Why should I blame them, that they fill their days with misery? Had they but sense equal to desire. Is there anything as life-sapping for the onlooker as seeing healthy young people pound pavements in sweaty anxiety as they pursue the body perfect or – that other mirage – an energy equal to ambition.
All that palpable agony when they should be wasting their youth in blissful enjoyment of life, creating happy memories for the later years when they cannot do so any more but, at least, have the great consolation of looking back with glee.
Only an old man like George Bernard Shaw could say “youth is wasted on the young”. It should be! For verily it is a truth not to be denied that when they are old and grey and full of sleep same “youth” will most assuredly not be capable of such glorious, wanton squander. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”
But not so those young people pounding the pavements in sustained masochism. It is great to be young and fit, but you do not need to be Usain Bolt to have good health and an equal and apposite quality of life. “Mens sana in corpore sano” went the old Latin phrase – “a healthy mind in a heathy body”. That hardly requires great pain.
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Youth must look after itself, as there are greater challenges ahead. Growing old is not for the faint-heated. Need convincing? A visit to any nursing home should make that clear.
English academic Mary Beard (68) recently commented: “I am hugely grateful for all the medical advances on cancer, dementia etc, but I am beginning to wonder how I am going to die.” Being a classical scholar, she continued: “The mythical Tithonus comes to mind. Got eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Are we all going to get older and older forever?”
Perish the thought.
(Those Greeks had a god for every occasion. Goddesses too!)
What science should be doing is extending youth and the healthy middle years, not expanding old age until we lose our minds to such as Alzheimer’s.
Meanwhile, youth should “just relax, take it easy ... think of everything you’ve got/For you will still be here tomorrow/But your dreams may not ...”
Tithonus, lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn, was granted eternal life rather than eternal youth.
