Getting Old Is Not That Bad and Fearing It is Dumb

And being young is way less fun than it should be

Here’s a lie AI told me: it said that it was a “fascinating paradox” that young people today are more terrified than they’ve ever been of aging, even though old people are the happiest people on earth, and young people more unhappy than they’ve ever been.

There’s no paradox there. Everyone is aging every day. If one’s worldview is that their future is terrifying and future selves are embarrassing, why wouldn’t they be miserable? Hating on your future self seems pretty dumb to me. Age-phobia is something for third-party villains with a profit motive and self interest to try to convince you into — it is never in one's own interest to believe this hype.

So stop it.

I know, you’ve been subject to a steady stream of propaganda your whole life, all blaring the same message: being young, strong, and sexy with firm skin and all your mistakes ahead of you is the most enjoyable possible (and only non-debasing) state of being. You have one shot at glory and adventure, and after that, life is just one long series of humiliations as you get grosser and weaker and more confused and embarrassing every day and then you die.

Believing this shit is a great way to ruin your own life and make people who look down on you a lot of money.

So if you’re young: I’m here to tell you that you’re wasting your time being terrified of getting old. You can just as easily decide that you will become cooler and more awesome with every decade, and it won’t make a lick of difference, other than making you a much more gracious and chill person with a more enjoyable life.

And if you’re no longer young, and embarrassed about it, I’m here to shame you out of your pathetic attitude and convince you to join me on the thoroughly righteous and much more fun campaign of riding the high on the hog of middle-aged pride.

And if you’re REALLY old, well, you’re already the kings and queens, so you don’t really need any help (though if you have a bad attitude about being royalty, you should probably adjust that while there’s still time).

And come on, fear of aging is especially perverse for Substackers. Most of you madly in love with your own intellects — which is perfectly fine! -- there are some damn fine brains here. But how are you going to celebrate the life of the mind while also being afraid of age, which mostly just takes its toll on your body?

I mean, what are you, a slow-witted dunce who no one will have use for, once you’re no longer strong enough to dig a ditch in concrete? I thought you were smart, not a mental invalid who’s dependent on his six-pack abs. And what on earth is the point of being a know-it-all if you’re just going to act as if you’re an empty-headed bimbo who actually will be in trouble once her body no longer defies gravity?

By adopting the fears of the dunderheaded, you’re just willfully refusing to accept what is blatantly obvious: your lot in life as a smarty-pants is for it to just keep getting better. You’re one of the lucky ones. So you better start wearing the mantle of that privilege with some goddamn dignity and gratitude for your good fortune.

Here’s the deal: my life was better on every possible measure at age 42 than it was at age 24 – and that is perfectly normal and how it should be.

And I fully expect that if I am lucky enough to live to 84, I will have ascended to such a state of light-hearted yet curmudgeonly wisdom that I’ll basically be a Queen Mab combined with Max Kanata combined with Larry David, and that’s going to be great fun. That’s not cope, these are facts. See, I already dress up like her sometimes, to pay my respects:

Here’s the thesis of my diatribe:

1. Being in your 20s is an almost universally stressful and anxious experience;

2. Life in your 30s and 40s is way better;

3. People in their 60s and 70s are the happiest people on the planet;* and

4. Women have an easier time with aging than men — imagine that!

*Very Important Caveat: this is all IF you live if the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or western Europe. Results vary elsewhere and I won’t pretend to understand what goes on there – sorry.

Okay, let’s get down to it.

To the Young: Your 20s are the Worst

I suppose there are a handful of people who manage to not be completely poor in their 20s, and for them — well, who cares about them, they might as well be aliens. For the other 95% of us, having no money, skills, or standing stinks, and you’re not going to have any of that in your 20s.

This is made worse because: (A) every bit of media blasted in your face 24-7 is telling you that you should be living the most fabulous, exciting, adventuresome and sexy time ever, thus making you feel like an enormous loser when your life is not at all like that, and (B) you haven’t yet built up any callouses against disappointment, nor proven to yourself that even when bad things happen, you’ll get over them.

