The Weaknesses of Youth, the Advantages of Age

Bust of Cicero

In the summer of 2023 I read Cicero's essay on On Old Age in which he argues that growing old is not a decline but a reward for a life lived wisely and virtuously. He dispels fears about aging—loss of strength, pleasure, and status—by showing that the mind and character can flourish even as the body weakens. Old age, he says, brings freedom from restless desires and the chance to reflect, teach, and serve with dignity.

Cicero's observation came to mind as I reflected on our contemporary worship of Youth. We see it everywhere, in our obsession with “30 under 30” lists and teenage billionaires. Society erects a pedestals glorifying untested ideas while sidelining the hard-earned wisdom of age, creating systemic cracks across business, policy, culture, and human well-being. The costs are measurable, painful, and entirely avoidable.

Let's start with business failure rates. Venture-capital post-mortems show founders under 30 crash twice as often as those over 45, largely because they lack the pattern-recognition that comes from surviving multiple economic cycles. A couple years ago I heard someone share how he went to California to work for a tech startup in which the twenty-something founder came down the hall on a skateboard to meet him when he arrived. The unrealistic prospects never materialized and the company was gone as fast as it emerged. 

Theranos, another media darling launched by a 19-year-old, vaporized $700 million and put patients at risk precisely because no one in the room had seen a similar scam unravel before. Meanwhile, companies that purge veteran staff to appear “innovative” lose institutional memory. Boeing’s 737 MAX disasters can be traced, in part, to retired engineers who once enforced rigorous certification standards the new cohort never learned.

The pattern repeats in shallower arenas. TikTok-spawned “zero-waste” startups collapse when supply-chain realities hit, while seasoned operators would have stress-tested logistics from day one. In politics, Congressional offices staffed by twenty-somethings produce student-loan forgiveness schemes that ignore four decades of inflation data, saddling the country with $1.7 trillion in moral hazard. Even culture suffers: modern pop music leans on three-chord loops compared to the seven-to-nine-chord richness of the 1960s. Diplomatic miscalculations echo 1914 because “history is bunk” to those who never lived through its consequences.

The human toll is subtler but no less brutal. When elders are sidelined, mentoring evaporates; Deloitte reports 62 % of Gen-Z workers have no workplace guide. The Harvard Grant Study, tracking lives for eighty years, insists that relationships with mentors are the strongest predictor of late-life happiness—yet we withhold them. Simultaneously, the pedestal crushes the young it elevates: CDC data show suicide rates for 25–34-year-olds jumped 35% from 2010 to 2021, fueled by the pressure to “change the world” before one’s prefrontal cortex is fully wired. (OK, that last is an oversimplification; blame can easily be laid at the feet of a whole culture that has coddled its youth. Gotta protect those kids from having their feelings bruised.)

The strength of youth may be its unbounded energy and untested optimism. What's needed is the wisdom that only experience can bring. 

Here's a suggestion for those in the business world as well as civic leadership: Pair every 25-year-old visionary with a 55-year-old operator who has weathered three market crashes, two recessions, and one divorce. Raw energy tempered by scar tissue is the only combination that produces progress that lasts.

When I was young we (young people) bought into the slogan, "Don't trust anyone over thirty." A corollary to this is that the past is unimportant, on the now and the future matter. In truth, both those ideas were stupid. There is much to be learned from our elders, just as there is much to be learned from human history.

Youth brings spark, but absent the wisdom gained from the school of hard knocks leaves that youthful energy unfocused, misguided or worse.

Closing Thought

True contentment depends not on youth or power, but on virtue and wisdom. For Cicero, aging well means living well—and death is simply nature’s final passage.

More Thoughts from Cicero: On Life, Death and Philosophy

I've been reading Ross King's The Bookseller of Florence, which details the influence of ancient writings and the manuscripts that helped spawn the Renaissance. One of the details that jumped out at me was the literacy rate in Florence at that time. 75 percent of the Florentines were literate, which was three times greater than peoples in other cities. Books and reading resulted in great advances in all fields of study.

One of those influential writers from Roman times was the statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, writer and academic skeptic Marcus Tullius Cicero. During the political crisis that led to the establishment of the Roman Empire he was striving to uphold high and noble ideals as regards the community we want to live in. His extensive writings include treatises on rhetoric, philosophy and politics.

He was also considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists and the innovator of what became known as Ciceronian rhetoric. Cicero was educated in Rome and in Greece and served as consul in 63 BC.

Cicero was a prolific writer and his works cover a wide range of topics, including politics, philosophy, rhetoric, and law. He is best known for his speeches, which are considered some of the greatest examples of oration in the history of Western civilization. He didn't speak just to hear himself talk, though. His aim was to make a difference, especially in the realm of making a better society.

He was also a gifted writer and his works are still read today for their insights. I am currently reading his book On Old Age. It is 2000 years old and still relevant.

What follows are some quotes from this an who influenced both Augustine of Hippo (Saint Augustine) and George Washington. The best way to enjoy good quotes is similar to the best way to enjoy art, poetry or a good meal: go slow and savor.

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"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."

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"There is nothing so absurd that it has not been said by some philosopher."

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"No one is so old as to think that he cannot live one more year." (I've used this quote several times recently)

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"Injustice often arises also through chicanery, that is, through an over-subtle and even fraudulent construction of the law. This it is that gave rise to the now familiar saw, 'More law, less justice.'"

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"We are not born for ourselves alone; a part of us is claimed by our nation, another part by our friends."

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"Let your desires be ruled by reason."

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"For the habit of arguing in support of atheism, whether it be done from conviction or in pretense, is a wicked and impious practice." 

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"I should prefer ineloquent good sense to loquacious folly."

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"Speaking of the 'Law of Nature,' what could be more "in accord" with it than for the old to die--an event that happens to young men only against all the opposition that nature can muster. Yes, indeed! It seems to me that the death of a young man is like the drowning of a blazing flame by a flood of water, whereas the death of the old is like the gradual, utterly gentle and spontaneous flickering out of a fire that has used up its fuel. Fruits, too, if they are green, must be forcefully pulled from the bough, but if they are ripe and mellow, they drop off. So it is with the life of man: from the young, it is taken by violence, from the old, by the fullness of time. This is a thought that gives me great comfort; as I come closer and closer to death, I seem, so to speak, to see the land and to be at last about to come into harbor after a long sea-journey."

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