I found myself time traveling back to my youth and comparing my attitude to that of the youth of today. Attitudes in the 40s and 50s were definitely different. There was still a modicum of respect for those of advanced numbers. I revered my grandparents as I watched them age. They died earlier than grandparents of today, the product of decades of hardscrabble living in rural, windy southeast Wyoming.

But we loved ’em and cared for them in their decline. No warehousing. Aging and death in place.

Will we return to that reverence for the elderly? Let’s not hold our collective breaths.

Can we blame them?

I guess it’s just one more demonstration of a naive attitude from our ill-and TikTok-informed youth. But, can we really blame our media-infected youngsters for viewing “old” as bad when the vast majority of media portray “people of advanced age” as irrelevant, slow, useless, unattractive, etc.?

In his recent book, “What Retirees Want”, Dr. Ken Dychtwald references a 2019 AARP study of the online media image portrayals of people age 50 and up. That age cohort represent 46% of the population but only 15% of the people pictured. The study found that older adults are seven times as likely to be portrayed negatively as younger ones, and the portrayals are heavily stereotyped.

Dychtwald further points out that the average age of advertising agency employees is 34 and they are openly transfixed on their own age cohort.

Since there may be a prevailing tendency to not think on their own amongst the younger, maybe we can’t blame them for this attitude and bias?

It wasn’t always like this. Old used to be “in”, even here in the U.S. The signers of the U.S. Constitution, although relatively young, tried to look older (white wigs) because age was venerated. Older meant wiser and the younger looked to this wisdom for advice and direction.

Then, as we approached the 20th century, it all got turned upside down as we moved into and through the industrial revolution. Sage wisdom began to be replaced with an obsession with youth.

Portals galore.

In the 19th century, we essentially had two age classifications – child and adult. Today, with the help of social scientists and creative and opportunistic marketing experts, we have at least seven age portals: newborn, infancy, childhood, adolescent, young adult, middle age, and old age – each creating its own opportunity for marketing and profit.

Do you notice the 6:1 ratio there? Old age almost seems to be an afterthought. The status and privilege enjoyed by older society members eroded and the old represented a burden on society, an obstacle to progress.

I remember someone saying: “Youth is wonderful. It’s too bad it’s wasted on the young.” Our global obsession with youth is wrongheaded and ignorant and blinds us to the real world of what it’s like and what it means to grow old.

Be the example.

While it certainly is not true for everyone as they age, the vast majority of those 50+ enter their later years in great shape mentally and emotionally despite the tide of ageism and youth-orientation that older people swim against.

What our naive youth don’t understand – and most likely will never be willing to accept – is that they are headed to an abyss of emotional and psychological instability that, on average, bottoms out in early middle-age i.e. 47–50.

Research shows that, on average, it gets better from there and reaches a peak of happiness and overall well-being in the late 60s on through into the 80s.

What? The experience of “fun” dips in mid-life and then rises to a peak in the retirement years? Yep! Share that with the next irreverent, arrogant, whipper-snapper millennial that dishonors your modern elder status.

Here’s what “fun” looks like at various life stages, according to an AgeWave/Merrill Lynch study entitled “Leisure in Retirement: Beyond the Bucket List”

Age Happiness/Fun Level (on 1-10 scale)

25 – 6.4

35 – 6.0

45 – 6.0

55 – 6.4

65 – 7.3

75 – 7.1

That same study revealed that most retirees are turning out to be living their best years with their contentment and relaxation in the 70+ percentile and anxiety in the under-20 percentile while 25-35-year-olds are in the 30-50 percentile in all three categories.

So, on average Mr./Ms. Irreverant Youngster, your worst years are looking you in the face while you buy into the myths of aging and deploy your abject ageism. Meanwhile, we slow, stooped, senile, slobbering, senior citizens control 76% of the wealth in the U.S. and, frankly, are doing just fine, thank you.

We are now “modern elders”, not senior citizens. We are living longer and healthier, we are highly active, and are the biggest givers of our wealth and our time for other than self-aggrandizement. We have finely-tuned “bullshit meters” based on life’s experiences and our acquired wisdom.

Yet, we are patient with youthful insolence knowing that age has a way of bringing things into proper focus.

Photo by Atharva Tulsi on Unsplash

“Just For Today”

That’s a sign that you’ll likely find hanging somewhere in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting room.

I know – I’ve been in a few of those rooms and seen the signs or heard the words. Not as an addict, but as an observer and a presence in support of a loved one deep in the clutches of alcohol.

The phrase won’t hold much sway or meaning for the sober, man/woman on the street.

If alcohol or drugs own you, it means the world – a life-or-death mantra.

It’s a mantra that saved my loved one and sustains him today.

It saved Steve Chandler – thankfully!

Steve who?

Around 9 years ago, I stumbled across a life/business coach and author named Steve Chandler. It was a time when I was succeeding at the crazy, misguided goal of reading 6-8 books a month. It was also a time when my loved one was in the depths of his struggle.

Steve’s crisp, no-holds-barred writing style – and his personal story – gripped me and I plowed through at least a dozen of his books that year, including “Prosperous Coach”, considered to be the seminal book in the field of executive coaching.

I’m replowing. I’m committing to re-reading all the Chandler books on my shelf and in my Kindle in 2023.

I need to do that because the story is so powerful and the life-changing advice that good.

And, because I need that constant reminder that “just for today” is the best of that advice.

Chandler is an alcoholic.

My loved one is an alcoholic.

If you’ve been in or on the fringes of that world you know that recovery never stops. There are no “recovered” alcoholics.