You know how New Year’s Eve is always built up as if it should be some wild and crazy #bestnightever, and then in reality it always sucks and you either spend the coldest night of the year freezing your ass off trying to find the cool party or just giving up and staying home? Your 20s is like one big decade-long New Year’s Eve – the gulf between expectations set by media and the reality on the ground are at their absolute widest.

I think perhaps once upon a time, sometime last century, people had much lower expectations and assumed that of course they’d be poor in their 20s. So they were all in the same boat together and probably had a much better time. Nowadays, people actually expect their 20s to be their best decade, and as we know, happiness = expectations minus reality.

What you put in your brain is not only as important as what you put in your body, it is far more important. And what is being put in young people’s brains is constant images of gorgeous people with amazing friends going on vacations, attending fabulous social events, hooking up with hotties, visiting incredible sites, and generally having the time of their life while wearing cooler outfits in better bodies with more friends. Great. What a wonderful way to make yourself feel like a gigantic loser and/or deprived victim in comparison.

I do think older people have very little sympathy for this. I do have sympathy for it. Why wouldn’t your brain start flashing panic at you when everything you see shows you something better than you got? That’s what your brain is DESIGNED to do, to motivate you to do something and make things right. But that’s not possible if everything you're seeing is fantasy and bullshit and propaganda.

If you find yourself spending a significant amount of time experiencing envy or fantasizing about a life that is totally unrealistic — and I truly believe this is now the default emotional atmosphere of the young western mind — you need to go cold turkey. I’m sorry but it’s true. Quit scrolling, only train your eyeballs at real life, and you will feel like a totally different person within a month or two. I had to do this myself when I was 24 (for an entire year, because I was bad gone), and honestly it turned my entire life around.

There’s also an enormous element of anxiety when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing with your life and trying to establish yourself. Inevitably you end up constantly comparing yourself to everyone else, to see if you’re falling behind. You often have no idea what your life will remotely look like in even one year, let alone 5 or 10. Yes, there’s a sense of possibility and excitement that goes along with that, but mostly it’s just stressful and a lot of wondering if you’re going to end up homeless or skulking back to live with your parents. There’s probably not much you can do about this aspect, as it’s inherent to being a new, non-established adult, but you can at least stop torturing yourself with the evil comparison machine.

As for the wild times and partying that’s supposed to be going on, well, I did have some fun nights back then, but I kind of barely remember them. And anyway, most people in their 20s really aren’t having that much of a wild time. Instead, they’re sitting in their crappy apartment eating ramen noodles and wondering if they’ll ever have enough money to do anything fun before they’re too old and ugly to enjoy it.

And on that point: the whole reason being young is supposed to be the best is because that’s when you’re gorgeous. Except most young people are not in fact gorgeous, and once again the chasm will never be wider between the ideals flaunted in your face and your reality. If you look completely mediocre when you’re 50, it’s fine. In fact, you may feel pretty damn good about that! But when you’re young, you can legitimately be compared to the most beautiful people on a whole planet of almost 8 billion people, and nowadays they’re not even real, they’re juiced up with filters or are just straight AI. This ends up with the extremely stupid situation where you may very well be at the height of your beauty, but you’ll probably feel worse about your appearance than any other time of your life. You’ll spend later years looking at photos of yourself and being amazed you were ever so gorgeous, while at the time you’re bothered by half an ounce of extra fat or a cowlick.

The bottom line is that I have never met EVEN ONE woman in real life who says that their 20s were better than their 30s, and only a handful of men who say that. Now I realize I’m about to get a bunch of comments by naysayers who claim their 20s were fantastic, and it’s true, some of them exist. But they’re rare. Usually they somehow managed to get a job they actually liked at that age, or sometimes they’re military guys who were having adventures that made them feel useful and important. But it’s vanishingly rare, especially for women. Which of course men never believe because THEY think women are best in their 20s (or teens), and they sometimes have trouble with the subject/object distinction.

