You’re only as old as you feel. I have four kids. I’m 37 going on one hundred.
I recently had another birthday, which was unfortunate. I’m not eager to hit new milestones in my slow and steady march toward death. I used to do an annual post about lessons I’d picked up over the previous year, but I stopped because I wasn’t actually learning anything new. Each time, I was just as dumb as the year before. People often say that if they could do their lives over again knowing what they know now, they’d do things differently, but deep down, we all know that if we had a do-over, we’d screw that up, too. Reliving your life would just give you a chance to make new but equally terrible mistakes. In that vein, instead of pretending that I have some wisdom to bestow this year, here are the top signs you’re getting old like me.
Everything creaks and pops.
Your house. Your bones. Your cereal. It doesn’t matter. Everything makes noises it shouldn’t, and in a way that can’t be fixed with a can of oil. Unless you’re the Tin Man, I guess. I don’t want to assume your Wizard of Oz persona, or wizona, as the kids are calling it these days. (Editor’s note: Literally no kid has ever called it that because no one under the age of sixty-five has seen the Wizard of Oz. If you’ve even heard of that movie, you should start shopping for coffins.) Human bodies simply weren’t built for all the wear and tear we put on them, which is saying something since people today are more inactive than ever before. You’d think all the time we spend slumped over at computer desks or staring catatonically at our phones would keep us in mint condition, but the opposite seems to be true. The older I get, the less it takes to hurt me. My left wrist has been in extreme pain for days, an injury I sustained by doing absolutely nothing. Simply existing was too much stress for it. Human beings evolved to reproduce in their teens and be dead by thirty. The fact that improving nutrition and medical care now keeps us around past our expiration date is more of a curse than a blessing. It’s a shame that human beings are made of flesh and bone, which don’t exactly come with an extended warranty. In a perfect world, we’d be made of reinforced steel. When I leave a review for this body, I’m going to deduct a few stars for obvious design flaws.
You have to do math to figure out how old you are.
Ask any kid how old they are and they can tell you they’re eight and three-quarters before they even understand how fractions work. I’m the opposite. I spent the last six months thinking I was already thirty-seven, when in reality I just turned thirty-seven at the end of June. When my wife, Lola, pointed this out, I didn’t believe her and had to calculate it myself. Twice. I accidentally gained a year back, which brings me no pleasure. Nobody wants to repeat anything in their thirties. If I get a do-over, I want it to be for before my name was on all the bills. If I could go back, I’d be so much better at freeloading.
Your bedtime keeps getting earlier.
I used to pride myself on how little I slept. For years, I’d work full time, spend a few hours with my family, and then write until one or two in the morning. Then I’d wake up at 6 a.m. and do it all again. Were there any consequences for living on four hours of sleep for most of my early adulthood? It got my writing career off the ground, which is the ultimate punishment. The only reward for hard work is more work. It also probably shortened my lifespan. I have a theory based on a sample size of two that everybody gets the same number of waking hours and that women only live longer because they sleep more. Even now that I have a slightly better work-life balance, I struggle to sleep past 7 a.m., no matter how late I go to bed. Lola, on the other hand, will get nine hours of sleep, no matter what. She could snooze through a rock concert in the middle of a hurricane. She’ll have to live to be 102, however, to have as many conscious hours as me. Meanwhile, based on how much I was awake in my twenties, I’ll be lucky to make it past forty.
These days, I have no problem falling asleep early. If I lie down at any point after 6 p.m., I’m done for the night. The next stage in my development as a dad will be to master falling asleep while sitting up. My dad and father-in-law can both conk out mid-conversation at the table at a birthday party. There are pictures. Someday, maybe I’ll even achieve the ultimate human aspiration and learn to fall asleep standing up. If horses can do it, so can we. At least then I wouldn’t have to worry about wrecking my entire body by sleeping on a mattress that wasn’t exactly the perfect level of firmness.
You give up on looking cool.
At first, you want to appear with it and hip. Then, you just don’t want to stand out as being horribly out of fashion. Finally, you don’t care what people think because you know they’re probably not thinking about you at all. That’s when you become unstoppable. I’m not quite there. I’m still at the stage where people sometimes look at me, but in the same way they gawk at a car crash as they slowly drive by.
You spend more time talking about the past than the future.
