't let people see that they hurt you.

Have your own money.

Don't depend on anyone.

Leave before someone gets the opportunity to leave you.

Under the right conditions, any of those lessons might be useful.

Some may be extremely useful.

The difficulty comes later.

Circumstances change more easily than lessons do.

Something learned during a bad marriage gets carried into a good relationship. A way of protecting yourself at seventeen is still running at forty. A family adapts to a crisis, the crisis ends, and twenty years later nobody remembers why certain subjects can't be discussed at dinner.

The adaptation survives the environment that produced it.

That doesn't make the original response foolish.

Quite often it means the response worked.

This is one reason I'm cautious when people describe previous generations as though they simply failed to understand themselves.

They knew things we don't.

We know things they didn't.

They also had to make decisions before seeing what those decisions would become after thirty years of repetition.

We have the unfair advantage of arriving later.

The generation growing up now will have the same advantage over us.

What may be different for them is the speed at which explanations arrive.

A person can have a painful experience at midnight and, before going to sleep, find an entire community organized around an explanation for why it happened.

Sometimes that's enormously helpful.

Someone discovers that an experience they thought was uniquely theirs has a name. They find other people who have been through it. They learn that behavior they had accepted as normal wasn't normal at all.

An explanation can return options to someone who thought they had none.

It can also become difficult to leave.

Once a story explains enough of our experience, new events start getting interpreted through it.

Evidence that fits becomes confirmation.

Evidence that doesn't fit may look like another example of why the story was right.

Eventually an explanation can become very good at protecting itself.

That's not primarily an internet problem.

People have always done it.

Families do it. Political movements do it. Religions do it. Institutions do it. Individuals do it.

The internet just gives us more explanations, more quickly, along with other people prepared to reinforce almost any one we choose.

The problem isn't having a story about what happened.

We need stories.

Without them, experience is just a pile of events.

The problem begins when the story is no longer allowed to change.

Maybe Grandma knows something about that.

Not because she's old enough to have solved life.

She may still be carrying explanations that stopped being useful decades ago.

Her advantage is smaller.

She's had more time to watch some of her explanations fail.

The thing that felt permanent at twenty wasn't.

The person she was certain would never change did.

Something she thought she'd never recover from eventually became one event among many others.

Another thing never stopped hurting at all.

Time didn't resolve everything.

It gave her more observations.

That may be what the younger person in the kitchen doesn't have yet.

Not wisdom.

More samples.

And perhaps that's why advice across generations is so difficult.

The older person knows that some things change.

The younger person knows that this thing is happening now.

Both are right about something the other can't fully access.

"Give it time" can be terrible advice when someone needs to act.

"This is how things are" can be terrible advice when someone has mistaken a painful period for a permanent description of the world.

There isn't a rule that resolves the difference.

You have to keep observing.

That requires leaving some part of the explanation unfinished.

Not so unfinished that you can't act.

Not so open that every lesson has to be relearned from the beginning.

Just unfinished enough that reality can still disagree with you.

Maybe that's what Grandma heard differently in the old song.

When she was young, it described something she needed.

Years later, she can hear the protection in it and also hear what the protection cost.

The song hasn't changed.

She has more information now.

The radio keeps playing while they finish whatever they were doing in the kitchen.

Neither of them wins the conversation.

That's probably useful too.