27 Notes On Growing Old(er)

A Universal Process That's Also Mighty Strange

Rembrandt made about a hundred self-portraits; together they’re perhaps the greatest visual meditation on ageing we have. This composite made by The Collector.

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On July 14th my choir is taking part in a performance of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts, at Cadogan Hall in London. I didn’t know the piece - not many people do, it’s a bit of a rarity - but it’s fabulous. It’s got huge tunes and thrilling harmonies. None of the versions on Spotify or YouTube do it justice. We’re performing it with a big band of top jazz musicians, and a superb soloist (Nina Bennett). It’s going to be a special night. Come along if you can.

1. Will Storr, author and fellow Substacker, recently wrote about his “midlife identity crisis”. I was struck, while reading it, at how rare it is for people - men in particular - to admit that growing older can be tough. In the second half of life, we’re all expected to say how much happier we are than in our insecure twenties, how we wouldn’t swap places with our younger self, oh no, not even if you paid us. Hmm. Sometimes I feel that way, but not always. Some days, ageing feels like a curse, only lightly mitigated by the knowledge that the curse is universal.

2. Let’s be honest: after a certain point - 35? 40? - growing older is psychologically punishing. How could it not be? It involves getting a little bit weaker, stupider and uglier every year.

3. Let me summarise the science of how ageing affects physical and mental capability: all the lines on the graph point down. We can slow this multi-dimensional descent but not stop it. The miracle is that most of us are not driven mad by this knowledge. We ought to congratulate ourselves on the depth of our resilience, on our heroic fortitude in the face of adversity - while quietly acknowledging that we rely on a modicum of self-deception to get by.

4. The American poet George Oppen said my favourite thing about growing old: “What a strange thing to happen to a little boy.”¹ I love how this evokes the subjectivity of a bewildered child trapped inside an aged body; a boy staring at his wizened hands and wondering what on earth is going on.

5. One of the weirdest things about the midlife ageing process, as those of you who have passed 40 will know, is that it is discontinuous. It doesn’t happen at a gradual and consistent rate, allowing you time to adjust. After lulling you into a false sense of security, it rushes forward, catching you unawares. It’s like finding yourself dropped into a different world. You may ask yourself, how did I get here?

6. The physicist Michael Nielsen tells us that the Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam perceived his life as sharply divided into two halves: “In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group. In the second half, he was always the oldest. There was no transitional period.” There was no transitional period.

7. I think people who had a lot of success early in their careers (not an affliction from which I suffered) feel this more acutely than most. When you’re always the youngest guy in the room, it’s natural to build a whole identity around your precocity. Then suddenly - and it is sudden - you’re not the youngest anymore. You’re one of those anonymous older guys. So now who the hell even are you?

8. There’s a kernel of truth, by the way, in that Rat Pack-era Frank Sinatra line about how he pities tee-totallers because when they wake up in the morning, they know that’s the best they’re going to feel all day. In terms of pacing your life, it might be a good idea not to optimise too early. If you’re in your twenties, perhaps you shouldn’t exercise too much or eat too healthily, since if you’re hyper-fit at 30, all you’ll experience is decline, pure decline. Whereas if you only start getting healthy later on you can, at least for a while, experience the feeling of water running uphill.

9. In your twenties, you say “about three years ago” of memories you can only hazily locate on the timeline. Then at some point you suddenly hear yourself say “ about twenty years ago”. And you hear yourself saying it again and again. About things that feel like three years ago.

10. The short story I think about most is The Swimmer, by John Cheever (later a film). It’s a golden Sunday afternoon in upstate New York in the 1960s. The well-to-do residents of Westchester are out in their gardens sipping cocktails. Neddy, a fit man in early middle age, decides to swim home from the party he’s at by way of his neighbours’ pools, just for a laugh. As he progresses from one pool to another, being made drinks as he goes, the weather and the mood start to get colder and darker. He finds himself being treated with inexplicable hostility and pity by once-friendly neighbours. Bewildered, he finally arrives at his own house, only to find it empty and abandoned. We sense that in the time it took Neddy to swim through a few pools in a mildly drunken haze, whole years, even decades, have passed. We also sense that Neddy is ruined in some way - that he has ruined himself. I’m not ruined, not yet, but Neddy’s bewilderment speaks to me. I only set off a few minutes ago. The sun was still high in the sky.
    

