Playing the Age Card on Facebook

I saw a post on Facebook advising people to look at the first three digits of UPC codes in the grocery store to find out whether you’re really buying American or not (and the government is covering up this secret to keep the people from blah, blah, blah). I saw this and thought, huh, that’s interesting, I wonder if it’s true? So I went to snopes.com and searched on “barcode country” and found out in five seconds that it’s not precisely true: The first two or three digits of a UPC code only tells you the country in which the UPC code was issued. It *might* be the same country in which the product was manufactured, but it also might not be. The bottom line is that it’s not a reliable shortcut.

None of that is the point of this post. The point is that I see these kinds of things on Facebook with disturbing regularity. (“These things” being inaccurate misinformation that takes 5 seconds to check.) Most of the time I let it slide, but in this particular case I chose to leave a comment with the snopes link.

Why this time? I’m not sure. I think it’s because the person who posted it is a young-ish person. The only other time I commented on something like this was also on a young-ish person’s post. Perhaps part of me thinks that maybe there’s still a chance that these young-ish people can learn to be skeptical of these kinds of posts, whereas I see the people my age and above as too far gone to accept further education.

It could also be that innate human sense that older people are supposed to inform younger people, but younger people are supposed to shut up and listen to older people. This is a concept that I personally find extremely annoying. For some strange reason, I’ve always found myself around people that are older than me, and older people (as in, people in the next decade of life or more) pretty much always think they are wiser than younger people. Sometimes that is actually true, but in my experience, it’s kind of rare.

If you spend most of your time around younger people or people your own age, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about. But you can see this effect whenever you reach an age milestone. If you’re in a mixed age environment and you say something like, “I’m 30 today, boy do I feel old.” Somebody is inevitably going to say, “You think that’s bad, wait until you get to 40!” (It might be me, at this stage of my life.) The unspoken subtext is that the 30-year-old’s feelings are irrelevant because the 40-year-old’s are more important. And then someone else will say, “You think 40’s bad, wait until you hit 50!” and the balance of power shifts from the 40-year-old to the 50-year-old.

And then that 50-year-old will cheerfully go home and forward a Facebook note telling all of their friends that the phone company is about to release everyone’s cell phone numbers to telemarketers if you don’t add your number to the national do-not-call list. And I will see it and spend 5 seconds determining it’s complete bunk, and has been the ten other times I’ve seen it over the years, and I’ll have to grit my teeth and not say anything, because if I do, the 50-year-old will get all embarrassed and defensive and scared and say, “But I heard it from my sister and she would never lie to me! Is my entire world crumbling around me??” and I would have to bite my tongue to keep from saying, “Your sister isn’t lying to you, she just has no critical thinking skills and no ready access to Google, traits which you both seem to share.”

Ahem. Anyway. My point is that I was probably so overwhelmed with glee at the chance to finally use the “I’m older so I must be wiser” card that I couldn’t stop myself. I try not to do that because that card is constantly played on me so I happen to know it’s really annoying.

But I’m still right. :)