Good afternoon, and welcome to my 19th annual April Fools observance. Wow, 19. Is it just me, or is this getting old? I worry that I’ll run out of steam or, even worse, run out of topics. I actually had a whole other topic set up for today, but my damn therapist ruined it by helping me find resolution and peace. Resolution and peace are great for mental health, but a mixed blessing when it comes to growth. When we’re at peace, there’s really no need to change anything; without agitation, why bother changing? Agitation, the struggle with the internal and external contradictions of life-- well, it’s the lifeblood of this sacred observance. What if I simply grow up, and find inner and outer peace? What if, truly self-actualized, there are no struggles left to take on, and therefore, no more April Fools? How awful!
But I shouldn’t get ahead-- for right now I can reassure myself that I will always have something to worry about.
So let’s get into it. Since it’s good practice to notify you how long I’ll be requesting your attention, you can expect the speech to be about 12 minutes from this point on.
My topic today is the folly of aging.
This topic feels particularly foolish, which delights me. For one, I’ve been corrected by the congregants of Beth El, and by every older member of my family, that I am not actually old. Since it’s all relative, especially with my family, it’s safe to say that they are both right and wrong. But I will no doubt sound foolish, explaining aging to the aged. I even expect that older versions of myself, the audience I will become in due time, will also see the foolishness in my words today.
Meanwhile, there are SO many tensions and paradoxes in aging, so let’s get into it!
First, when exactly are we old?
There’s no clear line here, which means it must happen gradually, and gradual changes are really confusing. The classic version of this is the sorites paradox, in which a pile of sand has one grain removed at a time… and at some point it’s no longer a pile. But when? As the sand drips through my hourglass, at what point am I old? We could say “after the halfway point” but of course there’s no knowing when it was, is, or will be.
Even when someone draws that line, they inevitably move the goalposts. I used to be a member of the Moishe Kavod House, a community for young adults in their 20s and 30s. Now at Beth El, I’m told by the head of a certain club that they want to recruit younger members, “Y’know, in their 40s and 50s.” So that’s no help.
Perhaps certain milestones make us old? Moving out, work, rent, chores, marriage… heartburn? I used to say “You’re a kid until you have a kid,” a principle which renders me still a kid. Naomi often will exclaim “I’m an adult!” as a way of motivating herself, but I’m just not sure if that’s the kind of exclamation real adults make. Number of years, number of advanced milestones, these all could be indicators of aging; but I suppose the confusion isn’t just between whether we’re old or not, but also the fact that aging and maturing may or may not show up together.
And whether we’ve aged, whether we’ve matured, seems not to count for much, since there are so many adults who will still say about themselves “ I can’t believe I’m (x) years old-- I don’t feel that old…!” I have a hard time relating to this sentiment-- for one, go spend time with someone of the age you feel like, and you’ll quickly realize your mistake. If you still feel like a college student, go hang out with one. Of course you don’t feel your age-- you only just got to this age, you don’t know what it really feels like. True awareness of what 20 felt like only came to me when I was turning 30.
So, when are we old? I have no clue. Maybe I’ll get it when I’m older.
Second, is it good or bad to be old?
One would think that an unequivocal “Yes!” is the only answer here. Being old means you survived to old age. Being old, when done right, should come with some useful wisdom; I hope that, the longer I live, the better I get at living. If Cat Stevens can fault us for being young, then there must be some kind of improvement in store when getting old, right?
And yet, in many places I turn, my elders are discouraging aging. The anti-endorsements pile-up-- Pete Townsend hoped he’d die before he got old; in the Bible, Kohelet tells us it only gets worse as we age; my great-uncle would often say he needed to go to the store to buy a new pair of legs; Naomi’s own grandfather discouraged aging (as well as marriage and children). Kurt Cobain, a musician known for not getting old, let us know that his pay-off for teenage angst was both old age and boredom.
And I said earlier that it would seem that old age comes with wisdom, but we can be skeptical about that as well. Abraham Simpson used to be with it, but then they changed what “it” was. Seymour Skinner may think “it’s the kids who are wrong,” but we know that he’s the one truly out of touch. Jack Weinberg, the man who said “Never trust anyone over 30,” turns 84 this year-- if he were to say that phrase today, would we believe him?
Economist Daniel Kahneman, of blessed memory, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, cites two studies as evidence that hindsight is not a privileged perspective but merely a different one. In these studies, one involving ice-cold water, the other involving colonoscopies (Thank goodness these aren’t the same study, am I right??), it’s clear that we assess our experiences differently in-the-moment vs in-retrospect, and each vantage point has advantages and disadvantages. 40 year old Matt knows something about life that 30 year old Matt didn’t; but the opposite is also true.
