On the Difficulty of Remaining Young
Not that long ago—when old people were just called old people before the word seniors was invented—age and maturity were revered. Youth was something to grow out of, like tie-dyed pants and Nehru jackets.
Older generations consequently weren’t obsessed with staying young forever. They were content to watch the world pass them by. They knew they had wisdom, perspective and 5-percent off on senior day at the supermarket. They were OK with slowly fading away, as long as they could do it from their La-Z-Boy recliners.
Us boomers, not so much.
No longer young, many of us continue wanting to seem young, trying to act young. And it’s not easy.
Inundated with how-to-stay-healthy advice, we use anti-aging face cream and regenerative moisturizer (SPF 132!) and drink bottled water from pristine springs rather than Mello Yello from god knows where. We eliminate gluten from our diet and try ingesting more antioxidants and fewer oxidants, if we could figure out which are which.
We hire a personal trainer, then check our target heart rate on a Fitbit as if we understood what’s a target heart rate. We play pickleball and are disappointed to learn no gherkins involved. We go to yoga and Pilates and Zumba and Tai Chi and would do downward dog if we could figure out how to do upward dog immediately afterward.
We play brain games to ward off dementia and do Qi Gong to ward off osteoporosis. We get new knees, replace our hips and swap out our rotator cuffs.
Awash in unfamiliar popular culture, we nevertheless believe we can distinguish between Dua Lipa and Doja Cat before admitting we have no idea who either of them is. We have a bunch of Spotify and Pandora playlists but also a stack of old 45s, Guess Who cassette tapes and three non-ambulatory Walkmans. We imagine we’d get all the references in Saturday Night Live skits, but of course it’s on too late for us to watch it live.
At sea in a high-tech storm, we Zoom with friends, Skype with former colleagues and WhatsApp with family but still don’t know how to find those digital photos from that trip to Greece. We’re finally on Instagram when everyone has migrated over to TikTok. We now have so many gizmos and a bounty of complex thingamagigs, along with several completely unnecessary doohickeys, but still can’t figure out how the QR code works. And when something goes wrong with our iPhone 32, we have to find a nearby 12-year-old to fix it.
We do all this trying to hold on to our youthful past, but it’s hard, especially when our past happened back before we were paying attention. Plus, when you get older, there’s a lot more past to remember. And now there’s a lot more complicated present to deal with.
In addition to the traditional problems involved with getting older—increasing bodily frailty, faulty memory, root canals—our generation also confronts some unique challenges, including kale-flavored instant waffles, mounting LinkedIn requests from people we’ve never heard of and receiving mail with an invitation to a complimentary dinner where you can learn about cremation (I chose the salmon entree.).
We find ourselves living in a world where the print size of menus seems to have become smaller and restaurants appear to have become louder and frequently we feel much less capable of dealing with it all, particularly if there are acronyms involved. How do we navigate this scary world and make believe we really understand text messages that end with KMN?
I looked it up; it’s Kill Me Now.
FIHNI. (Frankly, I Have No Idea.)