Ever since before the budget, the issue of intergenerational inequity has been in the news. While the emphasis has been on the disparity between the wealth of ageing Baby Boomers and that of Millennials, the inequity cuts both ways.
While the rising generation may not be as rich in tangible assets as its elders, it possesses an even more enviable form of wealth - time, health, youth and opportunity.
Michel de Montaigne was aware of this when he penned the famous words "Old age sets more wrinkles on the mind than on the face".
He was talking of the metamorphosis that begins when life stops giving you things and begins taking them away.
Such insight, although penned four centuries ago, is arguably even more relevant today given that with the ageing of the population, dementia has emerged as a leading cause of death in both men and women.
Today's Baby Boomers, like the ancients before them, fear the loss of both mental and physical acuity that the passage of time brings more than death itself.
While our Victorian forebears adopted the Stoic slogan "memento mori" - remember death - as a reminder of the need to live life to the full, that does not mean they feared it.
Tennyson put it well:
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
That said, it would be a rare individual who, as the clock winds down, their grasp grows feeble and their sight starts to dim, would not swap all of their envied supposed wealth and comfort to buy back a few of the decades that have slipped beyond their grasp.
The reality is, however, that despite all of its remarkable advances, this is a riddle medical science has been unable to solve. It has, in fact, achieved the opposite.
The parallel with the fate of Tithonus, the Trojan prince whose lover Eos (the dawn) asked Zeus to grant him eternal life when she should have asked for eternal youth, is stark.
Tithonus continued to age, albeit very slowly, and was eventually transformed into a cicada to mask his senility.
He would have been far better off if his life had been allowed to run its proper course as spelled out in the riddle of the Sphinx, who asked Oedipus what was the creature that walked on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening. The answer was humanity.
Babies crawl, adults walk on their own two feet and the aged are supported by a staff or cane. Or, as the preacher in the Old Testament said:
"To every thing there is a season ... A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted ... A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away."
Life runs its own race through a cycle as old as time, something Montaigne and the ancients whose wisdom he drew upon, knew well.
"My bodily state has run its course, each part in its due season. I have seen it in the herb, in the flower and in the fruit, and now I see it in decay... I bear my present infirmities much the more patiently because they are in season, and because they invoke a more kindly recollection of my past life".
It is what it is. Both the young and the old have their own respective burdens and rewards. Setting one generation against another in a bid to alter something that has been ever thus is neither productive nor wise.
To paraphrase Derryn Hinch, all of us get old if we are fortunate - but some of us get there first.