New plans are great, but nostalgia is better. Doing new things costs money, but reliving old memories is free. When I get together with my dwindling group of real life friends, we seldom have new adventures. Instead, we talk about how great it was when we used to go out and do fun things. Then we go back to our own homes and go to bed early. At this age, even conversations about fun are exhausting.
You realize all of your heroes are younger than you.
Lola’s favorite thing to do while watching movies, besides pointing out that every actor and actress ever was also in ER, is to ask how old I think the people on the screen really are. It’s the only way she can stay awake for an entire movie. She’s more of a dad than I’ll ever be. Her age quizzes were fun back when all the people in our favorite shows and movies were older than us, but now, everyone famous is younger than us, and everyone older than us is dead. I will no longer be visiting IMDB. Things get even worse when we compare ourselves to sports stars. Kids in their mid-twenties are aged veterans and quarterbacks in their early thirties are senior citizens one false step away from breaking a hip. Not-so-fun fact: I’m the same age as Lebron James. He’s a four time NBA champion playing in his nineteenth season of professional basketball. I recently discovered a better way to open those plastic produce bags at the grocery store. We’ve both had our moments.
You tell those kids to get off your lawn.
This is a meme, but it’s also a real thing people say, apparently. There’s nothing better than the laughter of children, unless that laughter comes at the expense of your sod. Do you know how much a bag of grass seed costs? I do because my heart is as dead and black as my yard. Go play tackle sword football quidditch somewhere else. Childhood games don’t have to make sense. They’re not fun because they have consistent rules; they’re fun because they ruin the landscaping. The only reason I haven’t kicked any kids off my grass yet is because I don’t have any grass left. My pigs killed it all. They’re the only things keeping me young.
You realize that legacy means nothing.
Remember Charlemagne? Chances are you don’t, but he was king of the Franks and the first Holy Roman Emperor. At his peak, he was the Lebron James of his day, known and feared by all. (If you don’t think Lebron James should be feared, watch the new Space Jam. You’ll have nightmares for weeks.) What good did Charlemagne’s legacy do for him? Unless you double majored in history (English wasn’t the only useless thing I studied), you probably have no idea who he is. Out of the approximately 117 billion people who have ever lived, there are, like, eight historical figures everyone knows, and Charlemagne didn’t make the list. Even for the ones who people do remember, no one really knows them. What did it sound like when Shakespeare laughed or Napoleon hummed or Julius Caesar told a dad joke? Nobody knows, but for the record, I assume Shakespeare giggled like the Pillsbury Doughboy and no one can prove me wrong. Great deeds and stone monuments and dense plays inflicted on hapless high school students don’t make you immortal. Being remembered for what you did isn’t the same as being remembered for who you were. In the end, everyone will be forgotten. And that’s great news.
You don’t remember Charlemagne, but you probably remember that super embarrassing thing you did in fourth grade. Guess what: You’re the only one who does. You can let it go. If even the most famous and most powerful people ever to live get erased from our collective consciousness, you can cut yourself a little slack. Take a chance. Go on that trip. Start that business. Fall in love. Whether it goes right or catastrophically wrong, it will all be erased in a few generations anyway. People act like children are our legacy, but the truth is, a hundred years from now, we’ll all just be a random bullet point on somebody’s family tree. If you go back far enough, we’re all descended from some fish that crawled out of the primordial sea. Where’s its parade? Seriously, we should start one. I could use another day off work.
You’re officially old when you stop living like you’re afraid of making mistakes and start living for today. Even the youngest of us have a finite amount of time left. This advice is as much for me as for anybody else since I’m highly susceptible to delusions of grandeur. I keep thinking that if one of my books makes some list or if my newsletter passes some arbitrary metric, I’ll finally be a person who matters. But that’s shooting for the wrong goal. If you zoom out far enough, none of this stuff matters. Focus on what you like, and, more importantly, on who you love. My children aren’t my legacy, but they are my world. Here’s to teaching them to live their lives with the same reckless abandon that I’ve accidentally lived mine.
Now go out there and make some mistakes. None of us are getting any younger.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. A big thanks to my paid subscribers, who make all of my free and premium content possible. You guys have made the best mistake of all. Catch you next time.
James
Eight Signs You're Officially Old