If not now, when?

Contemplating an uncertain future

"Maiden, Mother, Crone" by Tamara Adams

A recent article about age perception, and an essay by an old friend recounting her decision not to have children, caused my brain to produce a neural cocktail of hard to dismiss thoughts on old age and identity. Hard because I don’t often push myself to think back on to the time I first recognized my inner-narrator telling me who I was, beyond how my family identified me. Lately it’s difficult to remember when what I did for a living wasn’t my automatic response to the question of what I wanted to become in the first place. Both authors reflect on the way time shifts with the perspective of age, and cover an emotional ground in a way that feels familiar if you’ve ever wanted to change, or gracefully accept, how you see yourself.

“We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.”― T.S. Eliot

Despite all the therapy, I love myself only a few brief moments out of every day. I doubt at this point that pattern will ever change. For the rest of the time spent reflecting on feelings, I’m either angry at the anonymous masses over the state of the world, or reminded beyond my ego, what a privilege life is regardless of how hard it is to stay motivated, or how differently I feel now about how I messed up the opportunities of my past.

When the winter sun spills across my table and illuminates the sparkling dust in the air, I still retain the capacity to pause and admire the beauty of the temporary. My life included. I recognize that although there is still “life-work” to be done, suspended in the beam of light remains both time and opportunity for different choices. This thought is punctuated with a sense of the future. Perhaps, someday…I will evolve.

The article, titled The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are, mentions a “vigor-­maturity index” where if you are over 40 you always see yourself as, on average, 20% younger than you are chronologically. It is a recognizable revelation about a very common disconnect between where we always thought we would be, and where we find ourselves. It’s the reason the TikTok teen filter is making all the olds cry. It’s also one of the few articles I’ve read on aging that addresses the feeling I’ve held since I was small: that I was born an old soul with a long shadow and a suspicion that somehow I inherited a sense of a past before I made one of my own. Biologically the term is generational trauma. Emotionally it made me more sensitive to life and death than I ever wanted to be.

My parents were at least a decade older than the parents of any of my peers, and I subconsciously inherited their world war angst and depression scarcity world views. In this environment a very common adult compliment was how mature and “grown-up” the children behaved. While my parents reinforced this grow up fast mentality, the media simultaneously pushed a view of age that destroyed and devalued all the elders around me, especially the women. I never once heard my mother reveal her true age. I used to see this as dishonest, but I was a just a precocious kid. I understood nothing about the deeper meaning behind most things.

Being rewarded for adulting skills only lasts under the guise of youth. You won’t find adults being applauded for their maturity. In fact ridicule is in store for anyone over 50 behaving like a teenager. Yet the article posits a paradox, “If you mentally view yourself as younger—if you believe you have a few pivots left—you still see yourself as useful.” It’s the constant pivoting of youth, the persistent role changing and evolution of personality that lasts only as long as one can maintain the ability, or are provided the opportunity, to pivot.

The tech industry then becomes a perfect place for the forever-young to hide since it’s easier on the skin and kinder to the joints than manual labor. What no one mentions is that even if the tools improve every 18 months, the ability to reinvent yourself within this community is finite. You might not internally feel the age you’re at now, but there is no doubt chronological age will dictate what avatars are left for you. Ultimately, as the stoic Epictetus said, we all become "A wisp of soul bearing about a corpse." But while we might agree the soul is the most valuable part of a human, that is small comfort to anyone not currently on their deathbed still asking themselves what they want to be when they grow up. 

The essay, Loose Ends, treats postponement and delay (or the neverending finality of our choices) as if they were old friends and not pivots at all. “We accrue new selves but keep glancing backward at who we once were and notice those earlier selves continuing to interact with our new or revised selves.” When the remembered past no longer supports our future selves, or where the present self has tired and overwhelmed by the melancholy of the backwards glance, is where I currently find myself. It has nothing to do with a number and everything to do with age.

While in my 30s my mother’s retort to nearly every argument between us was that if she were given the choice to repeat her life she would never have had children. This is not a fond memory, but I do find it amusing that I am living her desired alternate universe. Until I’m really not. Despite having children as a handicap, her profession, cost accounting, was as reliable, constant, and comforting as pure mathematics could make it. She was so good at it her company even “allowed” her to work into her late 60s to ensure a comfortable retirement. In my universe I struggle to move forward even without children. In fact, my identity feels as if it is collapsing in real time with no retirement in sight. When the New Yorker publishes “The End of the English Major” you know there are some seismic cultural shifts at play that have devalued the humanities with more than a little scorn. 

