Every time I open a device, I am presented with new stories about how kids these days don’t read, don’t work, don’t save, or don’t know how to get through school without extensive reliance on Chat GPT. I posted a few weeks ago about how easy it is to be triggered by the young (this is true for all of us, even the teenagers who recently pointed to the new students pouring onto their campus, telling me in impatient tones that they were never this rude, that they never filled the locker rooms with poorly chosen, internet-derived drivel) and about how being relatively older than anyone requires us to be prepared to nurture, not to demand nourishment. This applies to teens who are learning to not be threatened by hordes of anarchic twelve year olds, and to adults who are learning to treat the youth with care, not fear or contempt.

Last time my emphasis was on how to be the grownup in the room. This time I want to talk about co-existing with the understanding that age can make people *different from each other,* and how this difference doesn’t need to be viewed as a liability.

I don’t like discourse that tries to create adversarial relationships between age groups. No “okay boomer” for me! No lazily researched anti-Gen Z hit jobs for me! There are a myriad of negative reasons for this, chief among them my suspicion of the profit motive that often co-opts and encourages the proliferation of age-differentiated identities. But there is mostly a strong positive reason for this, which is my conviction that intergenerational relationships are so rich, so impossible to overestimate in their value, that I don’t want to acquiesce to any ideology that tries to persuade us otherwise.

First, let’s talk about the “okay boomer” sentiment and why I despise it. I will confess here that I used to be insufferably arrogant and peak ageist in my belief that people needed to be young and “informed” and very online (sigh) in order to be relevant. I was also very active in both devout evangelical and activist progressive circles—both of which I still love, but which added to my unearned air of authority and made me a truly intolerable person. It’s amazing that I had any friends. My attitude was only adjusted by a crisis of belief and circumstance that reconfigured my entire life, and the life of my family.

You know that truly stupid phrase “don’t trust anyone over 30,” coined by Jack Weinberg of the Free Speech Movement (lol and how did that work out for everyone? Please see Dashka Slater’s generous but unsparing take on the remnants of the Free Speech Movement lingering at the peripheries of the Berkeley campus)? After our life-altering disaster, my sister and I started telling each other, grimly, “don’t listen to anyone under 50.” We were DONE with youthful idealism and only wanted to hear from people who had been through catastrophic disappointment and knew how to carry on! In the years that followed, I asked several older people to have coffee with me and talk to me about their lives in activism, in ministry, in grappling with the vicissitudes of community and belief. I tried to ask calmly, but they could definitely see the panic in my eyes, which is probably why they all said yes.

The conversations were always good. I don’t think they were good in a way that my younger self would have found legible, because they were not as prescriptive as I would have liked, and void of the certitude that I used to associate with wisdom. One of the people I talked to, after hearing me lament a decade in social impact work that ended with nothing to show, told me simply “if you had known differently you would have done differently. Some things you can only know over time.”

Funnily enough, my reentry to community-oriented work happened in a setting that was populated mostly by boomers. It was the best case scenario; I think going back to work with a team of people my age, with personalities in any way similar to mine, would have turned me into the worst version of myself. Being around relatively older people has tempered me. Don’t take my word for it; one of my longtime friends, who tolerated me back when my extracurricular activities consisted of

A) prayer-walking on the Berkeley campus

B) protesting on the Berkeley campus

recently moved back to the Bay Area. After we reunited, this was her appraisal of me: “You’ve always been confident and full of conviction, but I can tell you’re growing because you’ve become more gentle.”

Now let’s talk about the youth and about why their presence is a gift. As someone who has been personally attacked by high schoolers who have offered, as a sincere and good-faith act of charity, to redo my entire face of makeup, I know how it feels to be disrupted/affronted/threatened/unintentionally maligned by the young. (The high schoolers wanted to throw a gender reveal party for my baby and they also wanted to post about it. But they didn’t want us to all be in the video together if my face wasn’t done.

Her: “Can you write me a note so I can come to your office before the party?”

Me: “I’m not going to take you out of class to do my makeup. I can do my own makeup.”

Her, speaking in a tone of genuine distress: “No you can’t.”)

Think about how insufferable and myopic we would all be if we didn’t have the opportunity to have our egos checked and our assumptions rightfully challenged by people less socialized, less inhibited, and less impressed by our conventions than we are! I was listening to a friend of mine, who recently completed a graduate program at Yale, complain about the smugness of her peers and their impenetrable self-satisfaction. This made me think about how I, too, would be very smug and self-satisfied if I was in a graduate program at Yale, surrounded by adults who knew what graduate school was and how hard it was to get into—but no, not only am I not a student at Yale, I am surrounded by fourteen year olds who don’t know what graduate school is, who have only a fuzzy concept of the institutions I find impressive, and who stare at me blankly when I try to engage them in a heartfelt discussion about our cultural climate and the potential of youth activism. During that particular discussion, one of them finally raised her hand to ask “why are you wearing the same outfit you wore a few days ago?”

I would have worded her critique differently, but I took the point. I was facilitating a conversation that I was interested in, not one that she was interested in, and I needed to read the room. Like I’ve said before, accepting your role as the adult in the room doesn’t equate giving a wholesale endorsement to whatever the kids are interested in, because taking young people seriously also means giving a fair critique of their opinions, but this does mean taking their reactions in stride, and considering whether you need to make adjustments.

Regarding the group of students who wanted to talk about my outfit, I eventually figured out that I was overreliant on verbal discussion and would do better with them if I interspersed our conversations with more readings and video clips—basically, if I stopped yapping so much. I also figured out something that is probably obvious to people who know me well, but hard for me to confront in myself: it’s always easy for me to default to talking about what I find interesting, regardless of who is actually in the room with me. Being with people younger than me is an abrasive experience, but I know for a fact that it makes me more pliant and more willing to recognize that I have opportunities to grow. These qualities, in turn, make me a better person to live with, in all settings, at every scale. I also never wore that outfit again because it drew too much attention.

Finally, the title of this post: I think my phone started feeding me Selena Gomez content because I spent a few days perusing Benny Blanco’s recipes and then went down the Selena/Benny rabbit hole. I paused when I saw the name of their joint single because it delivered such a potent dose of emotion in a short phrase. I’ve thought about it often because of how well it works to evoke the animosities that linger beneath our intergenerational discourse—the fears of displacement, the unfavorable comparisons, the sense of intractable rivalry. I’ve also thought about how this title is only effective because of how quick we are to understand it, and how clickable it is in its suggestiveness. It worked as a critique of my sensibilities.

The moment someone articulates the thoughts that accompany intergenerational rivalries—“don’t trust anyone over thirty,” “younger and hotter than me”—is the moment you see how stupid this whole thing is. If you have the opportunity to plunge into a discomfiting range of rich, diversely intergenerational relationships, I highly recommend you take it.

Before you go: My workshop on publishing and editorial collaboration, given for Inkwell / Christianity Today, is this Saturday at 10 AM PST. Register here and come out if you’re free! It would be fun to see your faces on Zoom. xx