Grumpy old woman showing stubbornness

Stubbornness, Pride, Age and Being Wrong

It’s funny how stubbornness, pride, age and being wrong are often interlinked.

Some people readily admit it when they are wrong and say sorry, some do it grudgingly, while others just find excuses for it in an attempt to shift the blame onto someone else. This can be a reflection of stubbornness and or pride, which are often linked with low self-esteem.

Many young children display tantrums when they can’t get their own way, and they can’t get their own way because their parents think that what they want to do is wrong. There is a five-year-old girl next to us who frequently screams and stamps her feet, if she is not allowed to play on the road with her friends.

This very unattractive personality trait usually disappears soon after they go to school, but reappears in a disguised form when they get to retirement age. No wonder old-age is often called the second childhood!

The elderly frequently have the character flaw of being very stubborn. Old people’s pride may not allow them to stamp their feet and scream in public, although who knows what they do behind closed doors?

Old people’s reaction to being wrong is often to stay away from the place where they showed themselves up or to avoid the person they did wrong to, whereas younger people are far more likely to say sorry or at least put put a brave face on the next time they see that person.

Stubbornness when one is wrong is not a nice personality trait, and is almost always an old person’s thing, although it can run in families as well, as it does in ours unfortunately. Pride is also something that seems to increase with age, not that people of all ages do not feel pride.

However, stubbornness in refusing help seems to increase with pride and age. It is well-known that many old people suffer unnecessarily because they are too proud to seek assistance or to claim the benefits they are entitled too, because they have been paying the premiums for them all their lives.

In a similar way, men are often too proud to go to the doctor when they are ill. I wonder how many men die every year, because they were too proud to go to the doctor when they had a pain, which later turned out to be something serious enough to kill them. Like cancer, sclerosis or hepatitis.

I know of three without even thinking about it.

It makes ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’ seem positively benign!

And there are people who do that. Not literally, of course, but I know of families that have split in half, because of the stubbornness and pride of one of its members and that person is often old, and so should know better.

I have seen it in my own family, mostly in the generation before mine, but also in my generation. I hope that the younger generations wise up, change their ways and do not follow suit.

All in all, a lot of old people set a pretty disgraceful, arrogant example for the young to follow, and in my experience, they don’t even realise that they are doing it and don’t even care enough to see that they are ruining long-standing relationships, just because they see that their power is on the wane.

It is egoism, basically, and that is a chief feature of stubbornness. Elderly parents seem often to be guilty of it.

After reading this, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that I must be a young man with a downer on pensioners, but that is not true, I am only five years off claiming my old-age pension myself.

by +Owen Jones