How to Not Suck at Being Old (and Young)

Read Time: 8 minutes

Your life is full of crossover points into older age–points where you go from one mode in your life to another, and  never go back.  This happens in many ways–paying your first bills, driving your first car, finding your first hair in a place on your body that makes you go, “Great, there’s another fucking thing I have to deal with.”

 

The crossover point I want to talk about is one of how we perceive, well, everything– music, politics, the very idea of humanity–everything.  Let’s call it The Perception Crossover.

 

In nearly all cases, when you’re on the younger side of your Perception Crossover, you want everything to change.  You look at the way your parents are doing things, and you go, “Well that’s stupid. Someone should do all of that differently.”  That’s your dominant mindset.  That’s your built-in bias.  This is why younger people predominantly want people to have access to healthcare without going bankrupt, and why they convince themselves that house music is cool.  This is all, at its core, “New thing is better.”

 

Then at some point, we cross over to our older side.  This usually, but doesn’t always occur when things start to go downhill for us in life–which can happen as late as 55, and as early as 5, depending on the person, and which area of life we’re talking about (For instance, you could crossover in movie taste at 12, and then cross over with how you view the gays at 36).  

 

When you crossover to the older side of your Perception Crossover, you tend to shift into the mindset of wanting things to stay the same–or, when you get old enough, you want things to go back to the way they used to be, but the idea is the same.  You want things to be unchanged from a younger time.

 

This is why most old people are physically incapable of enjoying music outside of their pre-crossover era, and why they get really stressed out when they have to learn a new gender pronoun.  Every resistance to social advancements like this, when you look at it, boils down to, “But this is different than what we’ve been doing so far, so please no. I’m afraid.”

 

These crossover points are normal, and they’re perfectly natural.  Everybody crosses over.

 

But here’s the other thing: Both sides of your crossover point also happen to miserably suck.  I mean of course.  “Normal” and “natural” aren’s synonyms for “good.”  If unchecked, both sides of your crossover can really fuck with your head, and so it’s worth looking into what to do about them.

 

As someone in many ways at my own crossover points (I thing gerrymandering is fucked up, but also hate it when people say, “It’s lit,”) I feel pretty well equipped to comment on this.

 

The Awful Young Side

 

 

When I was 13, I hated The Beatles for one primary reason: My dad liked them, and therefore the thing from my generation (which was generally 3 power chords + manufactured angst from dudes so radical, they made their hair spiky) must be better.  I disliked them because if my dad had talked about how much he liked pizza, at that point, I would have convinced myself, “Pizza is STUPID!”

 

I disliked them because middle schoolers are fucking assholes who dislike everything their parents like–because younger people are biologically driven towards change.

 

This is good and bad.  One could say we are where we are right now as society because younger generations constantly looked at how we could improve what’s here–because we are programmed in youth to enter Utopia, and go, “Nah, this is problematic. Let’s put in some barn doors, and find a different word for ’feet.’”

 

In the really big picture, the over all result of this is positive. It mostly moves the world into a better direction.  But it can be wrong sometimes. Sometimes we try to add stupid bullshit to the world because our programming constantly says that adding new things is good.  As a result, society has a habit of taking ten steps forward, and nine steps back, and it’s fucking exhausting, and time consuming, and I think, avoidable.

 

Sometimes we think things suck that are totally fine, and we miss out on a lot of great things in the world simply because we’re young. 

 

On the young side of our Perception Crossover, we are machine guns of newness and change, and a lot of our bullets in our guns are stupid, and as a result, they hit the wrong targets. It’s only when we get older that we learn to manage and delineate between the good ideas, and the stupid bullshit.

 

And that sucks.  But the reverse also happens in our older life, and that can also suck.  

 

The Awful Old Side

 

 

When we get old, and we close ourselves off to change, two things happen.  

 

First, we remain close-minded to all new things that come towards us–be it music, facts, or ideas.  This is the crossover point that we’re all aware of. It gets recognized and talked about all the time.  We all know that crotchety old people don’t like new things, and we all eventually become them.

 

The second result of being in our older stage doesn’t get talked about as much, but it’s truly just as awful, and it’s this: A major hallmark of getting old is holding onto ideas and creations that–seeing what we see now–totally suck.

 

 

This could mean thinking that The Monkees made great music, or that racism just means saying the n-word, or that the 50’s were the best time in American history (those last two might be related).  It could mean holding on to art that doesn’t enrich you, ideas about life that are holding you back, or ideas about society that are holding us all back.

 

Sometimes We Get Old When We’re Young

 

As I said before, this can happen at any age with anything.  The crossover into “The thing I love is perfect and I’ll never change my mind,” is particularly volatile.