11. One reason that the experience of growing old can feel jagged and abrupt is that there is a disconnect between how old we feel and how old we are. You often hear people say “inside I still feel young”. It’s tempting to dismiss that as meaningless happy talk but actually it’s often true, and it’s one of the strangest things about growing older. Neuroscientists use the term “proprioception” to describe a person’s intuitive sense of their own body in space - the position of their arms, the movement of their legs. If it deteriorates, you can’t control your actions without conscious effort. I think there’s a kind of proprioception for age, which for some mysterious evolutionary reason gets switched off around age 40. When you’re 18, you feel 18, when you’re 35 you feel 35, and when you’re 53 you feel…35. You’re constantly having to arbitrate between your felt age and your real age, reminding yourself that you’re not actually that person anymore, making a special effort to act appropriately (maybe you shouldn’t actually go skiing, or drink six pints, certainly not both). If you’re a young person, and you’re talking to an older person, it’s as well to remember that they may well believe, at some level, that they’re the same age as you. Many such conversations are asymmetrical: the young person always aware of the age gap, the older person not so much.

12. There hasn’t been enough scientific investigation of ‘felt age’ but there is some. This study finds that people over the age of 70 have, on average, a 13 year gap between their felt age and their real age. So a 73-year-old typically feels about 60. But the study also finds that this gap closes with age, as your body insists, ever-more loudly, on the harsh truth. I should imagine there is a lot of variation here. On announcing his retirement from Berkshire Hathaway, at the age of 94, Warren Buffett told an interviewer he had never felt old until he passed 90. Then, all of a sudden, he did.

13. Some times I will meet someone I haven’t seen for twenty years, or simply see a photo of them, and get a momentary, discombobulating shock at how old they are. And then almost immediately I realise - or re-realise - that I’ve grown older too. Once we start talking I forget all about it, but that moment is a little glimpse into the double game that the brain is playing. In Proust’s Time Regained, the narrator finds himself in a room of elderly-looking people whom he fails to recognise, until he realises that they’re his friends, grown old like him:
    And now it dawned upon me what old age was — old age, which of all realities is perhaps the one we continue longest to think of in purely abstract terms, looking at calendars, dating our letters, seeing our friends marry, and then our friends’ children, without understanding, whether out of fear or laziness, what it all means, until the day when we see a silhouette we do not recognize, like that of M. d’Argencourt, which makes us realize that we are living in a new world; until the day when the grandson of one of our friends, a young man whom we instinctively treat as an equal, smiles as if we were making fun of him, as to him we have always seemed like a grandfather…

14. Last year I went to see Henry IV, Part 2 with Ian McKellen as Falstaff. In one of those scenes that Shakespeare uses as a comic interlude from the main action, Falstaff goes to visit Justice Shallow, at Shallow’s country estate. Falstaff and Shallow were friends in their youth. In front of others, Shallow boasts about the wild times he and Falstaff had while young, how hard they partied. Falstaff distances himself from Shallow’s nostalgic exaggerations though he can’t help but feel a little wistful (“We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow”). Amidst the comedy of male vanity, there’s a needle of sadness. Shallow asks if “Jane Nightwork” (a punning nickname) is still alive. “She lives,” says Falstaff, curtly recalling that she never liked Shallow. Unembarrassed, Shallow continues:
    
    SHALLOW: “She was then a bona roba. [A hottie]. Doth she hold her own well? FALSTAFF Old, old, Master Shallow.
    SHALLOW Nay, she must be old. She cannot choose but be old.

    
    In the production I saw, Shallow spoke that last line (“Nay…”) slowly, with the force of revelation. He is realising that Jane Nightwork isn’t the person in his mind, and neither is he.
    

15. Wisdom is meant to be the great compensation for growing older. Though your your knees sound like they’re unlocking a safe when you bend down, and you can’t straighten up without an “oof”, you can at least revel in the depth of your insights into the human condition. Well, yes and no. It is true that we accumulate knowledge (and if we try really hard, more of it than we forget). It’s true that we get a feel for the repeated patterns that constitute so much of human experience, and a clearer sight of the possible mistakes arrayed before us at any point in time (whether or not we make them anyway being another question). But there are countering forces too. The world changes faster than we’re ready for, which borks our pattern-detecting software. We’re endlessly self-deluding; we smooth the random accidents of life into stories that put us in control of our own destiny (this is what The Road Not Taken is really about). We’re also lazier, more set in our ways, more dogmatic, less prone to question our assumptions. If we’re not careful, our ‘wisdom’ makes us stupid. Most cognitive decline is self-inflicted.

