My mother has joked with me that she’s spending my inheritance, despite her friends telling her not to say that.
Without knowing your mother, it’s entirely possible she was first exposed to that joke when it was generally believed that your children will be at least as successful as you, thanks to ever-increasing standards of living, and never stopped to reevaluate the cruelty of the joke. But since friends are telling her to stop, she’s either willfully ignorant or being cruel.
A Greek proverb says a society grows when old men plant trees whose shade they shall never know. What’s the exact opposite of that?