Aging & Wisdom Quote by David Cronenberg

Cronenberg doesn’t lob this line as a bitter dad joke; he frames it like body horror for the mind. The provocation is in the absolutism: "All stereotypes" is obviously false on the facts, but emotionally accurate in the way fear is accurate. He’s talking about the creeping sense that your younger self’s moral certainty was built on a fantasy of infinite plasticity: that people can be remade, that society can be reprogrammed, that you can out-run your own wiring. Age, in his telling, is the slow reveal of patterns that feel like destiny.

The subtext is less "prejudice is correct" than "recurrence is terrifying". Stereotypes aren’t just social insults; they’re narrative shortcuts, and Cronenberg is fascinated by what happens when shortcuts start behaving like laws of nature. In his films, the horror often arrives when technology, sex, illness, or desire exposes something stubborn beneath self-image. This quote applies that same logic to social life: you resist a category, then watch yourself drift toward it, as if your rebellion was part of the script.

Contextually, it’s a director’s worldview: an artist obsessed with transformation who keeps finding limits to it. The line lands because it weaponizes the one thing progress narratives hate admitting: some patterns persist, and noticing them can feel like betrayal. It’s horrifying not because stereotypes are noble truths, but because being predictable can feel like losing your freedom, your youth, and the story you planned to tell about yourself.