Aging & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Edison

Edison flips the expected script: we’re trained to treat maturity as a stabilizing upgrade and youth as the messy beta version. He calls that bluff. “Absurd” is the key jab, because it doesn’t mean immature people act silly; it means the grown-up world often doubles down on rituals, excuses, and self-protective logic that look ridiculous precisely because they’re defended as “responsible.” Maturity, in this framing, isn’t wisdom; it’s a costume that can hide fear of change, sunk-cost thinking, and the need to police anyone who still believes alternatives are possible.

The second clause sharpens from comedy to indictment: “very frequently is most unjust to youth.” Edison is naming a power dynamic. Adults don’t merely misunderstand young people; they penalize them for the very traits society later markets as innovation: impatience with stale norms, risk-taking, the refusal to treat tradition as evidence. “Most unjust” suggests a specific betrayal: maturity claims moral authority while using that authority to gatekeep opportunity, dismiss critique, and rewrite youthful energy as naivete.

Context matters. Edison’s era lionized industrial progress while enforcing harsh labor hierarchies and moral certainties; youth was both fuel and threat. Edison himself cultivated the mythology of the tireless tinkerer, yet operated inside a cutthroat patent economy and demanding workplaces. The subtext is a warning from inside the machine: don’t confuse age, status, or “experience” with fairness. The absurdity isn’t youth’s chaos; it’s adulthood’s insistence that its own arrangements are natural law.