This one is easy.
There are plenty of cultural traditions from other countries I admire, but the one Scott and I were talking about recently is the reverence many cultures show toward the elderly.
I know that exists here, too, at least in pockets. Plenty of families love and honor their parents and grandparents. But culturally? As a country? We are not exactly leading the league in “respect your elders.”
We are much better at “upgrade your elders.”
We treat older people like outdated software. They still work. They still have value. They have stored information the rest of us desperately need. But instead of listening to them, we keep trying to replace them with something newer, faster, and less likely to tell the same story six times.
And that’s a shame, because older people are living libraries. They have seen trends come and go. They have survived things we only read about. They know which worries actually matter and which ones will be forgotten by Tuesday. They remember a world before every restaurant menu required a QR code and every customer service call began with a robot pretending to care.
There is wisdom in that.
Other cultures seem to understand this better than we do. They make room for older voices. They honor grandparents. They recognize age as something that can bring dignity, experience, perspective, and value.
In America, we tend to celebrate youth so aggressively that we sometimes act as though getting older is a personal failure.
That’s ridiculous.
If anything, growing old should come with perks. Better parking. First crack at the good chair. Automatic authority in arguments involving weather, casseroles, handwritten thank-you notes, and whether a restaurant used to be better before they remodeled it.
And honestly, they are usually right about that last one.
So yes, I’d love to see more reverence for the elderly in our culture. Not the fake kind where we post a sweet picture of Grandma on Facebook and then ignore her when she tells us something important. I mean the real kind. The kind that listens. The kind that makes space. The kind that understands that people who have lived longer have probably learned a few things the rest of us could use.
We don’t have to copy another culture exactly.
But we could at least stop treating age like a software warning and start treating it like a hard-earned credential.
Enjoyed this? Subscribe and get future reflections, bourbon notes, and assorted nonsense delivered straight to your inbox.
Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
This is a good post. I am witnessing the difference from what I know now that I live in Brazil. Unfortunately the culture of the USA and money make it easy and necessary to put the elderly in a care facility. The individual culture vs the collective culture.