It’s one day at a time – just for today. It’s what saves the alcoholic’s life.

But it’s a thin edge.

That’s what makes Chandler’s story so compelling. His emergence from alcoholism while raising four children as a single dad and rising to the pinnacle of the coaching profession is inspiring.

It’s why I’m thankful for “just for today” as my loved one lives by it and is recovering a lost decade of his life and succeeding beyond his, and my, expectations in business and life.

The hypnosis of linear time

I work hard at avoiding “time travel” and encourage others to avoid it as well – mentally traveling into the regrets and guilt that exist in the past and the fear that is the main resident of the future.  That’s a central message in Chandler’s writing.

He writes about the impact of this sign in his book “Wealth Warrior: The Personal Prosperity Revolution.”

“That sign never left me. I later built my whole time warrior training and coaching around that sign. It’s the most counterintuitive sign ever put up in any room anywhere. Why? Because it eliminates the future. In fact, it eliminates the hypnosis of linear time altogether, and linear thinking as well (always, in the past, a dreary cocktail mix of paranoia and regret). So, the “Just For Today” sign in the meeting hall gave me my first taste of freedom and my first flirtation with this wonderful thing I call the “higher self.”

Chandler goes further and references the great UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden:

“His method was to eliminate the future. He called it ‘Make each day your masterpiece.’ And when he got his whole team to devote all their skills and attention to today’s Wednesday afternoon practice (instead of the upcoming ‘big game), they became the Zen Masters of college basketball. Linear thinkers could not beat them. Because Wooden’s boys were always in the moment they were in.”

Would we not all be better served if we remembered this? “Give us this day our daily bread.”

There is no reference to the future in this good phrase.

Photo by Clint Patterson on Unsplash

Thanks for being a reader and for all your feedback. I appreciate you and hope 2023 is your best. I’m gonna make it my best. So I’m taking some time away from Make Aging Work for a few weeks to refresh and rejuvenate and let that fatty acid clump between my temples settle down and defrag (remember that word?)

See you back here on January 9th.

“The secret to living well and longer is: eat half, walk double, laugh triple, love without measure” Tibetan proverb

A member of a golf foursome I found myself in recently asked me on the third tee box how old I was. I don’t recall what spawned the question – perhaps the dismal state of my golf game as demonstrated on the first two holes.

I gave him my standard answer to the question:

“I’m on my next-to-last mattress.”

His was a predictable response – raised eyebrow, cocked head, and a chuckle once the thought got processed.

I use this response to the question less for an attempt to be clever but more to be true to a disdain for the automatic slot that a person’s version of age is likely to place me when they hear the number.

My age doesn’t define me.

If pressed, I’ll reveal the number, but prefer to let that thought lie and simmer.

Somedays I regret knowing my birthdate.

Black baseball legend Satchel Paige is often credited with saying: “How old would you be if you didn’t how old you were?”

That question came to life when I read a guest post on Chip Conley’s “Wisdom Well” daily blog written by Mhaire, (read the article here) a fraternal twin who, with her brother, was surrendered to an orphanage at a toddler age with no paperwork. They were tall for their age, leaving it anyone’s guess as to their age. Their progression through orphanages, a “rotating roster of caretakers”, and eventual connection with relatives carried with it an obligatory, but fabricated, birth certificate that was a decade or more wrong.

It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it, what that would be like for us with our fetish for numbers, categorization, and life portals.

I’m changing it up.

After reading Mhaire’s post, I may move my response from “clever” to “weird, strange, esoteric” and further confirm the suspicion that I was dropped on my head as a child.

Ask me how old I am today, and I’m gonna say:

“I am today.”

OK, maybe not. I’m already too good at finding ways to dissolve relationships. Maybe the mattress gig is adequate for now.

But, I’m guessing you see my point. If not, let Mhaire help make it for me with these excerpts from her post (the bolding is mine):

“The point is that other people’s versions of age do not matter. And I am not the only person in the world who does not know their birthday. Many people don’t. Especially those of us from orphanages, or who have been through wars as children, those who lost their parents, or even cultures who identify age differently than the Gregorian calendar.

In American society, age seems to be something to negotiate (age gracefully) or commodify (buy this to fight aging), or to use as a weapon (you are older than me). We have a whole body of writings and research to argue against the idea of an elder as a bad thing (which frankly I agree with whole heartedly.  Elders are to be celebrated, regardless of chronology). 

Others place their definitions of where I am in their version of age to help them understand where I might be. Living in the present is what I do, because age is the thing that defines the future and the past, yet it doesn’t define me. There has never been a way to do so. Not because I don’t let it, but because it never has.

I suspect I am better off.”

Time travel sucks!

Old Dale got it – time travel does suck.

I’ve written a lot about the dangers of mental “time travel”  i.e. back into the regrets of the past and the fears of the future versus the life-enhancing qualities of being able to live in the present moment.

I wonder if not knowing my birthdate would make the avoidance of time travel easier. It seemed to help Mhaire.

I’m getting better at staying encapsulated in today. But, even with the realization that today is all that I have, it’s still difficult to avoid that time-travel track and stay in line with my life purpose.

One thing is certain. If I’m preoccupied with my number and what my culture says it means, I’m gonna be sucked back into the past or shot forward into the future where fear remains the main resident.

Author and podcaster, James Altucher, puts it this way:

“Regret steals joy from the past, anxiety steals opportunity from the future. Both steal energy from the present. Anxiety is the opposite of self-care.”

It’s all in the interest of protecting my self-care.