7
by Bisbee
I mean this in all honesty to help give the OP some perspective, Heretic. Part of the reason why old people seem old is their conversation style implies everyone is already thinking about things they are thinking about when they open their mouths. To many people, a sudden pronouncement out of the blue makes little sense and paints the speaker as living in his own little world... out of touch with reality.
Of course nerds and other Asperger spectrum kids also do such things; bursts of nonsensical statements. They are not considered old but still dismissed as being out of touch. They also suffer from disconnection and social disorders.
It helps to be more conscious of how you set up the initial statements to others. Take the time to clearly explain the background for any issue and why your opinion matters to the reader about any subject you care about. It is a show of effort, not just common courtesy but actually helps to improve your social cache in any social group that matters to you.
Doing otherwise kinda expresses the opposite; that you just want to vent about something, don’t really care whether people understand or not. And if that were true why should anyone care about you or anything you feel important?
I am very conscious of doing this myself these days. I spend a lot of time in my head working through personal issues as it relates to family and other relations. Some of what I am thinking about is pretty esoteric and philosophical in nature. But I don’t give voice to much of it unless there is a purpose and I make some effort to parse it out for anyone who may be my intended audience.
"It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent." -Gandhi