You know, I was a trainer for a year, and I’ve spent all my life thereafter working with them and studying enough of their culture to build machines to help them and to understand our species’ relationship with pokémon.
Yet I don’t think I’ll ever understand why they measure something as abstract as battle experience with levels or why other trainers take that system so seriously.
(Not to be rude about it, of course, anonymous. Levels are just measures of a pokémon’s battle competency, not an indicator of age. A newly hatched pokémon can be a higher level than an elderly one and vice versa.)
The Pokédex According to Bill 