The Mistakes of the Elders
Learning, and Not Learning, From Those Who Went Before
The Pot Brownies of Doom
Because of a friendly argument with an acquaintance of mine on the responsibility we elders (my god, am I really an elder now?) have to the younger folks who are now coming-of-age, I had occasion to remember a story I once heard in Sunday School.
The story goes like this:
Gary was bored. It was a hot day, he didn’t want to go anywhere, he was hung over from partying the night before with his college friends, so he decided to spend his Saturday doing chores, washing his car, and relaxing in the sun. He just needed a joint to take the edge off.
The joint presented a problem. The pot plant he usually kept in his closet was nearly bare. No buds—he’d smoked all those—and only a couple leaves. He had seeds, he had stems, and he had too much of a headache to roll reliably.
So he did what any self-respecting stoner would do. He grabbed a box of brownie mix, crushed and crumbled what remained of his little plant, and dropped it in.
Half an hour later he had a pan of fresh brownies, a pair of shorts, and his car washing gear. He ate one of his chocolate pleasure bombs and went out front to wash the car.
There was, so he said, a bug on the windshield. He didn’t like bugs on his windshield, so he washed it off.
An hour later when his best friend pulled up with a car full of buddies, Gary was still washing that bug off his windshield.
Gary’s friends invited him to ride with them to San Francisco, but he declined on the grounds that he was too high to even bother. “This is the rankest shit I’ve ever done,” he said. “I am so fucked up...I don’t know, man, I didn’t know you could get this fucked up.”
His friends liked the sound of that, so they asked if they could each have a brownie. Gary gave them the pan, and went back to washing his car.
The following morning, Gary was awakened by a knock from his friend, who had come to return the brownie pan.
His friend was not in a friendly mood. “You bastard! I can’t believe you did that!”
“What did I do?”
And so his friend told him. The car-load of young men had gone to San Francisco, eating the brownies all the way. By the time they got to Chinatown and found a good restaurant, they had cleaned the pan. After taking their seats at the restaurant, they ordered everything on the menu—literally. The waiter brought a mountain of food for the table, and the four of them had sat and stared at the food.
They sat, and stared, until closing time.
And then they discovered they didn’t have enough cash to pay the tab.
“That is the worst shit I’ve ever had in my life!” the friend was now shouting loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear. “How could you do that to a friend?”
Gary apologized profusely.
“Don’t worry, man, it’s all right,” his friend said. “Um…you got any more?”
The takeaway from this Sunday School lesson?
Don’t ever make pot brownies out of the seeds and stems.
Mistakes and Generational Knowledge
That wasn’t actually the point my youth leader was making.
It was the late 1980s, and he was, watching his charges (as well as his own kids) getting propagandized by the anti-drug madness of the era. He knew that, going by the numbers, at least some of us were going to wind up dancing with the dragon of recreational chemistry by the time we hit voting age. He also knew that the best way to guarantee that a teenager of a particular inclination will do the most dangerous possible thing in any given scenario is to feed that teenager transparently false and moralistic propaganda on the relevant issue. A properly skeptical, intelligent, yet immature rebel will look at the lies he can detect and automatically discount as lies everything else coming from the source of those lies.
So, my youth leader decided to give us the straight dope (pun intended), as gleaned from his rather extensive experience with substances that make the brain sit up and do tricks. He told straight stories of his most embarrassing drug-addled moments, let us laugh at him, and let the matter be. This approach saved more than one of my friends from making any number of rookie space cadet mistakes like mixing drugs, overindulging without a plan for getting home without driving, getting high around people you’d be embarrassed to wake up next to, and so on.
This is what mentorship is about, isn’t it? Allowing the next generation to learn from your mistakes?
After all...
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’
-George Santayana, 1905
Or, to paraphrase the Twitter thread that inspired this post:1
“People who won’t tell youngsters about the mistakes they’ve made are defecting on culture. So why don’t more people publicly bemoan their mistakes? Why do some people celebrate them? Why don’t they spend more time warning youngsters off?”
The thread’s original author, a very serious Catholic who is also software engineer and hardSF author, reckoned that the lack of a doctrine of sin on the part of high-openness secular folks was at least partly to blame for what he sees as a rather poisonous cultural trend.
Even though I’m a high-openness secular person, you think I’d be more-or-less on the same page. I am, after all, no stranger to giving advice. I have written a lot of books and columns that basically consist of giving advice, both direct and indirect, on everything from writing2 to how-to books.3 My fiction often deals with themes of maturation and agency and ethics.4 While the two most striking examples are currently set to debut later this year, if you’ve read any of my work here on Substack you’ll have noticed my propensity to do so here. Indirectly, I do it through analysis in my articles on history. Directly, I’ve done so in posts like The Parable of the Shuffle Plow, Try This at Home, and What it Means to "Throw Like a Girl". For years, now, I’ve hosted The Every Day Novelist, an almost-daily podcast on the creative life and all things connected to it (which turns out to be just about everything).
