A 20-year-old tells a story which conflicts with that of a 50-year-old. The younger person is assumed to be lying.
A 40-year-old and a 15-year-old volunteer to help with a skilled task. The older volunteer’s help is accepted with gratitude; the younger volunteer is assumed unskilled and dismissed with “You’re too young.”
An office manager has been having trouble with a 24-year-old worker calling in sick for dubious reasons. He decides that from now on he will hire older workers, who are sure to be more responsible and reliable.
There is a name for the belief that the time a person was born determines that person’s personality, character, and behavior. That name is “astrology.”
There are still those who practice more traditional astrology, with many different heavenly symbols in different signs and houses, letting the traditional astrologer create a portrait which may not be accurate but is at least multifaceted. The everyday astrologer, on the other hand, simply thinks that earlier birth is better.
There doesn’t seem to be any real consistency or sense to this astrological system. The same 28-year-old can be assumed right in conflict with a 12-year-old and assumed wrong in conflict with a 60-year-old. How can she be both certainly better and certainly worse? What information does the birth-time-only horoscope really give us? It tells us nothing about her as a person, only about how we should regard her when she’s interacting with others. It’s not about her as a person; it’s about her status relative to other people.
One wonders what the astrologers would do if confronted with a pair of twins in conflict. Would they be able to use facts and case merit as tiebreakers, at least? Or would they have to consult the birth certificates and learn which was born first, to determine which one was just slightly inherently better?