If the world does improve on the whole, yet youth must always begin anew, and go through the stages of culture from the beginning.

Progress does not accumulate in people the way it accumulates in tools. Whatever a generation learns has to be learned again from nothing by everyone born after it, and no one inherits the understanding, only the results. That is why the same mistakes keep appearing in a world that is otherwise getting better. Nobody starts where the last person finished.

Be patient with someone young who is working out something you settled years ago. Rather than handing over the conclusion, tell them what it cost you to reach it, which is the part they cannot skip.