Unconfirmed Reports

Since I moved to England, I have worried quite a lot about growing old. Really, there’s not that much difference between me and all the suckers who get roped in by the ads for “Oil of Olay” (and why did they stop calling it “Oil of Ulan”, anyway?) Except I’m not trying to buy my way out of the problem.

The causes are clear enough: starting a full-time office job, and being in a steady, apparently long-term relationship; both these things seem to be sure symptoms of the settled, established life - becoming an “adult” in the most conventional sense. These are things I am highly suspicious of… things that for have for me the scent of stagnation, decay, growing old before your time.

I think that when you settle down to a life of comfort on a well-trodden path, then you have become not just an “adult”, but you have become old. I meet a lot of people who are already quite old, in their 30s or even their 20s. I have met a lot of them especially since I came to England to work full-time and save money. Being around them makes me feel old; I have sometimes worried that their oldness will rub off.

What exactly is involved in a “conventional”, “established” life? Crucially, people lose the ability to change: lose their flexibility, becoming overly attached to routine, and to things being as they “have always been”. People’s personalities calcifying, their flaws and limitations becoming permanent. Perhaps worse than anything, people can lose the ability to understand new things. And when a person cannot absorb and integrate new concepts, not more than superficially, then from that point onwards they being moving away from the present, and into the past. Moving towards death.

Lately, I’ve been less worried about all this. I’m now trying to be alert, not alarmed. My life is moving through certain frameworks, and though these are recognisable as social conventions (getting a “real job”, moving in with a partner and staying with that one partner), that of course doesn’t invalidate them. To avoid things simply because they are conventional is the opposite of ageing - it is adolescent. It’s like when I was seventeen, and for a while I refused to answer the question “How are you?”, because I considered it to be an empty convention. It may be one of the most well-worn conventions in our world, but that doesn’t mean it has to be empty.

I will die some day, and as I move towards that point my world will surely get smaller. But that’s years away, and in the time in between, I must be sure that the frames of social convention and ideological norms are just frames that I move through, scenes in an engaging, unpredictable film.

Alert, not alarmed; the person who is me keeps changing and progressing, and can still do things that don’t figure in any kind of predetermined plan. Maybe this is true of everyone, in some sense - even the office worker, the accountant, the stable, respectable family man. But there’s a question of degree here, and I still want to think big. And with respect to growing old, I think that vigilance is necessary.