But here’s a funny thing: the only adults who think their 20s will be the best decade of their life are people in their 20s. At every other decade, the majority response from people is that their current decade will be their best. Even people in the 70s. So if most people who have actually lived through multiple decades do NOT think their 20s was the best, you should probably assume that’s true, and just do your best to enjoy them as much as you can, but also assume things just get better.

For the most part, older people’s laments about wasted youth have to do with not using their body to its full capacity when they were at their peak of health and energy (not for everyone but mostly): they wish they swam and laughed and danced and had sex and hugged and flirted and flaunted more. So probably you should try to do those things as much as possible.

Okay, if you’re not convinced, let me give you some stats.

Every Survey Shows That People Are Happier the Older They Get

Here are two charts that make this fairly stark, from Harvard Business Review, in a slide show called “Why Your Late Twenties Is the Worst Time of Your Life”:

Their explanation for the quarter-life crisis is that:

It feels horrible at the time, but research suggests that going through this crisis is extremely valuable as we age. Folks in their 40s and 50s have higher stress levels than their younger counterparts, but they don’t jump into crisis mode. Why? Because those coping mechanisms that they developed as young adults have continued to strengthen. The pains of being a 20-something may feel terrible when you’re in the middle of it, but it improves our lives in the future.

I don’t know if their explanation is correct, but this result is replicated in essentially every survey that’s ever been done. Like the gold-standard World Happiness Report, which looks at happiness in various demographics over time, in 143 countries.

Here are the 2023 happiness ranking among countries for people over age 60, which looks mostly like you’d expect, and the US is doing great. We rank in the top 10 among 143 countries for happy old people, that’s pretty good!

But now let’s look at the happiness ranking of countries for adults under 30:

And…the US has dropped over 50 points to number 62! Our under-30s are barely any happier than young people in Kazakhstan. That’s bad.

It doesn’t matter what study you look at, they all point to the same thing. At least in the US (and similar nations like Canada and Australia), young people are the least happy, and old people the most. Which I would say is very strong evidence that fear of aging is extremely dumb and kind of like walking around blaring an air horn in your own ears for no reason.

But wait, I know exactly what the old-hating Zoomers and Millennials are thinking right now! They’re thinking this is only because those evil, greedy, selfish Boomers have hoarded everything good for themselves and ruined everything for young people. It’s all their fault! Sorry, that’s wrong. (Seriously, you need to stop with the Boomer hate, resenting elderly people is both wicked and extremely grotesque).

It’s Not The Boomers Fault

Yes, Boomers are happier than Gen Z, that much is clear. But that’s not a generational effect you can blame on the Boomers, like you do everything. Because 20 years ago and 40 years ago and 60 years ago, the oldest people were also the happiest. This is a long-running trend and has nothing to do with Boomers. In fact, Boomers are slightly LESS happy than previous generations were when they got above 60.

So old people haven’t gotten any happier — they’ve always been happy. What has changed is that young people have become much more unhappy (again, this is mostly limited to the US/Canada/AU/NZ).

It used to be taken as a standard social science fact that life was U-shaped, for happiness. People started off happy at age 18, and then things slowly degraded til around 45 or 50 as the low point, and then trended back up til you got to old age when you were the happiest. This curve was taken to be a robust, well-studied, and cross-cultural curve that simply didn’t change much, and reflected the fact that life responsibilities are highest around mid-life, while both the young and old are comparatively footloose and fancy-free:

But this age curve has collapsed in the 21^st century. Nowadays, young people are the least happy, and things just get better and better the older you get, in a fairly straight shot. Here, take a look:

Those over age 75 are a full 30 percentage points happier than those who are 18-24!! Is that not incredible?! Considering that every cultural message is that youth is glorious and old people are disgusting miserable wrinkle-bags? How can reality be so very different from what is portrayed, or even common sense, when age DOES bring aches and pains and bad eyes and knees?

I’m guessing people will say it’s the phones.

