The pure and selfless joy of the elderly for the beauty of youth is a precious heritage of humanity. We are exhausting it, when instead we should simply cherish what little we have left.
by Luigino Bruni
published in Il Messaggero di Sant'Antonio on October 2, 2025
Every generation has its own new collective challenges, and generally also has the resources to face them. One of our most important challenges, although not the only one (think of wars or the environmental crisis), concerns the relationship between the elderly and young people. This is an epochal challenge that takes various forms. The most obvious and worrying one has to do with the sustainability of the pension system and public health, which, however, is being addressed without placing it within a broader framework that touches on many dimensions.
The first is a new poverty of the desire for motherhood in women, who will have to rediscover the meaning and sense of being mothers, because today, when motherhood is finally no longer a destiny but a choice, one does not choose to bring a child into the world without a strong sense of gift, gratuitousness, and sacrifice (a word that has disappeared from our vocabulary). Without this new culture of motherhood, there will only be an increase in sad strollers with dogs and cats inside, and a decrease in everyone's joy of living, especially women.
Another challenge concerns the urgent need to relearn how to age and die. Past civilizations, up to that of my parents, knew how to die because they knew how to live, and because they had faith. Faith has always been a great resource for hoping for a good encounter with the angel of death. In the space of a couple of generations, we have completely forgotten the craft of living and dying, and if we do not find another one soon, the new pandemic will be depression. But in the meantime, for those of us who no longer have the culture of yesterday and have not yet generated a new one, aging is becoming an increasingly difficult experience, a very tiring climb for which we are not equipped, which we end up facing in undershirts and flip-flops.
This summer, I spent a few days at the beach with my mother and aunt. One evening, while we were having dinner, a group of young girls came in. My mother and aunt looked at them and exclaimed together, “How beautiful, how beautiful youth is!” Their gaze and words struck me deeply. A life spent ensuring that their children and young people became adults has generated in them a typical virtue, which we could call “anti-envy,” which is the precious ability to find true joy in observing and contemplating the youth of others, and not only that of their own children and grandchildren. This is a wonderful resource for living and aging well. It is the opposite virtue to that of Mazzarò who, in the novella La roba, had spent his whole life solely accumulating ‘stuff’. When he is told that death is approaching, he takes a stick and hits a boy, ‘out of envy’, says Giovanni Verga. In cultures that worship stuff, old people see young people as their own hell, because that youth only brings them envy, regret, and remorse. In cultures that worship life, on the other hand, young people are paradise for the elderly. The pure and selfless joy of the elderly for the beauty of youth is a precious heritage of humanity. We are exhausting it, when instead we should only be preserving what little we have left.
Photo credit: © Giuliano Dinon / MSA Archive
