Gen-Z: Is Respect For Elders A Cultural Obligation Or Necessity?

As culture and counterculture shift over the course of our lives, it becomes easy to forget why we do the things we do. This week's column talks about one such topic, and that is the role for 'respecting our elders' in 2025.

I'll start with the cons: the Boomers got us here. As the silent generation built a new world order in the aftermath of the Second World War in
the West, cries of 'never again' ringing in the air, what was obvious for them and the generations after was that their grandparents and ancestors got them there. The Middle East, in that process of establishing itself in the more recent past, is reckoning with the idea of planting trees whose shade will never cover you.

But in east or west, global north or south, the idea of development at all carries so many more negative connotations now, and obvious drawbacks. Why would I respect the people who brought me here? Or why would I respect someone just on the basis of their age? Because they were part of a generation that had it a hell of a lot easier when there were more jobs, more money and less climate disaster swirling around the world?

I love my grandparents, and I know well that sacrifices were made by them so that my parents and thus I could have a better life. Primarily, I think about my mom's parents, who left Syria in the 1960s for just such a reason, settled in Canada, and put five kids through university.

But is respect a give and take? No, of course not; everyone is deserving of respect, but it is exactly that – mutual. The golden rule, if you will.

In some places though, often times respect for elders and superiors sounds like a request for respect but is actually a demand for deference. I have a cousin who is just three years older than me who never let me forget he was older, and because of that fact alone, I owed him big time.

He was a series of words that are not polite to publish, a bully as well, but suffice to say that sort of attitude doesn't just emerge out of nowhere when a man's hair turns grey. It comes from a lifetime of coddling and entitlement, and an inability to think critically about the material conditions that brought you where you are.

I look at it like King Joffrey. Here's this prince, everything good and great handed to him on a golden platter, and yet he becomes a psychopathic murderer, just in this case instead of Westeros it's Earth run by techno-feudal overlords, and instead of endless winter it's the sun disinfecting the earth of its human problem.

I'll be 29 in less than two months, and in another year at 30 I won't be a 'young' person anymore, but I won't be an elder either. Meanwhile there are 45-year-old millennials still treated like the baby at work by their 75-year-old bosses.

I refuse to deal with that anymore, and rather than respecting elders based on that alone, respect them for their lived wisdom and experience, not because your culture says you have to.

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