Has youth lost its ability to inspire us?

There’s an old saying that says if you want to remain young, surround yourself with young people. The emperors of ancient Rome did it, kings and queens of the old world did it, the Aztecs practiced it, grandparents still do it to a certain extent. The elixir worked for thousands of years without flaw.

The Present

I was seated on my preferred machine of self-maintenance at the gym and happened to spy a young guy sitting on a giant beach ball doing sit ups – staring at his handy and laughing his head off. Ten minutes later, he was still at it: bobbing up and down, staring at his cell phone, and laughing.

To the other side of me, a pretty young thing sat on the thigh trainer, legs crossed, looking quite comfortable, textmerized by the small display of her mobile. She was oblivious to the growing queue of girls standing in front of her waiting for their turn. Only one was getting peeved. The other four were moblivious to what was going on, engrossed as they were in whatever was to be seen on the displays of their phones.

Meanwhile, a young man was walking from one end of the gym to the other and back again while talking to an invisible someone on the other end of his invisible telephone. His voice was loud enough to fill an amphitheater.

Another boy was doing women’s push-ups over at the far wall with his cellular on the floor in front of his face obviously in a session of extreme cellularbation.

As I widened my field of depth, I realized over 60% of the people in the gym at that time were connected to their cell phones. Most were thirty and looked about as fit as forty-year-old’s who never saw a fitness studio from the inside.

Did these people really think they had a chance to get fit, stave off the signs of encroaching old age, have a chance to attain any semblance of a six-pack?

When I was a teenager, society said our generation was going to pot. (which we were, if pot meant marijuana!) I’ve asked myself for the past ten years, where the current generations are headed?

I can’t think of a better way to age quickly than to hang around with a young person nowadays. There are exceptions, but, alas, they don’t want to hang around with me. 😉