The greatest contradiction in modern life is also one that nobody ever mentions - that today's youth is obsessed with living for ever, but has no respect for the elderly.
How can a generation yearn to escape every illness and defy the clock while, at the same time, give no thought to what life is like for old people?
We might call it a contradiction and we might call it bad preparation; we also might call it plain stupid, and soon enough Britain will have a population of the super-elderly living on in a place rigged up to meet the interests of 25-year-olds.
One of our greatest challenges will be to increase our capacity to deal with the needs of an ageing population, and, on current trends, we are already failing at it.
According to a report published yesterday by the independent think tank Reform, the NHS is likely to decline as the current population grows old, leaving those who gave little thought to the realities of agedness in a whole lot of trouble.
What we have is a generation of Gonerils and Regans, snapping youths who imagine the elderly to have failed some crucial test of coolness, as if youth were itself a very superior kind of knowledge.
Well, it is not. It is a rather familiar kind of ignorance, and one that is reluctant to make concessions to the value of experience.
Growing old is now considered more of an option than an inevitability, something to beat rather than be resigned to, something that is thought to take away from one's individuality rather than deepen it.
Of all the vanities of the current period, this might be the gravest. Apart from being unkind to our seniors, it leaves us with half a life, half a view of what it might mean to be alive. I'll be 40 this year and I already feel suffocated by youth culture, so what on earth must it be like for people twice my age?
News came this week of a 101-year-old gentleman who is about to be kicked out of New Zealand by the immigration authorities. The latter are worried that the man could become a drain on health resources.
The figures speak for themselves: more than 100,000 Britons were granted residency permits for New Zealand last year, and most of them were young. The 101-year-old man has only one relative, his son, who lives in New Zealand; yet the authorities consider it too much to ask that the old boy gets to live out his last years in comfort.
What a disastrous, callous decision. The man has savings and a pension, but somehow it is understood that he would be a better bet for citizenship if he were a callow 22-year-old who wanted to drink his way around the North Island.
We are now routinely advised by medical experts on how to make it to 90. The cult of longevity has become everything: the point is to live long, not live well; the point is to stick around in the world, not to improve it.
Like King Lear, we might find in future that to be four-score-and-ten is less fun than it looked from the vantage point of the self-loving thirtysomething.
Old people are Britain's biggest minority and it seems shocking that their voice is so dimmed: they have paid more into the country than any other group, yet the country does not appear to serve them or consider them quite so much.
As a society, we make respectful noises about our elderly, but in daily life we want to drown them out or ignore them. It can be only a matter of energy that stops the British elderly from being the angriest and most vocal minority in Europe.
Meanwhile, the national indulgence of immaturity has led us into another new corner: according to the organisation that represents funeral directors, people no longer show respect to funeral corteges and ignore burial customs.
I saw this trend in all its glory the other week, when I attended a funeral in the north. Impatient drivers tried to cut up the driver of the hearse; at one point, someone actually tooted a horn at a roundabout as the funeral cars went round at a slow pace.
And in the town, I was struck that no one took off his hat. There they all were, the laughing boys and girls in their baseball caps, and the black cars went past and they didn't see them.
The hospitals aren't ready for these people to get old, but, much more, the people themselves aren't ready. They are surrounded by a culture that wants to tell them how to live to 90, but nobody has any sense of what that will actually mean on the ground.
They think it means they will be 25 for ever and ever. But whose fault is this? Drivers who don't give way to funeral corteges are not the fault of governments or legislators. They are casualties of their own dullness, people who lack the imagination to think beyond the confines of their own life, and that is a very impoverished place to be.
Empathy with old people is not just a do-gooder's philosophy - it is a form of self-interest. With any luck, we will all have our turn at shuffling down the high street. A culture that does not know how to look after its elderly is a brutal one, a vicious one, and ultimately a self-defeating one.
We may find one day that we failed to honour the single greatest certainty in our lives: that we, too, would grow old and die. My generation might turn out to be the first one to be truly shocked by this certainty. And history might conclude that a people who never knew how to grow old never really knew how to live.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/02/12/do1204.xml
Forget yourself for others, and others will never forget you.
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