How We Age

Binaries: No Longer Habit-FormingAnd Papa Otter said to the Otter-Pups, "What do you think of the old-guy now?  Pretty cunning, yeah?"  

And the Otter-Pups nodded and said, "Not too bad, old guy.  Keep doing it like that, and we'll let you hang around as long as you want."

And Papa Otter looked at the Otter-Pups and grinned and bit them on the ear.

-- Book of Otter

Kent Runge at The Boar's Head Tavern reviews Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot's The Third Chapter.   It's a good book about the higher-premium time of life.  Runge remarks:

Any culture that disempowers (through retirement or any other means) the most experienced, wise and capable members is on the road to youth-focused narccisism.  Immediate gratification is a disease; whether in career, relationship, business or governance.

I see his point.

But I'm also disinclined to damn the rockets because they aren't the stabilizers.  Runge likes his polemics as well as anybody, so we can see through the crotchety get-off-my-lawn grumpiness of his post to a serious and interesting discussion.  (By the way, there's a really good supply of anthropological literature on aging out there.  If JSTOR ever does the right thing and sells individual accounts, you can read all about it.  Meantime, you'll have to search Amazon.)

Wherever the politics is painted as a struggle between the old and young, we miss a chance to talk about the mutual enrichment that is being lost wherever mass consumption takes the place of practical survival.

Like so many aspects of our lives (marriage comes to mind), aging becomes the practical burden where once it was the great mystery that connected the vibrant and strong to their heritage and their future.   And this is of course, as Runge says, a function of narcissism, partly, but also a function of the fact that in the world we inhabit, the old are a financial and tactical liability.

Pragmatism as much as narcissism admits that when the world changes radically every couple of years due to new tech, and where even our ways of thinking are bound to be shaped by the tech, age is no advantage.

Stay quick.  Stay loose.  Stay useful.

What fish have you caught for us lately?

There are ways to overcome this.  But they aren't going to materialize.  They are choices that communities must make at the local level, creative ways to value the elderly without hypocrisy.

As usual, it does mean connecting to another person not like ourselves, somebody on the other end of the actuarial tables, and wondering, "How do I want the world to look?  How shall I shape it?  What will I choose?"