People really need to take a wider view of this paranoia about age gaps and realise this is how we lose the ability to build communities. You need to be able to realise that people can have things in common with you even if they grew up in a different time/place/culture. You also need to realise you can build communities with people who don’t have obvious things in common with you, that people can have the same goals and needs as you even if in most ways they’re very unlike you. Now, more than ever, we need to be able to work together to have any chance to stand ip against the few who have so, so much more power, money and influence than any of us do individually. We need to form communities that reach across age (and class and race and sexuality and so on…).
This is one of those topics I feel very strongly about and agree completely with the points in this post.
I struggle to make fandom friends on Tumblr, and sometimes I worry that it is because people in their 20s think they can't be friends with someone in their 40s. That I'm uncool, weird, cringe, intimidating, or just too different from them.
But things don't change as much with age as most think. Older people still are silly, awkward, overwhelmed, enthusiastic, confused, playful, irresponsible, obsessive, dumb, cool, horny, and all these other things young people think we stop feeling or being as we get older. We're just humans. I am really great friends with someone on here more than 20 years younger than me because we have so much in common! You can't tell that we're different ages when we chat.
And also—you can be friends with people who you do NOT have much in common with! Because fundamentally, you always have humanity in common.
Years ago, there was this lady in my community who was maybe 30 years older than me and who I knew was far more conservative than me. I dismissed her as someone I didn't want to spend any time with because she was obviously too different than me. But, I was forced to spend some time with her (long story), and guess what? I became really good friends with her! Because I found out I was wrong about all those things that made her different than me? NO! I was right about that—she was just as annoyingly conservative as I had suspected. BUT that wasn't the whole of her person. She was so much richer than that. There were lots of things I didn't know about her. A few of those things were commonalities, but overall, we still didn't have much in common—but that didn't matter. We could still be kind to each other, help each other, respect each other, even enjoy each other's company if we stuck to topics where we didn't clash too badly. I feel really bad for judging her, and I'm so glad I gave her a chance.
So yes, please make friends with people who are not your same age. You probably have more in common than you think, and even if you don't, that doesn't matter. We're all humans and we need each other. Our communities need us to get along.
I'm 40. My bestie is in her early 60s. We met in 2014 on tumblr thru fandom. make inter-generational friends!!! <3
The constant framing of an older person interacting with a younger person as something with clearly predatory intent is a huge part of the problem. Learn to spot actual grooming behavior and patterns, don't substitute a difference in age for your actual judgment. This pedojacketing shit has to stop. We were not meant to stick to only socializing with people within two years of our own age. That is not how you have a functioning society.
Also, we built these sites and all the source material for your fandoms. Stop acting like it's weird for us to be in our own damn houses. Learn to talk to people older than you. Go learn to quilt.
