Gimme Schlatter is scared that growing old inevitably means turning into a conservative crank like the artist behind Lil' Abner and Matt Taibbi
That Taibbi believes he's found what he's looking for? That he thinks bog-standard emails between Twitter content mods prove that people under 40 aren't nearly as radical or influential as the Internet makes it seem? That it's easier for him to think all his family and friends were, what, tricked by the FBI into believing trans women are women (???) than accept that times change, young people grew up in a different world than he did, and the fight to make our society better doesn't stop when you get comfortable? That's not a balm to me. That's terrifying.
I was introduced to Taibbi's work in 2005, when he wrote a blazing takedown of exactly the kind of middlebrow, middle-aged, middle-of-the-road observational punditry produced by people who've ceased being able to see the world from any perspective but their own. That that writer has turned into this one scares the shit out of me.
How long do I have until I stop fighting for justice and start fighting for stasis?
I Hope I Never Have My Druthers | Gimme Schalter Vol. 2, No. 7 • Buttondown (tyschalter.com)
The solution to this is the same solution to proper debugging: always assume it's your code first. If you assume that your code is the problem, you first try and find the faults in the in piece of the system you know best. You make sure your work, your assumptions, your responsibilities are correct, valid and lived up to before you start turning your gaze to the work of others. And if it turns out that your code is correct and not the problem, the process of proving that will very often give you the insight and evidence you need ot help determine where the problem actually lies.
The same attitude works well when encountering new ideas. No matter how progressive you were when you were younger, there will always be the temptation to fall back on the past work, to assume your previous position are obviously correct in the face of assault by these annoying newcomers who have no appreciation for just how hard you had to fight to get them accepted. And you did fight hard, and they did represent real progress. And they should be celebrated.
But progress does not stop. Each generation stands on the shoulders of the ones that came before it and tries to push even farther. Not every new idea will be good. Not every step in a new direction will actually be a step forward. Being young does not inherently make you correct. But neither does it make you inherently wrong. If you approach your ideas like you approach your code, with the assumption that yours is wrong first, then you are much more likely to be able to tell the difference between being right and being stubborn. And much more likely to accept when you need to change.
People like Taibbi have always been more arrogant than they have been intelligent. He's always been more interested in being acclaimed than in being effective or being right. He always assumes that other people's code is wrong, a common problem. In work, that is mostly annoying. In life, it turns you into the kind of person that others look at, aghast, and pray they never turn into. The good news is that not turning into him isn't that hard -- it just requires practicing some basic programming humility.