Aging & Wisdom Quote by Logan Pearsall Smith

There’s a polite cruelty in this line, the kind a seasoned critic can deliver with a straight face. Smith isn’t offering advice about mentoring so much as diagnosing a social hazard: the way adults recruit youth as emotional proof of their own relevance. “Don’t let young people tell you their aspirations” sounds, on first pass, like misanthropy or generational contempt. It’s sharper than that. He’s warning that aspirations aren’t confessions; they’re provisional identities, tried on like clothes. If you’re the audience for that performance, you’re also part of the outfit.

The second clause is the sting: “when they drop them they will drop you.” The verb “drop” does double work. Aspirations fall away not through dramatic betrayal but through casual gravity. And you, the listener, go with them if your relationship was built on being the witness, sponsor, or curator of someone else’s imagined future. Smith’s subtext is transactional: attach yourself to a young person’s dream and you become an accessory to it, not a person in your own right.

Context matters. Writing in a period obsessed with self-making, ambition, and social climbing, Smith is suspicious of confession-as-currency. His cynicism isn’t anti-youth; it’s anti-sentimentality. He’s puncturing the adult fantasy that proximity to youthful striving equals intimacy. The line works because it treats aspiration as theatre and affection as collateral damage, turning a seemingly generous exchange (“tell me your dreams”) into a cautionary tale about dependence disguised as guidance.