16. In a quasi-scientific study of “wisdom at the end of life”, researchers interviewed people who knew they were dying, mostly old people. These interviews elicited such crystalline insights as, “I think you would have more wisdom if you have empathy and compassion.” Right. “Wisdom means seeing life on life’s terms.” Deep.

17. People who know they’re approaching the last stop aren’t wiser than the rest of us, they’re just even more self-deluded than we are. I recently listened to an interview with the entrepreneur/self-help guru Alex Hormozi. I liked what he said about those “deathbed regrets” which get spun into cute homilies - I wish I’d stopped to smell the roses, I wish I’d seen more of my children, and so on: “The human condition is that we want it all, and we're not willing to make trades…‘deathbed regrets’ typically have the bias of wanting the other path - the path they could have taken - without considering the cost of that path. So they say "Hey I was really successful and I did all these things, but you know, I would give it all up today to have my family.’ It's like, well yeah, but you didn't, because you actually chose the path that you're on, and you weren't willing to do that. What you are saying right now is that you want it all. Sure. So does everyone.”
    

18. Age is just a number, so they say, but numbers are pretty important. This one gives you a rough idea of where you are on the journey between birth and death. You might want to make a note of it is all I’m saying.

19. Should you act your age? Yes if it means making elegant and creative adaptations to it. No, if it means performing it: striving too hard to convey authority, or worse, behaving like somebody who has given up on life.

20. “To get born, your body makes a pact with death, and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat.” Louise Glück. I am not certain what she meant but this reads optimistically to me. All our biological processes - healing wounds, fighting infection, repairing cellular damage, maintaining homeostasis - are essentially the body attempting to beat the system. I sometimes hear people criticise fitness fanatics by saying they’re trying to deny mortality. Well, no shit - that’s the whole game. We’re cheating entropy from the moment we’re born. Every organism, including the one which is you, is a revolt - an organised rebellion - against the universe’s fundamental drive towards disorder. When you’re up against an enemy this implacable, I say it’s OK to cheat. In fact it’s heroic. The universe wants us to be dust and will eventually get the job done. Staying vital for as long as we can is a magnificently perverse act of resistance.

21. There’s an interview with Mick Jagger from when he was 58, in which he’s way more patient than he might have been, while a Dutch interviewer suggests he’s too old to be a rock singer. Jagger is 81 now and still selling out stadiums. Jagger, McCartney and others from their generation have endured decades of being sneered at for not “acting their age”. Few people do that anymore. By stubbornly persisting, they’ve changed our ideas of what that phrase means.

22. Jagger and McCartney hardly ever engage in age-based self-deprecation. They tend not to make those slightly nervous “I’m just an old geezer” jokes, of the kind that the rest of us start making from the moment we pass 30. I think that might have something to do with the almost ridiculously good time they’re having in their eighties. They play the double game to perfection: simultaneously aware of age and oblivious to it.

23. Age is time divided by achievement. Achievements come in many forms: writing Blackbird or raising a family or starting a business or helping someone through a difficult time - anything that extends or endures beyond you. Whatever form it takes, the more you achieve, the younger you are (relative to that number).

24. To be reminded of your decay every time you look in the mirror is, as the kids might say, low-key brutal, but if nothing else it teaches you acceptance of things you can’t control. It’s a rigorous spiritual practice.

25. Every day you’re the youngest you’ll ever be. That’s a Hallmark cliché but it’s also an indisputable fact; one which we find almost impossible to appreciate except in retrospect. We should try. We can choose not to become old, but the alternative is much worse. Like root canal treatment and democracy, ageing is the least bad option.

26. There is comedy to savour in it, too, albeit comedy with that British sitcom feeling of being trapped in a losing game, laughter the consolation prize.

    

27. What a strange thing to happen to a little boy or girl! Rembrandt’s late self-portraits capture so much about how it feels. That look on his face: pissed-off, amused, baffled, defiant. Here’s my face. Not pretty is it? But it’s the only one I’ve got.

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1. Not from a poem - it was a remark he made to Paul Auster. If you’re going to drop a killer aperçu, make sure a writer is around.