Aging (S2E2)

Better than the alternative

Dear Q,

So the question goes: If you didn’t know how old you were, how old would you be? Of course there’s no answer, at least not one noticeably different from your Gregorian calendar age.

Did you know the Gregorian calendar came about thanks to rounding errors with solar years? Which is also why we have leap years. This lead to a frankly bonkers period essayist Michael Dean describes as “time dysphoria”:

It was a solid plan to get us back in sync with the sun, but we had to do the unimaginable: skip 10 days. In Spain, Portugal, and Italy, people went to bed on October 4th, 1582 and woke up on October 15th. The masses, who didn’t really get why such a change was necessary, were disturbed and disoriented. Birthdays went uncelebrated. The religious ones who assumed Judgment Day was coming on a fixed date within their lifetime assumed the government cut 10 days off their life. There were protests and attempts to resist. To add to the confusion, not every country agreed to this. It took between 2 months and 300+ years for everyone to sign onto the Gregorian Calendar. This was the greatest episode of time dysphoria in civilized history.

Abolish Leap Year! (by 2035)

Which is to say while aging, at least the process by which our bodies become increasingly incapable of sustaining life,¹ is an absolute given, our age, that number we assign to our condition of existence, is a lot of hullabaloo.

Pretty much everyone uses the same timekeeping across the globe now (and even if you don’t, your phone and computer do), but in the not-so-distant past you could basically make up your birthday and no one would be the wiser.

Heck, I was issued a paper birth certificate. From a church.

Maybe the better question is, if you didn’t know how old you were what would it matter? Or, if you didn’t know how old you were what would be different for you?

I think about this a lot as I become, at first subtly and now in years of the double digit variety, the “old guy at the club”.² I wonder what my age and perceived gender do to the spaces I’m in. This is what happens when you Benjamin Button your hobbies and start going to techno festivals in the (hopefully ) middle of your life, cresting towards oblivion.

It’s 2024 - why aren’t there any places where people nearing 50 are dancing?

All my friends are having kids, and all of them have expressed to me at some point the sheer delight at no longer having to go out. The great obligation to be in space pretending to enjoy yourself has finally been lifted.

The kicker is - I think they mean it!

If we had a village network approach to childcare, would this still be the case? If we had spaces where people having reached a certain station in life and perhaps no longer wishing for obliteration but simply wanting a good boogie could go, would we still gleefully announce our non-attendance?

(This is super duper what someone without children says.)

((Also someone writing a newsletter about aging while wrestling with mortality.))

I have lived long enough to experience the batshit lunacy of “X is the new X” applied to so many things, Derrida and Barthes either spinning in their graves or dancing on them.³ When 40 is the new 30 reached its fever pitch, I, a then almost 40-year-old, wondered what would happen as I got close to 50.

Well, I can tell you, and you’re going to be surprised - 50 is the new 40! At this rate, when I turn 70 I’ll have the carefree bonhomie of a newborn baby.

Act your age, or at least dress it. You’re only as old as you feel. And after all, isn’t youth wasted on the young? As a great thinker once said, age ain’t nothin’ but a number.

This is also incorrect. Age ain’t even a number.

I remember going to my mum’s 50th birthday. A good friend got her a wild, Homer-designs-a-car-style walking stick. It had a bunch of novelty elements, like a horn for shooing away youngsters. There were jokes about retirement. I had just turned 20 and 50 felt like a million lifetimes away.

And now I’m 47, using your bastard time system. I’d say that went by fast but parts of it felt so slow I thought I’d be stuck in them forever. By some counts I still feel the way I think a 20-year-old must feel now - unsteady, hopeful, despairing, rushed. And by others I feel 120 - full serenity prayer embodying stillness and so very, very tired.

But mostly, honestly, I feel somewhere between helpless infant and withered sage, neither at the beginning of my life and (hopefully) not yet at my end. I feel… now. I am age now, and it seems I’ll be this age until I’m age then.

One unsung benefit of going through two divorces is it really puts everything that comes after into perspective. I’ve already done a thing you hope not to do, and then I did it again. There’s real freedom in getting to a sort of spiritual bottom, sitting on the well floor looking up at the stars. Like how if you’re a non-smoker there’s nothing you can do that would be as good for you as another person who smokes quitting smoking.

Now I’m not suggesting you go mess your life up so you can experience this temporal uncoupling I seem to have gained. Nor am I saying that merely by getting divorced (and sort of flapping about, arms akimbo, through some other events) I am now free to go through life as an Ageless One.

I do feel older. I just don’t feel “an age”.

There’s the very real possibility I am experiencing a second adolescence, although maybe this is my first. I was a very stressed-out kid. We moved across the country when I was 11 and in some ways I feel my childhood ended there. In other ways (like living at home until I got married) I feel maybe I was a child for too long, at least in the culturally-relative North American context.

The simple answer could be as a person of a certain socially-assigned gender approaching a certain culturally-important time marker, I’m looking for any and all reasons not to think about what that portends. And this (gestures at words above) is just a lengthy reframing, a doth protest too much, a golly wouldn’t it be great if.

And… yes. It is. “Forgetting what things mean in order to enjoy what they are.” Humpty Dumpty shit.⁴ Is reframing akin to forgetting? Maybe I’ve always meant, ignoring. Disregard what things mean, what we’re told things are meant to indicate.

Content designers are often asking not for more content to be added (to make sense of an interface, to guide a user journey) but for content to be taken out. Stop trying to explain with words what should be intuitive by design.

In this list of things that don’t work, the sobering revelation that people don’t read written instructions. And then:

Age is a written instruction we don’t need for a thing we’re already doing. Apart from very specific circumstances, there’s no benefit to knowing how old you are. You won’t live longer. Like so many startups, it’s gathering data for nothing.

So… if you didn’t know how old you were, what would you do?

T

1. The National Library of Medicine (America) defines aging as “the time-related deterioration of the physiological functions necessary for survival and fertility.” Fun people.

2. “Every man has to settle down eventually. You know why you gotta settle down eventually? Because you don't want to be the old guy in the club. Every club you go into, there's always some old guy. He ain't really old, just a little too old to be in the club.” — Chris Rock, Bring The Pain (1996)

3. Shout out my fellow Lit grads who have no idea why the study of English literature involved so many French philosophers.

4. “When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”