old age can be like wealth and power in that it magnifies character defects.
Many awful people are going to get old and I kinda wish they could be written off the same way they would in middle age, without the social pressure to be compassionate.
There is no innocence regained.
Brings out a lot of underlying personality/ cultural /freudian entitlement in people who barely enjoyed getting thru life but are afraid of death.
Some old people, it's like they can't wait to regress... (I did my part, I get to be the baby now!)
also, immigrant kids have a special hell
lots of cultural/ethnic and class differences that makes this burdensome, suffocating, manipulative, and "politically incorrect" to talk about in ways that feels lonely.
A lot of these kids never got to be kids, since immigrant parents become low-agency children in practice: can't speak english, can't fill out basic forms, often too poor to do basic stuff by the book (legal, banking, etc), don't know the area to have risk assessment or make decisions adults are supposed to make. The kids have to grow up fast without help, succeed in some way without financial or cultural capital, and then take care of their parents without help. They are often being criticized and their decisions undercut the whole way.
Offensive to say but real for many, some immigrant parents often just have god awful personalities: poverty and war and refugee trauma have misshaped them into people that can be hard and unpleasant. Depending on age, many are closed-off, unwelcoming by default, they feel too old to learn new things, racist and endlessly judgmental especially if they never moved out of the self-segregating enclave many start out in the host country. The next generation often feels embarrassed or ashamed of them while having to assimilate, can't bring friends or dates around. Growing up with two different sets of norms and expectations.
Leads to simmering resentment and anger covered with guilt and duty and never ending ethnic responsibilities of the religious, Confucian, and/or gendered type. (Women expected to be servant-nannies for their middle-aged in-laws makes me fume.)
A lot of immigrant kids who 'made it' despite their crummy families can't really share/talk about it with middle-class suburban Americans... I feel this loneliness and often rage myself and see hints of it just go unspoken in my 'scholarship kids' peer group (asian, indian, latino and post-soviet kids in city gifted programs) now that we're all grown up.