Who wants to be ageless? Not me. I am old. Hear me creak. To be old and to be able to participate, even if with increasing cynicism and decrepitude, in the unpredictable verb of “ageing” is surely a blessing. It is a gift famously more attractive than the perennially unpopular alternative. I will turn 50 this year and I have realised that I couldn’t care less if people think I am 70 or 80, let alone 50. I’m just happy to be around. I don’t need anyone to think I’m not 50, and I certainly don’t need them to believe I’m any younger. What would be the point? If people think you’re younger than you are (or, worse, that you “look good for your age”), there’s a pressure there. It might be manageable this month. But how are you going to maintain that over the next five years? Or 10 years? Let’s be optimistic. Better to act like you’re 90 now. I mean, you might never get there in reality. So channel that age. Get the practice in.
The thing is, we are monumentally spoilt, even with the latest alarming news of the UK’s stagnant life expectancy, which is slowly creeping downwards from the upper 80s, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Because only 2,000 years ago, it was completely normal to expect to die a horrible death between the age of 20 and 35. Old people were outliers. It was only from around 1800 that average life expectancy in Europe pushed up to 40, and only in the past 200 years that it has moved beyond all previous imagining and we had to invent stupid sayings like “Age is just a number” and “60 is the new 50.” But if it really were just a number, then no one would need to say that it’s just a number. And if it’s all just numbers, then no number needs to be the new version of another number.
