Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic satirizes the common tendency among older people to view all societal change as decline. A younger woman pushes back against an old man's pessimism by pointing out concrete improvements: science is better, tolerance is more widespread, and lifespans are longer. Instead of engaging with these facts, the old man simply announces that he has "decided to identify all change as social decay."

The humor lies in the old man's startling self-awareness about his own irrationality. Rather than offering counterarguments, he openly admits that his negativity is a deliberate, blanket choice rather than a reasoned position. The caption -- "I plan to be a self-aware old man" -- serves as the punchline from Weiner's own perspective, suggesting that he aspires to at least know he is being curmudgeonly when he gets old, even if he can't stop himself from doing it.