Old Is Gold, most people no longer hear this proverb in our day and age but this shouldn’t be the case.

In our current society of rapid and seemingly radical change in technology and custom it is easy to become overly dismissive of conservative views, as well as those who hold them. Indirectly we as a society are shutting out the voice of the aged. We often scoff at past thoughts and theories, and true, they might not be relevant or appropriate in our current society, but it is with these elderly members of society that a vast – often untouched – store of knowledge is held. There is nothing comparable to describe a past event that took place before the widespread use of videography and photography. The best details we can get of event such as the Second World War are first-hand experiences. Many of you as readers may already be disagreeing with my view that the aged are being shut out, but in truth when we do listen to the aged, how much of what they say do we take seriously. Unless we are gathering facts on a subject, I would argue that the majority of the time we regard their speech as from a past and irrelevant view.

This, from face value, may not seem to be such an immense problem. Maybe it isn’t. But it is impossible to ignore that with age often comes wisdom and wisdom is very useful in a society such as ours that can be upturned in an instance. Compared to our overall past as a race our current system is a fragile one. To keep it running and thriving it is of the utmost importance that mistakes of the past are avoided to the best of our ability. One of the best ways to do this is to study our past by gaining advice first hand. Not only are they useful to society as a whole, but also individually. Many of the elderly in society have probably faced some of the same obstacles in life as we do and as a result interacting and gaining advice from them is beneficial for us all as humans. Over a lifespan of 8 decades a human will gather an immense amount of knowledge in general and the majority of this will be on how to lead life, the exact sort of advice that will be beneficial for us all in our lives. We can learn immensely for ourselves if we just take in what is being given to us. Old is Gold, we just need to take in the old and embrace it as we do gold.