AGE OLD PROBLEM

I read an article recently that argued that, despite the fact that a much larger percentage of those born after the year 2000 are likely to live to be 100 years old or more, we all find it almost impossible to imagine actually being old. We can’t plan for things like pensions simply because we do not believe that it is something that will ever happen to us. Old age, we seem to think, is what happens to other people. I found this rather odd myself as, since being about sixteen I’ve barely been able to imagine anything else. I’ve often said that I was “born forty” and precious little that has happened to me since seems to have deviated me from this state of old fartdom.

But this weird inability to picture our own futures does rather conjure up other problems. If we live in a culture that is predominantly “yoof” orientated and so many of us are just living in the “now” we tend to forget that for the vast majority of us, the “now” has a habit of stretching so far into the future that we might just live long enough to wish we hadn’t made quite so many indelible choices in our lives. If we do choose to “live fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse” (or as close as most of us are able), what happens to us if we unexpectedly survive long enough to find ourselves surprisingly middle-aged?

Suddenly we find ourselves standing there in our ridiculously inappropriate outfits, sporting an attitude and a haircut that doesn’t really match our face any more and wondering quite what to do next. Instead of gently maturing into a mature gracefulness, many will drag themselves to the gym or (God help us) the plastic surgeon with the quiet desperation of one who simply doesn’t know how to accept the passing of time. The idea of genteel little old ladies of the “Miss Marple” type seems to have been replaced with a brash and slightly embarrassing need to dress up like our children and their pals and dash off to the tattoo parlour or a rock concert and huddle together in panic and fear with all the other desperate folk…

I suppose it’s not really our fault. The media simply will not let us grow old gracefully any more. Pretty much everything they produce is now geared towards being young and being seen to be young. Even Disney’s new Miss Marple has to be played by that stick-like creature from “Alias”, but the predomination of youth culture and youth bias in the print and broadcast media is largely down to the fact that most of the people who work in those spheres are barely out of their teens themselves.

This is not a bad thing because new ideas will come from a spark of energy and the tumult of youthfulness is where most of that energy is found, even though all the ideas these days do seem to be pale rehashes of ideas from previous generations dressed up with whiz bang graphics that grew out of a generation whose main source of storytelling experience was the gaming industry.

Meanwhile, with all this in my failing mind, I will pass a sign in the street which offers services like “permanent make-up” and wonder whether the target market quite understand the definition of “permanent” and how outrageously awful such a thing might look when they reach their fifties. Does “permanent” in this context mean “I won’t have to deal with this for six months, won’t that be brilliant” or a more worrying “I can’t imagine a period of time further ahead than the London Olympics”…? It’s for much the same reason that I have never personally been fond of the whole tattoo culture. Maybe it’s just the slightly artistic background I had knowing how fickle we can be with images and how our perception of them changes over time. Tattoos do seem to be a very permanent decision to be made at an age where the whole idea of wrinkles and stretch marks can sagging can seem so very far away. I saw that not-quite-so-youthful icon David Beckham running along a beach with his shirt off in an advert the other day and all it made me think of was that he looked like he had a load of prison tattoos and resembled that character played by Robert de Niro in the remake (because everything is) of “Cape Fear”. Mind you, for my generation, tattoos were worn (not always by choice) by sailors, holocaust survivors and (as Truman Capote noted was the one thing they all had in common) convicted murderers on death row and spoke of a different worldview than they seem to nowadays

Still times change and what was once considered perhaps slightly tacky or undesirable is now quite the thing, and many of us on the brink of middle age and who really ought to know better seem to be now trying to cling on to their fleeting youth by inking their bodies as if that will persuade all their friends that they’re still young enough to be hip and happening (and other outdated “no-longer-yoof” terms like that) despite the fact that their actual hip is more likely to need replacing.

I suppose that I really think it should all be about having a bit of dignity and accepting that you are older instead of trying to recapture some image of yourself that might well look “fabulous” inside your own head (or even in your own mirror) but which the rest of the world looks at and thinks “a bit sad…”

“Older” did used to mean “wiser” but nowadays, in our desperation to remain forever young we’re making bigger idiots of ourselves than ever before and the really strange thing is that we’re doing it a lot younger too, as if a whole lifetime has to be lived before you’ve left your teenage years, otherwise you’ll simply be considered too old to do anything. Strangely, the next fifty years then usually manage to come along anyway and, whilst it should be no real shock that they do, you suddenly find yourself having to live with all the mistakes you made when you lived like there was no tomorrow, because when tomorrow actually turns up, a whole barrel of consequences tend to turn up with it.

Strangely enough (you might think) I don’t blame or resent the youngsters at all for this. After all, it’s not their fault that they’re young, but I do blame generations like mine for buying into this belief system and trying so hard to cling on to these notions of youth rather than accepting the inevitable and learning to live with what we are, rather than what we wish we still were.

It’s not even about giving up on anything, after all we all at least have the option to be much more active as we age nowadays, but we don’t have to act like teenagers to do so. Once upon a time the youth were given something to rebel against or aspire to, but now all we give them is the image of someone desperately trying to cling on to some long gone idea of themselves which is hardly likely to engender any level of respect from anyone really.