The Hallmark of Age

Age, and how we talk about it, is a funny thing. When you’re young, of course, you’re always topping it up – 18 years and 7 months is automatically translated into 19 when someone asks how old you are. Age is referred to in the context of status or personal rights. You want to be older to gain certain privileges, or you are older so you brag about it. As you get on, however, the ambivalence starts setting in. You are less and less certain about when and how to talk about it. You notice the disparity between how old you feel and how old you actually are, which tends to fluctuate.

And then, one morning, you wake up, look at yourself and say, “Shit, I’m getting old.”

What always surprises me is at what age people reach that point – and how much that varies. I am interested in how people see themselves in relation to how old they are. I’ve talked to people in their 40s who still consider themselves relatively young, and listened to a 29 year old lament about their 30th birthday. In my early to mid-40s, the only time I thought about how old I was or how old I felt was when I was comparing myself to other people. As a woman without children, it would always be a bit of a jolt for me to hear someone younger than I was talking about her kids. I didn’t see myself as having lived that long. And yet, the difference in my quality of life was a world apart from that in my 20s. Youth is overrated.

So when someone dear to me tells me that at 54, he’s “getting old”, and that finding people to do business with is increasingly challenging, I am shocked. 54 is young, I thought. But then I sort of got it. It’s all relative. He is in a line of business that is youth-dominated. Being discriminated against is the norm. I wonder how deeply that affects him. I wonder if, in his private moments, he is stuck in a time capsule. Or does he reconcile with the man he is becoming, slowly growing into a new way of being?

We so often talk about embracing a process or embracing who we are. What about embracing our age? What would it feel like to own it, work it, take pride in it? To find confidence in the experiences that have made us more rounded? We live in a time where we can’t look to young people to show their respect. They’ve never been taught. To the contrary, they’ve been conditioned against getting older and all that it represents. We all have.

It’s up to us to change that. They’ll either get it or they won’t, but if they don’t it’s their loss. Hopefully they’ll come around. The hallmark of age is something to regard, and our quality of life depends on it.