And yet, when I read my friend’s tweet, I found myself mentally skidding to a halt for a couple reasons:
First, because at the time this exchange took place I was in the midst of writing the initial draft of The Art of Agency.5
Second, in my mentoring relationships I have often found myself deliberately withholding advice, refusing to espouse regret, and/or saying “You’ll figure it out.”
So why the disconnect? Why am I, a stupidly prolific advice-giver, prone to not giving advice when it might make a difference?
After all, we all make mistakes. We’re all human. Part of being human is benefiting from the collective wisdom that’s transmitted through friendships, mentorships, parental relationships, and culture. What possible benign reason could anyone have for deliberately withholding vital admonitions inherited from wisdom traditions, or gained from personal experience?
It turns out, there are a few.
The Butterfly Effect
The hell of human life is that, like all life, it can only develop through adversity and struggle. There is, of course, such a thing as too much struggle, but as we’ve seen through the horrific crippling damage done to children by overprotective parents and institutions over the past couple generations, there is also such a thing as too little. Human competence, consciousness, and self-possession develops through experience—trial and error, risk and triumph, failure and learning. Just as a butterfly that is given too much help in emerging from the cocoon can have its wings permanently damaged, and rendered forever unable to fly, so can a person facing the challenges of life find themselves crippled if they have too much of the wrong kind of help. From this angle, it is clear that there will be times in every life where one desperately wants advice and guidance, when even the best advice and guidance will be the least healthy thing one could receive.
Sometimes, it is the mistakes themselves and our adaptations to their consequences—not the lessons learned from them—that create the very things about our lives that we find most valuable.6
If you’re in the position of giving advice from a position of social authority, you must be careful about touching the butterfly wings, of short-circuiting the struggles that allow for maturity and richness to develop. Sometimes, rather than offering advice, it’s better to offer an ear, or a hug, or a stiff drink.
The Arrogance of Age
Human nature is broad, with startling variation in personality and mentality and physicality between individuals within a group, and less striking (but still measurable) variations between groups. Nonetheless, human nature is a thing, and it does not change much (except perhaps very very slowly). The stage on which that nature plays out, however, changes a lot, and sometimes quite rapidly.
The past five hundred years in the West—and the past hundred years in the world at large—have seen a succession of historical fractures, where technological changes (and the economic and ideological changes they precipitate) have so shifted the ground in which civilization grows that the nuts-and-bolts strategies for living a successful life sometimes change more frequently than the generations turn over.
The Boomers faced a radically different social and economic environment than did their parents and their older siblings. They couldn’t rely on high-wage industrial jobs, on lifelong careers at companies that gave pensions. There were far too many of them for the existing job market to absorb, and their wages took a nose-dive as a result. They got further, faster, using reckless levels of credit than they could have following their parents’ path (a short-term plan the rest of us are going to be paying for for a long time to come).
The Xers faced a different problem—they were mostly locked out of the best parts of the job market by the oversupply of Boomers, and didn’t start to come into their own economically until their forties unless they were among the fortunate few who worked in tech or other rambunctious micro-sectors of the economy.
The Millenials faced economic crash and ennui, and the Zoomers are looking at the end of empire. And partly because the economic circumstances changed like that, so did the laws and customs around everything from business ownership to recreation to parenting to sex and marriage (not to mention the technologies that touched all these areas of life, which wrought their own changes).
A non-trivial part of inter-generational resentment comes from the fact that, over the past sixty years, each half-generation has grown up in a different world than did the sub-cohorts they were sandwiched between. Life advice that worked for one group does not necessarily translate to another, and the moralistic force and certainty with which older folks tend to admonish the younger folks is a very good way to encourage younger folks not to listen to wisdom on anything, even those more basic things that don’t change with the circumstances of the day.
On top of this, our current historical moment is a transition point between one age and another, at least as profound as that marked by World War 2 and perhaps as profound as that marked by the Black Death. Everything—power, values, currency, economy, family structure, industry, education, civic culture, and more—is up for grabs, for good and ill. The world we will see in 2040 will bear precious little resemblance, along most axes, to anything any of us alive ever knew before 2020. In such an environment, a lot of very good advice has a sell-by date.
The Exceptional Cases
Giving advice also falls afoul of unintentional egocentrism. It is not unusual for gurus and mentors—whether public or private—to be exceptional in some way. Often they are unusually agentic, driven, open, intelligent, and/or have high tolerances for discomfort. Sometimes they have walked through very dark places that others have not, or have other forms of rarefied hard-won expertise (many of the best voices here on Substack are of this sort). This rarity is one of the things that attracts those who seek advice: these people have something different about them, and that difference might be the key to unlocking an important part of the puzzle of life.