The phenomenon that “everything is always five to ten years away” made work-life in the tech industry an unstable vortex of early adoption and occassional success for everyone involved. It required career flexibility and stick-to-it grit. I still witness how the elusive carrot of professional prestige propels those who are constantly vigilant, glued to the machine, and dedicated to doing, producing, and achieving KPIs. It would be a weird job description that mentions loving awareness, supportive friendships, and self acceptance anyway. But at least at one point it was reasonable for a humanities nerd to summon favorable circumstances with a living wage. I took the ticket, I enjoyed the ride, but I am no longer confident the same carrots are working for me. Is that a circumstance of age, or ability? I’m not sure.

Looking back, my choices feel less like loose ends, and more like a failure of imagination. Naturally this is horrifying to someone with such a rich fantasy life. After all, a writer’s profession involves challenging world-views and crafting astute observations. It’s thrilling when writing about far flung possibilities, and a difficult mess when that same sunny futurism reaches the brick wall awareness of your own profession’s end times. Sometimes pivots happen to us when we are blind to the movement of the stars.

Do we all reliably fail to visualize how our final 20 years (or so) will unfold beyond the smiling gray-haired dreamscape pitched to us by younger marketing professionals selling financial and medical plans? We habitually define the potential of our future as an extension of our former selves. It’s the same trap inherent in an algorithm that uses outdated inputs. We predict our savings account, our stuff, our titles and societal ranking will all help us to grow old gracefully. We want to believe we have timeless states of being, as in ‘I will always be a mother’, or ‘I will always love the opera’ when we know those claims are unreliable at best. Even if those statements were true as an actuarial exercise, at some point even those identities will no longer serve us, or be devalued or disappear beyond our control. How or towards what end will humans ultimately evolve if there is no societal value in growing old? 

Aging is a projection filled with inherited personal and social bias. Removing the stigma from it requires an understanding of cultural history and the recognition of the more modern unconscious patterns and neurotic tendencies we all share. Even if our awareness exists only in order to reject this bias, all people still need discriminating wisdom to navigate between past and present, this choice and that path. 

Learning to trust what our conscience tells us rather than what YouTube experts sell is easier to say than do. We all fear appearing as the crone of our imaginations. Distancing ourselves from that apparition is a societal compulsion that powers the health, beauty, and fashion industries. I don’t even know what an enlightened path to elderhood looks like since there aren’t many ordinary role models who aren’t already celebrities that I can recall. I only hope the path includes a checkpoint to help me identify when enough (food or money or even time) is truly enough. 

Without guide-posts or rights of passage in these woods, my personal vision of the future is still clouded by desire. I sense the shift in my age constantly pushes my soul towards an introspective space, one that rejects the most popular propaganda necessary for a happy future. For instance, my intuition and lived experience rejects narratives that claim only children (or grandchildren) are a reliable indicator of an individual’s worth; or stories that insist our first-world standard of living must expand indefinitely at the expense of our future; and I continue to question the fear-driven impulse that whispers insurance companies are our only protection against disaster and crises. Regardless of these intuitions, I still know nothing about the deeper meaning and purpose of age.

Besides Ram Daas exhorting those in the last phase of life to remain calm and present, or Mary Oliver reminding us how to lead a good life, there is no ritual to guide anyone through the twilight between 60 and the end of life. Like Buddha under the bo tree, perhaps someday the greatest destiny for humanity will not involve technology at all. It will be our unique human ability to evolve into our own instruments of insight. Ageless and patient, inviting meaningful epiphanies (instead of outcomes) for ourselves and others.

The futurist Jamais Cascio once wrote, “The goal of any kind of foresight work, any kind of scenarios or futures work, is to provoke you into looking differently at the world. The term that I like to use [is] epiphany engines. They are meant to trigger in you, be for you the catalyst for an entirely new view of the world.” The perspective and wisdom of age supported by a soulful community that recognizes how temporary our existance truly is, could be just what’s required to turn the crone into a wise old woman at last. There is still time.