Not many of us think about getting older. Most of us just assume we will be young like this forever. Young, wild, and carefree is what the teenage years are supposed to be. Somewhere in the back of our minds we know that this will end and one day we will be our parents.

Does the thought of this scare you? Many do not like idea, and with good reason too. As we get older we will not be as fast or as strong as we once were. We will also be considered wiser and the younger generation will look to us. Or will they?

Looking at our generation now it is easy to see we do not treat those older than us with much respect. We scoff and laugh at the advice they give us and never put it into full consideration. This is different from what has been taught in the past and it has changed to the worse.

Emily Brewer (11) also feels similarly.

“They were raised different, and we were raised to respect them,” she said.

But are we showing it? By looking around our school the answer is obvious. What if we put ourselves in those older shoes? Like stated before not many think about this.

“I like to think about my future and what’s best, but I don’t think about growing old,” Brewer said.

Most of us, myself included, only think about where will be in the future about two years maximum. Not when we will have wrinkles, and grey hair; not when we will be running to keep up with our grandchildren, and aching when we do–just about college or maybe what is for lunch today.

Perhaps our view on the old has little respect because we do not want to look at them and think one day that will be me. That they were young just like me, they did things that I do, but now they are aged. Many don’t wish to think about that and instead just focus on me just now, and show disrespect in an effort to make them go away.

Is that really working though? Whether we like it or not we are aging every second of our lives and there’s absolutely nothing we can do to stop it.

Do we have to accept the idea of getting older? It depends on how we want to live our lives. We could take the idea of growing older as a learning experience and just go as it comes, or we could continue to ignore that for a few more years–whatever works best.

But one thing’s for sure, we look at the elderly differently than we do the rest of the population.

That they are old and useless, but they are not. Especially if you think about the fact they are like us and one day the younger generation will think that about us.

No one is just useless, especially not the older ones. Without them what would we know? They teach us even when we are disrespectful, and still help us. Will we do that when we get older?

We will have to do as the generations before us had to, and get older without even realizing it–which has happened for years. Everyone looks at their self young, never old; which is why we fear aging so much.

Accepting aging means accepting the idea that our best days are over. This is the thought that scares us most, that our best days may never even come.