Aging & Wisdom Quote by Mason Cooley

A whole generational cold war is packed into eight words. Cooley doesn’t frame the conflict as values versus values, or experience versus naivete; he makes it truth versus truth, plural. That choice matters. It suggests the standoff isn’t merely about attitudes but about competing realities, each internally coherent, each lived into existence. The young don’t just reject the old as out of touch; they suspect the older version of truth was purchased with compromises they refuse to make. The old don’t just patronize the young as inexperienced; they suspect the younger version of truth is a luxury belief, enabled by protections and options that feel temporary.

The verb is “disbelieve,” not “misunderstand.” Disbelief is a deliberate posture, a refusal to grant legitimacy. Cooley’s line captures how generations often talk past each other because they are arguing over what counts as evidence in the first place: memory versus possibility, scars versus ideals, what happened versus what could happen. “One another’s” makes the indictment symmetrical. No side gets moral credit for sincerity; sincerity is part of the problem when it hardens into certainty.

Cooley, an American aphorist writing in a late-20th-century culture increasingly defined by media churn and shifting norms, is diagnosing a permanent civic friction sharpened by rapid change. When the world rewrites its rules every decade, lived experience can look like stubbornness, and hope can look like denial. The line works because it refuses reconciliation. It’s not advising empathy; it’s naming the mechanism by which empathy breaks: each generation treats the other’s hard-won conclusions as hallucinations.