The Elderly

Amida (阿弥陀仏) coming over
the Mountain

The Elderly |
Tuesday – March 17, 2026

The elderly, truly the survivors of the material order, lack a proper place in the modern world, as the contemporary view based on principles of "sound" finance, view the elderly as a burden – a true disgrace. Of course, this is just one among many other disgraces in the modern world, but this disgrace in particular may be something that causes greater harm to the material order than many other deviations.

    It is the case, of course, that the elderly have much wisdom and knowledge of another world to share, but in the course of industrial development, sacred wisdom and ancient knowledge was simply brushed aside, and today whatever may be left of this knowledge is misunderstood and treated as fantasies. This general mistreatment of the elderly is of course understandable, since nothing the elderly can offer to the world can help to bring the material refinement to a closer and more perfect state, as they are less capable in the eyes of the societal consciousness, and this goes to the concept of age as well: once you have reached a certain number, you are essentially not desirable anymore, and whatever worth you have is solely tied to your productive capacity, and even if there are egalitarian pretensions about age, the industrial age has rendered each man a value according to his professional differentiation; truly, once a man has "expired" in the industrial sense, he is no longer of any value or of any true potentiality. This is perhaps most starkly expressed in the medical treatment of the elderly, where today a large portion of the medical professional community simply regard people whom they consider of no industrial value to be unworthy of treatment, and some of these people will even go as far as to claim that by treating someone whom, in their view, has no potentiality and is beyond the range of "productivity" one or more productive members of society miss out on treatment, a false notion indeed based in some kind of zero-sum mentality, which means that the elderly, the expired, the retired, are effectively dead men walking; they are dead to the moderns and in every and all regards that suits the peculiar mentality of industrial based civilizations, really a profound aberration. What culture, what tradition would treat the elderly in this way? Only a profoundly sick and disturbed tradition, really not a tradition but an anti-tradition, truly modernity. Of course, on top of the mistreatment of the elderly, you also have to deal with a kind of mafia or cartel of very young and inexperienced people, also known as the youth, a group of people who have been enabled to believe themselves to know more and better than the elderly; to the young people, the elderly is just an obstacle that has to be cleared, and hopefully these same young people can replace the elderly, or at least this is what they hope for. You may say that young people suck, and indeed that would be true, but perhaps that is a crude way to put it? Well, sure but young people do actually suck, and that is perfectly natural and normal, but in our twisted and depraved world, where the entirely of the metaphysical order of things has been inverted, young people truly do believe themselves to be more capable than the elderly, but what they, the young, fail to realize is of course that they themselves will become elderly, and they also fail to realize that most of their family, indeed all of history, is elderly. If you are to be young under the material order, you have to truly believe yourself to be the future, as the saying goes, and not only that, you have to believe that everything worth your attention is to be found in the future, and sure enough, until you find out that the future has caught up with you and that you no longer make the cut. Young people are, by the very course of nature, metaphysically more depraved than their parents, which means that for every generation, knowledge and more importantly potential is lost, and truly the last bridge to another time left is the elderly, yet the moderns seem very content with just rushing forward into an uncertain future.

    I think about the past like this: in the past I am very comfortable because I know what will happen, but even more so I am also comfortable because I am deeply familiar with the past, and indeed you may say that I am a part of the past; truly without the past there could be no tomorrow. Of course, most moderns have no reverence for the past, no appreciation for why things are the way they are; the only thing moderns know to do is how to change and disrupt every aspect of the world they are familiar with, the material order, so that this future can be achieved, so that industry can continue to perpetuate the deviation. This tendency can be seen almost everywhere: very many young people today are so full of themselves and so "privileged" that they believe that they have rights to all sorts of material creations, including of course within the realm of politics, and this is why politicians tend to become younger and younger; these people do not value even the material knowledge and experience of the elderly. So, yes it is true that one can talk about a kind of inversion of the metaphysical order, and the modern misconception of age is a great example of this, but you need to delve too far back into history to realize that indeed, not that long ago older people did still retain a clear position within the societal organization, and truly today the elderly have almost completely been pushed out. The kind of hip and hop attitude of the younger generations could be one explanation for this, but whatever the case, young people do truly still suck, yet today young people are so delusional that they are unable to see their own lack of skills, a truly modern deviation. The colloquial saying is, of course, that young people are suffering and that young people are somehow unable to achieve what earlier "generations" where quite able to accomplish; this is of course nonsense, and if there is any truth to this claim, it can only be true insofar as the limit of youth has become more and more pronounced, a kind of stressful thing I can imagine.

    Lastly, I consider everyone to be elderly, here me out here, because as I stated earlier: there is no escape from the past; the future is only the space in which you allow yourself to place all your doubts and all your anxiety, in the hope that the ripples of the past and the echoes of the voices most familiar with you will simply fade into the new dawn – a false hope of becoming a new man. If you are unable to put yourself in relation to your past, then you may not have hope for the future; if you cannot respect yourself enough to order the world, then you will not be able to seek the righteous path.

Reginald Drax – March 17, 2026.