It is, kind of. But phones were just one more step in a long progression of people experiencing live, color, video and photographic images of curated and idealized strangers, which began with the Boomers when half of Americans got color TV in 1972, and has gotten progressively and steadily worse the more fake, constant, and high salience and high emotion those images have become. The downward slide in happiness actually began around 2000, not after smart-phones. Virtually everyone has gotten less happy in the 21^st century, though some more than others.

It’s funny because people talk about the 90s as some golden era, and I was there and I don’t think we were all walking around bursting with joy all the time. They were good, they were fine. Mostly what we lacked then and everyone has now is existential unease. Material conditions are obviously so much better and living standards are so much higher. But also people now have dread, and clearly our brains are not equipped to know about what 8 billion other people are doing and thinking. So it’s funny, but most of the happiness research does in fact point to the late 90s as sort of the peak, and then everything goes downhill after 2000.

My own view is that absolutely everything about our society has become more competitive, cut-throat, and unequal in general, and the gulf between the haves and have-nots on any given metric has widened. EVERYONE has more negative emotions in the 2020s than they did in 2000, worldwide and across all demographics — that one’s not just the US. But the increase in negative emotions is actually not tied to how many positive emotions one feels, and for older people, those have not eroded nearly as much as they have for young people. It seems that in a world of constant social comparison, age is protective, which makes sense, because for the most part older people are no longer at a stage of life where they’re trying to establish themselves, find a mate, or prove they’re cool or hireable.

I also want to point out something else. At every age, men are happier than women. Up until around age 50, when it flips. How can this be?? Older women are no longer fertile, they’re disgusting hags who are supposed to be crying into their cats if they’re single, or slowly fading into some ambient background motherly mist, if they’re not. How is it that women become HAPPIER after middle age than men, who stay attractive and virile forever (lol)?

Well, I have some theories.

Why Would Men Have a Harder Time Accepting Aging?

First, men’s identity is way more bound up in social status based on dominance and strength and power. And not only that, but their social standing is fairly uniform among men and women, whereas women’s is not. Among women, age and maturity actually DO increase their standing, as do various other factors that don’t degrade much with age, such as social grace, affiliative support, being a norm-defender and taste-maker, pro-social achievements, doing good works, etc. Among men they mostly don’t give a crap about any of that and just assign women status based on being young and fuckable, none of which grants them any status with other women. Hence why we have extremely admired and high status women like Oprah, Jacinda Ardern, Caitlin Clark, and Michelle Obama, and for the most part men pay them no attention or actively find them puke-worthy.

But this means that as they age, women still have the respect and relationships of at least half of people. Whereas men kinda just straight up hate old people, I sometimes think. To hear them talk about it, anyway. The old ones only hold onto power but being the scariest asshole in the room and the young ones are always coming for them. If your whole thing is based on power and dominance, you are going to find aging to offer very little solace, and women are going to start finding you less attractive at precisely the same time that young guys are laughing at you and gunning to take you down.

Welp, sucks for them I guess. I mean, plenty of them are also not like that and they tend to have a lot more friends and a lot less mid-life crisis and really it seems entirely preferable all around, but you do you.

Another reason is that testosterone is basically a miracle drug that makes one feel powerful, confident, and energetic. Young men have tons of it, and I think it makes them feel like superheroes. I don’t think women ever feel that good, so aging isn’t as much of a step down, as far as how you feel on the inside. That’s speculation, but I can tell you that guys over 40 complain a LOT about their aches and pains. I don’t think they actually have more aches than women, I just think the step down from superhero to mere mortal feels worse in comparison.

Because let’s be clear, the thing that ACTUALLY sucks about aging is that your body starts to hurt. And you can’t see and you can’t hear and you have to stretch and get up slow in the morning just so you don’t throw your damn back out. That’s the truly bad part. Be thankful we have modern medicine to help with a lot of that. I’m practically blind at this point, if I lived through most of history I would have died from accidentally walking off a steep ledge, by now.

