I am sometimes very fond of those sentences starting with “like my grandmother used to say” – it seems to me that since the world is moving so fast that few or parents, lest our grandparents, can tell us about how to live in it, we should value those experiences they still are able to share with us, while discarding the xenophobic or too reactionary ideas about women and their place or the value of religion, maybe :) At least we do have the choice on which of those pieces of wisdom to take to heart, a choice few of our grandparents had, generations under the logic of war.
Maybe its simply a sign of growing up as well, to stop fighting everything your parents tell you and try to re-invent the whole world, maybe I’m getting old if I start to occupy myself with the ideas of my parents and go over them… Still I think it should be possible. While the most important things that determine our life are modern inventions – computer, the internet, digitalisation – in which those experiences offer little help, they still might be useful in the vast area of human relationships, emotions and needs, which, after all, are still the core of our personal happiness.
One of my favourites ever is an observation by my mother: “Those talking most about it are the ones knowing least of it”, an awful clever sentence which can easily fire you into an orbit of self-reference. The most obvious part we’ve all encountered: A potential partner talking about the urgency of trust and the terribly importance of relying on each other does make one suspicious immediately. He or she may be right on the point, but the need to stress it is what makes us wonder.
It of course also applies to any form of public speach, though other, more important rules governing the utterances of people with a spotlight on them may temporarily override it. But its usually not the economists who insist that economy is the solution to all problems.
At a wider scale, it shows how much our habits, choices and lives are determined by the good as well as the bad experiences we had when we were yet barely able to handle them, cause we were children still. So while we go out and study history, philosophy, while we script websites or unearth environmental disasters, all to often the reason for our behaviour lies in very personal experiences.