Finally, let’s talk about the tensions we encounter in physical aging.
For those who grow up able bodied, able-bodiedness can still be a temporary state. There’s so much we simply don’t know about the future of our own bodies, our health, and our longevity. That uncertainty adds so much to the confusion of facing aging-- that it can involve major physical changes, major injuries and/or even illnesses… but it might not. I think of my grandfather, who played tennis into his 80s (and my uncle, 80, who still does), and I think of other relatives whose lives were cut short.
Before I continue, a quick note about ableism -- as a generally able-bodied person my whole life, my thoughts and feelings about loss of ability are, well, rife with ableism. It’s baked into my experience and sense of self, and something I’ll need to contend with personally. For now I’ll name that, in a society built on a collective ethics of care (ala Joan Tronto), our identities would be connected to interdependence rather than independence, and a lot of my concerns about ability here would simply be irrelevant.
I see two major challenges regarding the physical changes that might come with aging. The first is how those changes can massively challenge one’s identity. Whether I think about it or not, most of my identity is bound up with my sense of independence. I need a whole bundle of abilities to keep my current active lifestyle. Ditto any of my hobbies and chores-- with a variety of conditions, I could no longer take for granted walking, writing, cooking, hula hooping, or even reading.
If I am too identified with these activities and the abilities they depend on, then function loss will come with a crisis of identity. If this happens, then an existential task arises-- to redefine myself within these new constraints. A daunting task, but doable, I hope. I assume that the biggest hurdle would be making peace with the need to redefine myself at all. I hope I can remember this-- that even if my current self remains pretty stable for a few decades, I shouldn’t expect this stability forever. I have to plan to continue to grow, plan for my identity to keep changing, even if I don’t know when, why, or how it will happen.
The second major challenge is how physical changes may simply get in the way of feeling pleasure and avoiding pain. This challenge is way harder to strategize around. Honestly, when I think of physical pain, and how any persisting amount of it can ruin my mood and temperament, I’m not sure what I’ll do… besides drugs. Seriously, that’s as far as I’ve thought on this topic. Not that she was doing it out of physical pain, but my grandma’s evening cocktail hour makes more and more sense as I grow up. When I imagine life with chronic pain, I can only think of doctors’ advice, specifically Dr. Hibbert’s preferred tonic prescription, and Dr. Dre’s recommendation regarding daily self-medicating.
This is getting long; it’s time to draw some conclusions.
So-- do I recommend aging? I’ll make the obvious point first-- that I’m recommending maturity, with or without aging, but ideally with it. Aging without maturing is all-too-common-- I recognized this possibility in the cafeteria in college, noticing that some bananas went straight from green to brown; as with some fruit, so with some people-- we can age without maturing. And so it’s on us to develop, discover, and collect as much wisdom as possible as we age.
But what kind of wisdom? The foolish kind, of course! This is the meaning of the sopho-more, literally the wise fool-- one who has learned enough to know how much they haven’t learned yet. We have to be wary of the end-of-history illusion, the notion that, at this moment, we’ve already done all the significant maturing and learning we will ever do. We seem to keep falling into the same trap, assuming that “when I grow up” is already here, rather than always ahead of us.
Better that we should expect the unexpected, to know that our self-knowledge may require rupture and repair when we encounter some new emergency in life. With each new emergency, we are challenged to start somewhat fresh, to become young again in order to learn and re-learn who we are. That’s the final paradox, that to age well will require returning to a beginner's mind, that we must renew ourselves as in days of old, that we may have been older then, but we’re younger than that now.
And we should remain young even as we get old! I need to stay playful to survive and thrive. Call it being “young at heart,” if you like that expression. Personally I like the expression “children of all ages,” as in “Ladies and Gentlemen, children of all ages.” We can age, but we can strive to stay playful, romantic, adventurous and so on-- all the things we usually associate with youth. Aging doesn’t have to mean losing past selves, but rather collecting them, like a tree collects its rings.
Let’s age but make sure that we mature. Let’s age but make sure that we remain playful. No one should take themselves so seriously; with many years ahead to fall in line, why would you wish that on me?
Ok, now an actual conclusion.
There’s a lot more to this topic that I left out, both knowingly and ignorantly. Maybe I’ll cover the topic again in 10 years (I should be so lucky). I mean, I wrote this whole speech without referencing death! A speech about aging… and I don’t mention death(?!)-- what kind of foolishness is this? Though to be honest, I should save that whole thing for a “folly of death” speech someday, should I be so lucky.
Well, from age 40, up to 120, and only with good health, for me and also for you. Thanks for listening.
