Aging & Wisdom Quote by Eric Hoffer

A little jab dressed up as diagnosis, Hoffer’s line lands because it flatters no one: it scolds the young for their certainty while also implying the old have earned the right to be impatient. Calling it a “malady of our age” is a classic Hoffer move - social critique framed as symptom, not scandal. He’s not describing a single loud youth cohort; he’s diagnosing a recurring cultural fever: performative conviction replacing the slow, humiliating work of learning.

The sentence pivots on “so busy teaching us.” Hoffer is less interested in literal classrooms than in moral posture. “Teaching” here means broadcasting, correcting, instructing the world on how it ought to be. The subtext is about status: teaching is public, legible, and rewarding; learning is private, provisional, and full of reversals. When the young rush to teach, they skip the apprenticeship stage that builds judgment, and they also turn elders into an audience rather than interlocutors. That “us” matters - it implies not just generational tension but a breakdown in mutual exchange.

Contextually, Hoffer wrote as a self-taught longshoreman-philosopher who distrusted mass movements and adored hard-won independence. Coming out of the mid-century era of ideological crusades, he saw how quickly certainty becomes identity. Read now, the line feels eerily optimized for the social-media economy, where being “right” is a performance and curiosity doesn’t trend. The sting is that he’s warning against a temptation, not just an age group: the desire to lecture before you’re ready to listen.