Feeling old at any age
And hopefully, the opposite as well
That’s me, at about age 5.
When I was 4, I had eye surgery, and got glasses.
In my defense, it was my mother who dressed me like a Miami retiree just stepping away from the shuffleboard court. The saddle shoes (!) are cropped out of this version.
Things proceeded from there. My entire childhood, I was an old man trapped in a kid’s body. I was crotchety and skeptical. When I was in college, I was voted most likely to be an old geezer shouting at the neighborhood ruffians, “You kids get off my lawn! I know your parents’ names!”
If anything, as I got older, I started to get younger. Benjamin Button without the CGI.
Well, now that’s over.
Now, I go into Walgreens, and the 16-year-old cashier says, “Will we be using the senior discount today?”
In the tone like she’s asking someone in memory care whether they ate their applesauce this morning.
A few years ago, I watched a TED Talk on YouTube. And the presenter put up a slide with a large grid of small squares on it. And he said, “Each of these squares represents a week in an 80-year life.”
That caused me to have a bit of an existential crisis. I lost my breath for a little bit. Because I started thinking about how many of those squares I had already filled in, and how few were still open.
I still think about those squares.
When I was in my mid-30s, I took a job for a few months where my boss was in his early 20s. Most of my co-workers were that age, too.
I felt ancient.
The culture was that everyone ate lunch together in the company break room, and they all sat there talking about things I knew nothing about and had no connection to.
I left that job after six months, the shortest time I’ve ever worked anywhere. It wasn’t just about age. But that didn’t help. And I didn’t know how to bridge the gap.
At my last job, I worked with a young woman in the first half of her 20s. We got along famously, and I often playfully razzed her about not knowing what I thought was basic common pop culture. She had no idea who Vivien Leigh was.
One day she said, “I’m turning 25 soon. That means I will be closer to 50 than zero!”
I responded, “Never say that to someone over 50.”
We’re all getting older. Time is an arrow. But as the very evil but also very wise Don Rumsfeld once said, “You go to war with the army you have.”
I’ve written before about making your age into an advantage, not a liability. And that’s important. But it’s also important to value the virtues of what we consider “youth”: openness, willingness to experiment, eagerness to learn.
I don’t have a huge treasure trove of advice about staying young. But here are the few ideas I have.
Keep moving. Both literally and figuratively. Take a walk every day. Work out. But also try to vary your routines. It’s so easy to get stuck.
Keep learning. Read books in genres you don’t normally read. Subscribe to something like Skillshare, and take some courses in interesting topics. Read websites outside your comfort zone.
Cultivate relationships with younger people. They have a lot of things to teach us old folks. And not just who Olivia Rodrigo is.
The moral of the story? You can feel old at any age. But I think the opposite is true as well. Here’s to feeling young!
SOME NEWS: Last week I started training for a job working on the phones at Lands’ End. Those who know me know I had this same job in the mid 90s when I first came back to Wisconsin from Michigan. Full circle and all that.
I can’t say I’m hugely thrilled with this development, because on some level it represents my inability to get hired as a writer and editor. But there’s nothing wrong with taking a side job. I’m actually planning to write a piece for Mighty Forces about the good and bad aspects of placeholder jobs like this one.
What placeholder jobs have you had? What were the circumstances? I would love to hear about it, and I would enjoy including you in this piece I’m writing. Let me know - just reply to this email, or leave a comment. Thanks.
See you next week.
After I was downsized from a newspaper after 30 years in business. After that I worked as a substitute teacher (and earned the award for Worst Substitute Teacher ever), as an elder helper (opened my eyes to a world where I learned most agencies are sketchy), at a Meijer bakery (experienced sexism), as a house cleaner where I continually broke things (hiding a broken piece in my car for five years and hoping to find a new replacement some day and swept dirt under the rug), was a housekeeper for a priest (who fired me for a reason I didn't understand, maybe because I broke a big marble urn that shouldn't have been in the laundry room), a toy maker who worked in a barn where my fingers bled cause it was so cold), a church newsletter editor (where a pastor accused me of losing his sermon on a Sunday morning), a property manager (convincing owner that hired me I could do it when I had no experience ever but ended up helping him pass an Ann Arbor housing inspection), a dogsitter (those dogs might not have been walked as much as they should have) and housesitter (ate all their Girl Scout cookies and had to find someone selling them to replace before they returned). Target didn't hire me because I asked too many questions at the interview and I felt like a loser cause everyone can get hired at Target. Then I landed a job as an estate sale assistant and opened a small booth at a mall selling quirky things. Today I've never been happier. No management duties, get to talk to lots of different and unusual people, get to design the booth and presentation at sales. I wish I would have gone into the business sooner. BUT... I learned something at every place (how elderly poor people live), found out what poverty was (went from living in a 2,000 square foot old house to living in 200-foot studio apartment). I never, ever expected my life was going to end up this way, and was very depressed for years. Still haven't figured life out though!
Nicely said. As for me, for the first half of my life, I was always the youngest guy in the room. Now, I'm usually the oldest guy. So it goes. It makes me smile.