So why isn’t that as hard for women? Well I think mostly it’s because society (and dudes) go WAY overboard scaring the crap out of women basically starting at about age 12. So they EXPECT it to be way worse than it actually is, and then find out it’s really not that bad. That’s certainly true for me. Whereas men are convinced they’re going to peak physically at 45, so when that isn’t what happens, maybe it just comes as more of a shock. It may just be that women get all their worrying out of the way early, and by the time they’re actually old it’s smooth sailing.

I know I was never more petrified of aging than when I was 24, right on the cusp of my 25^th birthday and it hit me I would no longer be “officially” young - I freaked out. I’m ashamed to think of this now, but I was truly upset. This was shortly before I pulled my head out of my ass and put myself on a strict zero-media diet, and stopped being such a ninny (I’m serious, this was life-changing for me). So by the time I was 30, I was ready to celebrate, and quickly found that literally nothing changes and everyone treats you exactly the same as they did the day before.

And then just like the data shows, I’ve found myself just getting more and more obnoxiously confident and satisfied, the older I get.

Because the thing is, y’all exaggerate so bad. You way over-sell the horrors of aging to women, so once we actually get there, it’s not even close to as bad as we were warned and ends up actually being a RELIEF. Like, I swear one of the reasons we keep getting these distasteful memoirs by divorced 40-something women talking about their sexual journey of discovery is because those same women probably expected their sex life to be OVER by that age. So when they got there and found out it wasn’t, they were shocked, and I guess they figured they’d better take advantage of the unexpected bounty. I don’t know, just a theory.

Another reason the tales of dread don’t pan out is because for the most part, even if less people are trying to get into your pants, everyone ELSE starts becoming much, much nicer to you once you’re out of the “is she going to steal my man” and/or “does she think she’s better than me, I better pre-reject that bitch” zone. That one I did not expect at all, but it has been a very welcome development.

In sum, the tales that you will “disappear” or inspire horror and disgust are very overblown, and since most women spend the entirety of their 20s being afraid of this, what happens is that they get there and…it’s just not that bad.

Also, never underestimate the ability of men to be horny at all ages.

So don’t worry, if you’re a woman, you’ll be fine. If you’re looking for it, you’re not going to have a problem locating a man who still wants to do you. And if you’re married, not only will your husband still want to do you, but very likely at a certain age some time in your 40s, you will find that he wants to do you a lot more than you’d like – which would be a weird thing to happen if you were suddenly a disgusting hag in comparison to him, wouldn’t it?

Because there’s a much more concrete reason women find acceptance easier: because nature blessed us with hormonal changes that mean right at that time we’re no longer fertile and nubile, we also really stop caring about attracting male sexual attention.

Now, I realize this sounds bad. As Cartoons Hate Her said: “Hearing ‘you will get older and stop giving a fuck’ sounded like some stupid Reddit slogan that would be embroidered on the pillow of someone who does roller derby.” Fair point. I understand that you don’t WANT to ngaf, but I’m sorry to tell you that it doesn’t matter, because you won’t, and you probably also won’t care that you don’t care. It’s sort of like how if I told my 8 year old self that growing up to own a mansion with a room dedicated to having a ball crawl, several slides, and a bouncy room were no longer important to me. Eight year old Kryptogal would likely be devastated and think that old Kryptogal was extremely lame. Old Kryptogal doesn’t care what eight year old Kryptogal thinks.

It’s a lot better than the alternative! I was fully boy/man crazy starting in 5th grade and straight through the next 35 years. But being just as man-crazy right when they’d become increasingly uninterested sounds….really bad actually?

You may find that you actually begin to have sympathy for men, because they’re the ones stuck being just as horny as always for a 20 year old, while said 20 year olds are mostly not interested in them, and this mismatch just gets worse every year and makes them vulnerable to making rather big fools of themselves. Does that sound fun to you? It doesn’t to me — in fact it was precisely what I spent my 20s being terrified of. But mother nature steps in and grants you the gift of not caring.

