Kid, Young, Youngish, Aging

Guernsey ID card 2 of 2
Originally uploaded by xxxrmt

Last week at PICNIC I had dinner with someone I have been working with for a year or so. Somehow the discussion drifted into age and aging and I was very surprised by the fact that someone I thought was exactly my age, was significantly younger. Someone I had thought shared the same story of struggling through their 20s, was not even halfway there.

Next to the few jokes made about the age issue, for a moment it threw me off rails. To be exact, my own surprised reaction was more troubling than the age difference. What’s in an age?

I have often been in situations where I am the youngest person and I have found people addressing me in a highly condescending manner. I could list numerous examples where I have got upset by comments such as “oh, you will understand when you are my age’ or ‘you young people’. I just have zero tolerance towards using age difference as a lifeline out of a professional debate. But the dinner last week made me wonder whether I have now gone full circle and started addressing people in a manner that I would not tolerate for a second. Why on earth would it change my approach that there is seven years between me and a colleague?

Due to my work I use the phrase young people several times a day. I use it in discussions, advocacy work, articles and funding applications. But I sincerely hope that last week, I catched myself early enough. I do not want to be that person who looks down on young people with that irritating amusement on their face. I really wish I can be a person who listens without prejudice, who makes judgements based on arguments and who is willing to explain their position to both young and old.

But I also want to recognize that I am getting older. I acknowledge that there are things that just go beyond my taste, my judgement and my understanding. But I wish I can live up to Robert Kennedy’s notion of qualities of youth: "not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease."

Making Sense

First day of networking and learning at PICNIC08 done. Got home at 22.00 after a spontaneous dinner with corporate trend analysts. Great stuff and discussions on how to create governments able to recognise the issues that matter to people. Basically the question was: why is a marketeer able to develop a working model that benefits product development, brand recognition and also profits the individuals taking part? Or more importantly, why governments are not able to do this? More surely to follow on that. As Charlie Leadbeater put it: why does it feel like governments are doing things to us when they claim they are doing things with or for us?

So what else did I grab from today?
- Google is not very good - some even said crap - in suggestings things to us that we were not aware that we are interested in (like for instance newspapers are)
- nearly all creativity requires collaboration but not all collaboration is creative
- "free form internet is a pure myth"
- Aaron Koblin's work on visualising data is amazing (see video above on visualising SMS sending in Amsterdam)
- internet platforms have corrupted the way we use the word friend and the meanings we give to it.

By the way: PICNIC is doing a huge mapping on trends. If you can think of one, let me know by giving a short explanation and an example and I will add it to the mapping exercise they are doing. One I saw added today was sharing rare music via YouTube.