Geriatric1927: YouTube's Wise Old Man

So we've been watching now as Geriatric1927, Peter, has been making videos for what, 3, 4 months? I could check, but you know, about that long. And we've watched as hundreds of thousands of views of those videos have been racked up as people keep coming and listening to this one old man from the Midlands of England tell us stories about his life and now read stories, fiction, that he's written over his life. And we've gotten to know this man. And, um, I thought it was, uh, for me it was time to kind of take a step back and to think a little bit about this man's impact on this group of people, us, who spends time here on YouTube communicating with one another. Now, I'm a psychologist. I've told you guys I'm a psychologist, and so I think of things in those terms. I think of things in terms of psychological meaning and things, you know, that's my framework. And so So watching yesterday's video in particular was the one that really triggered this thought for me, because in that video Peter talked about going down into town to do some shopping and running across somebody who— he didn't say this, but I imagined— was a contemporary of his, an older gentleman who had not— had only become familiar with Peter's activities on YouTube through the newspapers, and then apparently through his son who showed him one of Peter's videos. And this gentleman's assessment was, you know, what's the fuss? It's just you on there moaning and groaning about the old days and how hard your life was. And Peter thought at first, as he said on his video yesterday, "No, I'm not. No, I'm not." But then he said, "Wait a minute. Maybe I don't get to make that judgment. Maybe you— I have to ask you, are you— do you see what I'm doing as moaning and groaning and whining?" And he used the great word "whinging," which was one of my mother's favorite words, whinging. Whinging about my past. And if you— if that's what you see, then, you know, no, you're mistaken. That's not what I intended. Well, excuse me, that, that, that moment was a moment that I really thought crystallized for me what Peter's done here on YouTube. And, and, and that is the following. There are big ideas in our cultural history that kind of pass on from generation to generation, I think. And they're patterns. They're patterns that we see in in our daily lives and in the lives of our fellows. And one of those patterns is a pattern that has been called the wise old man. And this pattern— better, it's actually called an archetype in psychology of Carl Jung. But this archetype is an archetype that kind of says, you know, there, there is wisdom that gets passed down across generations, and the, the wise old man is one of the keepers of this wisdom and one of the transmitters of this wisdom. Now we see this, this character this archetype in a lot of, in a lot of stories. Certainly Dumbledore in the Harry Potter stories, Yoda in, of course, Star Wars, lots and lots of places that you'll look in movies and in television shows, you'll see this this wise old man character who's in the stories. Now, Peter, um, I think has, has become the wise old man of the YouTube village, if you will. Our, our little village here of, uh, however many thousands of us that there are that live in this village that check in with one another from time to time, we have a wise old man, and the wise old man is Peter. Now, what are some of the characteristics of being an effective wise old man? Well, one of the most important characteristics is not acting like a wise old man. It's the old human paradox again. You know, we— anyone who aspires to be the wise old man we're suspicious of. You know, they're trying too hard to be, let me tell you about what it was like back in the— and this is just the opposite of what Peter's done. Peter's been self-deprecating, but not obsequious, not, you know, kind of aw shucks in it. You know, he just says, hey, I just came on here to tell my story. I saw this thing, it looked really It looked like fun and I wanted to be part of it. So he didn't come on here looking to become the wise old man. He just came on to tell his story. So we love that. Secondly, what I think Peter's done is to show us that events don't matter. How you live events matter. So what does that mean? Here's a man who lives through the war and, you know, as a child, And, you know, he had some hardship, and he's had a lot of hardship. You notice, you know, Peter talks about his hardships in very understated ways. He lost his wife. He doesn't, you know, he hasn't dwelled on any of the things that others might. And that's another of the important differences, that for the wise old man, we all have events. That take place in our lives. We all lose loved ones, we all get sick, we all have disappointments, we all have successes and failures. This is part of what all of us experience. So the wise old man shows us that this isn't special for any of us. We all have it. It's what we do with them. It's what we do. It's what the events mean to us that makes the difference in terms of what kind of impact those events have on our lives. So that's the second thing I think that makes Peter a particularly attractive wise old man kind of figure. And thirdly, I think that what Peter does is one of those great simple principles in life, which is show, don't tell. Peter doesn't tell you about the things that are, um, points of wisdom. He simply shows you. He shows you by telling, telling us the stories, you know. And so, uh, so, you know, so what I did was I went to the school and I decided that I wanted to learn how to draw, so I just went into the class and just became a member of the class. Wow, that, you know, there's great lessons there. But did it have a— did that lesson have a big headline on it that said get ready, here comes a big message. No, it was just a little offhanded comment about, yeah, I went into the school as a, as a middle-aged man, and here were these, uh, adolescents, and I sat down and became one of them in their classroom, and we became friends. Tremendous lesson there. But he didn't tell us the lesson, he showed us the lesson by just describing what happened. So, uh, I, so I don't want to make this too long. It's already too long. But, uh, the point is, uh, uh, we have a great treasure here in, in our community. We have this terrific gentleman who obviously is an exceptional human being, who doesn't think he's an exceptional human being, who tells us great stories, who now reads us terrific fiction that he's written over his life in a very unassuming and very heartwarming way. And so I just wanted to first of all thank him again. Thank you, Peter, for your terrific contribution here as just one of us, but secondly for really having taken the well-earned position of YouTube's wise old man. So thank you very much. Bye-bye.