It’s not like your sexual ability shuts down totally. It just stops being a semi-uncontrollable, intrusive preoccupation. You see an extremely attractive man somewhere, and your attention is no longer target-locked. You can still appreciate male attractiveness on an aesthetic level, and orgasms feel just as good, it’s simply no longer an orienting force in your life. Everything else is. You may recall how before puberty you had a lot of fun and joy and interest in tons of things, and that after you were an anxious wreck obsessed with what boys thought of you. It’s basically just that in reverse. Once again, it’s not that bad. Suddenly you find things like gardening super interesting. No biggie. It’s a lot better than spending the rest of your life incredibly horny and terribly sad that hot guys don’t want to bone you anymore. Trust me, it’s fine.

Why else do you think 45 year old women are all suddenly running to the doctor for hormones?? It’s not because they make you LOOK any better, because they don’t. It’s not because it’s fun giving yourself a shot twice a week. It’s because they suddenly find that their husband is still smacking their ass and motioning for the bedroom just as much as always, but when you’re going through reverse puberty, it’s starting to get a little annoying, and you know that’s not really fair to just change the rules on him like that, so it’s to make it stop being annoying.

In case you’re wondering, the hormones work. Should that interest you.

But also, spare a thought for the men! They in fact DO have to deal with not only feeling their knees start to creak and their vision degrade and their hair thin, but they also remain focused on 20 year olds who aren’t looking back, and wives who are finding them really annoying. Those are pretty good reasons to have a hell of a hard time with aging in and of themselves, I’d say!

All I know is that everyone I’ve ever seen who had a serious depressive period about aging was a man. Also, look at how women write about aging on Substack:

• “Aging is natural and beautiful. It’s the story written across your face: the laugh lines from years of joy, the faint freckles from summers past, the silvery strands that catch the light just so.”

• “creativity is lifelong, and older adults are essential cultural contributors, not an afterthought.”

• “For more than a hundred years, patriarchy’s main flex has been to terrify women into hating the natural aging process and rob them of their power by villifying the crone into submission.”

• “It’s the moment you realize you’re no longer willing to be slightly uncomfortable just to prove something to no one. You stop choosing things that look right, and start choosing things that feel right.”

• “Our culture may worship youth, but you don’t have to kneel at the altar. Aging is a privilege, irrelevance is optional.”

And then compare it to how men talk about it:

• “Getting old sucks.” (written by a 38 year old! The height of vitality for most people)

• “Ultimately I just want the right to say what I believe to be true without a bunch of aging hipsters lecturing me about being old because they’re trying to stave off being old. I don’t like being 42. Nobody likes being 42. But I am 42. This is my reality.” (I was amazed when I read this because 42 was one of my very favorite years of all my life – no years so far have topped being 10, 17, 36, or 42).

• Or, like many of our current tech genius billionaires, they’re just flat-out determined to NOT age in the first place: “Build muscle, burn belly fat, stay young after 50—with the protein-timing system that works for aging bodies. Science-based nutrition, zero crazy diets”

Sad.

Of course, NOT ALL MEN! Plenty of them approach the privilege of not dying with a sense of humor and a good attitude. Doesn’t that seem like more fun? I love those guys! Please let me be surrounded by those guys when I’m old. I’m not worried about the old biddies, we’ll have fun regardless. Maybe I should pre-screen advance applicants for the future old people I want in my cool-people retirement home with me. Submit your entries below.

Many years ago, I worked with this guy who turned 50, and he spent the entire year severely depressed about it and moping around the office. He would not be cheered up. This astonished me, because I’d always had an idea in my head that turning 50 was pretty cool. I even dressed as Salley O’Malley for Halloween one year. I kept telling him he was being ridiculous, but he wouldn’t shake it, and it was directly related to turning that age and began on his birthday.

However, I recently saw him (he’s retired now), and he seemed incredibly happy. Glowing with good cheer. I reminded him of how upset he was at 50, and asked him if didn’t he feel silly about that, now that he’s 65 and much happier?

Here’s what he said: “I’m happy now because I’ve finally given up. I don’t have to care about how big my bonus is, or competing with anyone, or trying to look like anything but grandpa, or any status bullshit. I have nothing to prove anymore to anyone. I just get to enjoy the hell out of every day.”

