Daily Riddle — Aug 21, 2026

The trick here is that "young" and "old" don't refer to a lifetime of years, but to a lifetime of burning. A candle starts tall and unlit, full of wax and wick still waiting to be used — that's its youth, even though it hasn't done anything yet. Then, as time passes and the flame does its slow work, the candle shrinks. What's left, low and stubby, is what we'd call old, worn down by use rather than by calendar years. The misdirection is that we naturally picture a person aging, tall as a child growing shorter with a hunched back in old age doesn't quite fit, so your mind wanders before landing on an object whose height literally measures its remaining time. It's a neat little swap of biological aging for physical consumption, and once you picture the wax dripping down, the answer feels obvious.