Hello there! Welcome to another episode of Against Mainstream - a series where I rant about mainstream beliefs and social conventions that just don’t make sense. This week’s rant is about people dreading growing old. Enjoy!
While I usually don’t hate anything or anyone easily, there is one thing I really hate. And that is people dreading growing up. I hate it as much as Michael hates Toby.
Okay, maybe not that much.
Worrying about aging is so overrated, though. Sure, I understand if you are in your 70s and you have death lurking around the corner. But you are only in your early 20s and you fear turning 25!? Come on! Question the convention. Is it actually bad to grow up?
The dread of growing up comes in two flavors.
1. Longing to go back to childhood
This is the “Ah…childhood. I wish I could go back to those simpler times. Life was easy and fun.”
Really?
You would rather be a dumb babbling child that needs a stupid pacifier to stop crying? You’d prefer that over being an adult who has agency, freedom, and possibilities?
Oh, the possibilities!
You can experience cinema and understand poetry, set up businesses and fail and learn from those failures, get your heart broken and heal and fall in love again, try to wrap your head around the complexity of the world and give up trying, work on electric supersonic jets and de-extinct species.
To be hit by epiphanies, to experience emotions deeply, to be moved by a story, to have your mind blown by nuances, and to be able to understand how bizarre, vast, and beautiful the world is.
Do you really want to miss out on these privileges of life?
Ironically, a toddler not only lacks the capacity to appreciate the complex things in life, it also cannot appreciate the simpler things in life. Adults can do both.
We enjoy dubstep music as well as silence, we dare to climb mountains but also go for a leisurely stroll, we bring millions in revenue for a company but laze around eating tubs of ice cream on a sunday, we enjoy dressing up but we also love our PJs, we ponder questions like “what is consciousness?” but we also indulge in mindless shows like Indian Matchmaking, we enjoy the carnal pleasure of an orgasm but we also enjoy a warm hug, we are delighted by the blood in slasher films but our heart melts when we see a picture of a baby’s fingers wrapped around the single finger of an adult, we have intellectual discussions but we also laugh at poor jokes, we get promoted three years in a row but we also get humbled when we make mistakes.
Isn’t it nice to be able to appreciate the beauty in these things? Why, then, do you talk as if it would be okay to not have these things?! Why, then, do you want to go back to being a small blob of flesh that wouldn’t last a day by itself and spews gibberish? There is so much fun to be had as adults!
2. Turning 24/25/26/27
As someone who is in their mid-20s, I see statements like “I am turning 24/25/26/27 this week. It hits you really hard, you know? Turning 24/25/26/27 is the worst thing ever…” make an appearance in every birthday party that I go to. I, of course, am too polite for my own good so I fake-nod in agreement. But in my mind, I go “Dude, you are only 24/25/26/27! You have *most* of your life ahead of you. Are you kidding me?”
Your age counter is only going to keep increasing. Are you going to live your life with ever-increasing dread? Why set yourself up for a life of suffering when, in fact, you can set yourself up for a life of contentment?
Think about growing old the way Victor E Frankl thinks about it. From his book Man's Search for Meaning:
The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day.
On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back.
I always had apprehensions about people being apprehensive about growing old. But I never really saw the beauty of growing old until I read this. Frankl continues:
What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?
“No, thank you,” he will think. “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.”
I wish more people romanticized growing old, as Paromita does:
Becoming old is a pleasurable new experience. It is an unknown world, right? It's fantastic because you do change and you don't know you. You get the chance to know yourself all over again. In different phases of your life. And honestly, the biggest romance you will ever have in your life is with yourself. So this newness of you, even the fact that you're getting slower or that you think differently or that you don't automatically know all of the popular culture. It's okay. This is all a kind of new discovery of yourself and through that a new discovery of the world around you.
If none of this is appealing to you, you are probably watching time pass by as a passive observer. I have been there. The key is to stop doing things that you dislike. Prune the bullshit that is in your life. And use your time to do stuff that you love and explore new things to love.