In Sum: Get Some Goddamn Self Respect

Our young people’s brains are being intentionally poisoned with media designed to keep them anxious, envious, and horridly insecure, as well as simply wrong and confused about life.

My strong advice to everyone is to make it a matter of personal pride to simply not succumb to such evil intentions. How dare anyone try to make you less happy, just to get a buck out of you! Screw them, don’t stand for it!

Also, there is nothing more pitiful than old people desperate for the approval of youth. It gives me vicarious-embarrassment goosebumps just thinking about it.

At least back in the 20^th century, the adults had the good sense to think teenagers were exactly the lazy, self-important, self-centered, self-aggrandizing slackers that we were. That was at least a respectable position. But today’s spineless adults, simpering around their Gen Z kids & grandkids, full of envy and worshipful of their coolness, truly embarrass me. It’s one thing to BE a teenaged moron...it’s not their fault they have too many hormones and too little experience or wisdom. But it’s quite another to actually look up to them or (god forbid) wish you were one. That is completely pathetic.

The irony is that the people who are always insisting the kids are just fine and that there’s nothing new in the world are the ones who betray how entirely out of touch they are with the youth or what youth culture is like now, and how little they seemingly remember actually being a teenager.

Because, no. They’re not all right. They’re more unhappy then everyone else, and more miserable than young people in the past. Every generation since mass media started has been more narcissistic, vain, self-centered, indulgent, attention-seeking, superficial, insecure, and status seeking than the last. It started with TV, then internet, then phones, now AI, and it just gets worse every year. Now they’ve got infinite and instantaneous entertainment and social comparison machines for waging status wars right in their pockets. The acceleration of this emotional degradation hit warp speed and went right off a cliff the past 5-10 years. Zoomers are on track to commit mass suicide as soon as they find the first grey hair.

So stop with the youth-worshipping nonsense and embrace the dignity of the curmudgeon, the one archetype who fully flowers into their true glory with age. Young people are to be looked upon with slight disdain and ample pity – that is natural and wholesome. Elevating the status of the least experienced is not. It’s a symptom of a decadent, sick society.

Also, for my religious readers, don’t you kind of have to accept God’s plan? Isn’t trying to find ways to avoid it kind of a subversion? Hatred of age and the elderly kind of seems like shitting on God’s creation and whole plan, no? I mean, I’m not even really a believer, and I’m kind of offended on God’s behalf that you’re subverting his whole thing here.

Life is supposed to work in thirds: the first third, you have your health and are at your physical peak, and you also have time, but you have no money or autonomy or standing. The second third, you have money and autonomy, and most of your health, but no time. And the last third, you have time, money, and total autonomy, but not your health. This is entirely fair and balanced.

But now we’re flaunting the .001% of young people who have the youth AND the money AND the power all at once in their life (real or fake), and that’s not how it’s supposed to work. There has never been a culture, pre-1970 or so, that granted power or status to young people above their elders. 22 year olds today are more freaked out about aging than 52 year olds. It’s sick and twisted.

So if you can’t find the optimism or wisdom to look forward to getting older and happier, you should AT LEAST develop a sense of indignation at a sick culture devoted to convincing you life ends at 30. Besides the fact that’s demonstrably untrue, it’s also a black-hearted worldview devoid of any morality or anything that makes life worth living. Why on earth would you allow that to infect your brain?

And if you still can’t find it within you to resist the scared little voice telling you there’s nothing worse than being old, try just getting mad, and incorporate it at an emotional level. Righteous fury works. How dare the evil bastards profit off selling envy and terror to youth?! Just make it a matter of personal pride to never succumb to the bastards.

Maybe that sounds like cope, but if so, it works for me. You literally cannot convince me that I am not better, cooler, and more powerful every single day I’m older. You really can’t, ask anyone who knows me, it’s quite obnoxious. If you try, I just get convinced you fear my might and are trying to undermine it. See, it’s a beautiful, self-reinforcing, indestructible belief I hold. You should try it, it’s way better.