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Comment by JMTQp8lwXL | Hacker News Reader

Some things simply won't matter as you age. Climate change will have zero impact if you are going to die in a decade, which wouldn't be an unreasonable estimate among the current presidential candidates. If you aren't personally impacted, no matter how wise you may be, you can't have the same level of empathy for the problem.

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That's implying none of those older people care about the lives of their children and grandchildren which is not the case in my experience

Obviously you haven't been hanging around many career politicians or corporate executives.

The problem isn't that older people don't care, it's that the older people in charge don't care.

They're not dictators or petty royalty -- they didn't get into that role without having people elect them. They don't care because their electorate doesn't care; old white people in the US vote in large numbers.

> They're not dictators or petty royalty

Some of them would like to be and want to be treated as dictators and royalty.

Maybe they do in fact care, but from the kinds of decisions they make it certainly does not appear that they do.

You can care about other people, but there's nothing like experiencing a problem first-hand. It's a level of selflessness that most people don't ever realize, because it goes against human nature. If a flight loses cabin pressure, you need to put on your own oxygen mask before someone else's. Not that you don't care for other people, but if you don't care for yourself first, you will literally be unable to help others.

It's true that with age, one realizes that one won't be around much longer. And one realizes even more clearly just how little effect one person can have on the world.

But alternatively, sometimes people who are detached from a problem can do a far better job on it. And people who have seen a lot are better equipped to put things in context than those who haven't.

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