 

Eight years ago, it came out that not only was an assistant football coach at Penn State guilty of molesting literally dozens of children, but that head football coach and school icon Joe Paterno knew about it, and never quite got around to informing the police.

 

In response, many Penn State students at the time vehemently and passionately stood by Paterno, even though all rational conclusions would easily point to, “Nah, fuck that guy.”

 

We all do some version of this, because the things we grow to love and identify become a part of us, and protecting these things becomes a form of protecting ourselves.  For those students, removing their love of Paterno felt like removing a leg from their soul.

 

Now, that’s not really any excuse, and if your leg is ignoring a child molester, probably go ahead and remove that shit, but the point is that it’s difficult, and it’s a trap of the soul we all fall into.

 

Crossover Problems

 

So all of it is, in some contexts, a problem.  If we want to maximize how good our lives are, and more importantly how good we are, it’s important that we combat all four of these problems.  So just to review, here they are:

The Four Problems of Age

 

1) When younger: Being close-minded to the wonders of life that already exist.

2) When younger: Adding dumb new things to the world. 

3) When older: being close-minded to anything new and different.

4) When older: Holding onto things you love that in fact are totally shitty.  

 

So how do we do all of this? 

 

How to Not Be a Young Idiot, or a Crotchety Old Asshole

 

The most important step to handle your age-based biases is to start by accepting how completely inevitable they are.  This shit happens to everyone. We all go through a time when we support a stupid change because we hate our parents.  This is why you see people with blue hair. 

 

We all have age-based close-mindedness too.  This applies to things that already exist when we’re young, and anything new and different when we’re old.  Some of us may resist this better than others, but some degree of this is universal.  

 

And we all have some problematic shit we hold onto.  We all have some show we still love, or a political idea we hold close to our heart, or a shitty way of seeing the world that we let just kind of camp out in our head despite the waves of evidence that we should stop that like now.  We find justifications for it, we ignore the problem, and the world is worse for it.

 

Yes, you are doing all of this.  You’re not terrible for succumbing to any of these things at a given moment.  You’re terrible for succumbing to them and then never fixing them.  You’re really terrible for this. Stop it. Bad dog. 

 

The most important step in not succumbing–in maintaining objectivity from age 9 to 89–is awareness and getting yourself as close to objectivity as possible.

 

Here’s the the bad news with that: true objectivity is impossible.

 

Fight Your Bias with Bias

 

You may think that you can just decide to be objective, but you’re totally wrong, and I promise you’re totally annoying to talk to.  We all have ideas and hobbies and ways of seeing the world that we stitch onto our identities, and we want like hell for those to stay there.  If you try to walk into an idea, or a truth, or a piece of art trying to have pure objectivity, you’ll fail. You’ll always default to molding the truth to benefit your current political beliefs, or the idea that no, Bill Cosby was totally cool.

 

So what do we do instead of trying to force objectivity?  We counteract our bias with bias.

 

This means that whenever you’re about to just reinforce an idea in your head, you stop yourself, and you march your brain right in the other direction.  Every time you assume someone is an asshole for thinking a certain way, you question that thought immediately.  Actively seek out why you’re wrong.  Every time you think about “just how true” some meme is that you read on the TruePatriot911.Info Facebook page, force yourself in the other direction.  Force yourself to question your own beliefs, and your own understanding of reality every God damn day.

Dive into your strongest beliefs assuming that you’re wrong.  Genuinely convince yourself of the opposing viewpoint.

 

There are specific ways to do this on each side of your crossover.  

 

When you’re on the young side of your crossover, you need to force yourself to listen and accept.  When you inevitably assume that the world in front of you sucks and needs to be changed, to some degree, instead, listen to those that built it.  Accept it. Seek over and over to understand why it is the way it is now before calling it stupid. If you do this constantly, and bash your head against the wall, and you still think everything sucks and can totally be improved, well all right.  Maybe you’re right. I mean, you know, *motions to pretty much everything*.  

 

But it’s only after you march intently away from the prison of your biases that you can actually kind of know just how much everything sucks. 

 

 

When you’re on the older side of the crossover hill, you have to force yourself to be open-minded. When you inevitably dismiss all new things as stupid, you have to stop yourself, and force yourself to think that you’re an idiot.  You have to assume that you’re wrong about a lot of this, because well, I know you don’t want to hear this grandpa, but from segregation, to rock music, to Thai-Mexican fusion, the young people with new ideas tend to be right.

 

So assume you’re wrong. Recognize where your biases are.  Question the way things currently are in your head–the things you know for sure.  Remember that people who have been around longer have seen more than you, and enter assuming they know more while still questioning them.

 

And remain open to changing your own awful ways.  Look into why your way of life and thinking that you’ve been locked into for the last couple of decades actually totally sucks.

 

So I guess, basically, try to be as unlike your natural self as possible.