About this quote

Youth needs hope and idealism to get started, while age requires a dose of hard-earned realism to avoid looking foolish. If you are young and already miserable, you are overthinking life before you have even lived it. But if you are older and still expect the world to be a perfect fairy tale, you have ignored every lesson life tried to teach you. Balance your perspective with your mileage. Where do you stand on this spectrum right now?

When to use it

• When your twenty-something coworker is already cynical and claims the entire industry is a scam, you tell them they are far too young to have given up on trying new things.
• When your sixty-year-old uncle wants to dump his retirement fund into a sketchy online start-up because he trusts a stranger's promise, you use this to warn him that his age should have cured him of such blind faith.
• When your middle-aged sibling keeps waiting for a toxic relative to suddenly change overnight, you bring this up to help them accept people as they actually are, not as they wish them to be.