7 Notes on Growing Older
Seven excerpts from the post, “27 Notes On Growing Old(er),” from Ian Leslie’s Substack, The Ruffian.
1. 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.
2. Let me summarize the science of how aging 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. . . .
3. The American poet George Oppen said my favorite 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.
4. 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.”
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Wisdom is meant to be the great compensation for growing older. Though 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. . . .