The 18-40-60 rule
I heard this random quote somewhere, and it has been bouncing around my head for a few weeks. I can’t remember where I heard it, so let’s say that it was on NPR (but it was probably Facebook).
“When you’re 18, you worry about what everybody is thinking of you. When you’re 40, you don’t give a damn what anybody thinks of you anymore. When you’re 60, you realize nobody’s been thinking about you at all this whole time.”
With three teenagers in the house, it’s painful to watch them twist themselves into knots about everything that they won’t remember in twenty years. And that any advice that I try to give will be unintelligible to them until they have figured it out for themselves anyway. All that I can do is look in the mirror and recognize that I’ve made it only halfway between 40 and 60 myself.