Often—both in the aforementioned cases and in others—they are madmen by any conventional definition, not because they are “mentally ill,” but because their frame of reference is in some way alien when measured against the average joe.
Any such person who is not acutely cognizant of how mad they truly are risks giving advice which, if followed earnestly, could be disastrous for the advice-taker. In more extreme cases, this can result in unintentional quasi-cults collecting around public intellectuals such as Timothy Leary, Jordan Peterson, and others (it happens more frequently than you’d think). This is a particular hazard for people in my profession of science fiction writing.
People who are exceptional in one or more of the above fashions occupy a dangerous place in the social fabric. As I explored tangentially in my article Enter the Dream, such folks serve the role of the Shaman as explored by Eliade in his book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. They explore the edges of human experience through adventuring, experimentation, meditation, and drug use. They traipse beyond the bounds of social acceptability, and bring back wisdom from the outer realms—such wisdom is both vital to the health of a culture, and can be profoundly destructive (and often at the same time).
When one is in such a position, it is vital to recognize how one’s experience—positive or negative—can not reasonably translate to the normies. The exercise of such responsibility was demonstrated handsomely once by one of my favorite authors, Robert A. Heinlein, whose books often featured unconventional mating systems and customs—many of them drawn from history, and some his own personal experience—that caught the imagination of generations of readers. And yet, when asked directly by a fan in a letter about what advice he would give on how to responsibly live such a lifestyle in the here-and-now, he responded by saying “If you have to ask, you should not do it. Coloring so far outside the lines is dangerous, and can create a lot of destruction you’re not prepared to deal with.”7
Sacrificing for the Future
Finally, we come to what is perhaps the most important reason one might choose not to give youngsters the benefits of one’s experience.
Giving advice is a joy, not just because it’s part of how culture is transmitted, but because the idea that another person might learn from your mistakes and benefit from your wisdom is seductive on its face. When someone else picks up your baton, it gives your life a sense of meaning.
But sometimes, it is simply not ethical to burden others with the weight of your wisdom, no matter how much you’d wish to. It is those others, after all, who will bear the burden of the consequences of your advice, should they choose to take it. They will be responsible for their choices, not you. Earnest and forceful admonishments can be every bit as levering, manipulative, and potentially damaging as can exploiting a younger person’s inexperience in matters of business, sex, and religion for your own benefit.
It is natural to wish to build connections by explaining your actions, your reasons, and your values to those to whom you feel responsibility—and yet, doing so can sometimes shackle them to your past in ways that simply are not fair.
A young friend of mine once found himself subject to this kind of thing in a family therapy session when his parents who, feeling tremendous guilt about their parenting failures, attempted to explain themselves to their children by sharing the details of their lives that were driving their poor decisions. His mother had been the victim of multiple rapes, and his father had spent his life trying to protect her—even to the point of both of them treating their sons as potential rapists once they hit puberty.
This unburdening by the parents of of their sexual histories sent more than one of their children into a tailspin of confusion and self-loathing that contributed to a number of failed marriages and other problems that simply would not have materialized had their parents just held their own council and quietly corrected their parenting behavior.
Sometimes, one must sacrifice the joy of giving advice, and the relief of confession, in service of the future.
Paul Simon captured this sacrifice, and the love and duty it requires, in this poignant stanza from his song Slip-Slidin’ Away:
And I know a father who had a son
He longed to tell him all the reasons for the things he’d done.
He came a long way just to explain
He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping
And then he turned around and headed home again.
In the end, those who seek advice do not always know what advice to ask for, and what they ask for may not be what they need. It is incumbent upon those of us who’ve been around the block a few more times to pay attention to their needs, rather than our own. It’s a delicate dance—and sometimes, painfully, it means leaving the youngsters to struggle through waters we know all too well, because we know that our solutions, while appropriate to our lives, may not be appropriate to theirs.
If you found this essay helpful or interesting, you may enjoy the Reconnecting with History installment on Understanding Before Thinking, and this essay on learning to think through language and story: Are You Fluent in English?
When not haunting your Substack client, I write novels, literary studies, and how-to books. You can find everything currently in print here, and if you’re feeling adventurous click here to find a ridiculous number of fiction and nonfiction podcasts for which I will eventually have to accept responsibility.
A book which will see publication later this year. Among other things, it contains a lot of broadly-applicable advice, much of which long-predates me.
I pointed this out in my tweeted rejoinder to the thread that started it all.
This is a paraphrase from memory. My reference copy of the letter from which this comes is currently in storage.
Not the specific TLP post this brought to mind, which I couldn't unearth, but relevant.
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/12/raising_kids.html