Time Passes Like a Roaring Bullet Train, and Then It's Gone. Suddenly We're Too Old?

Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Lerone Pieters on Unsplash

It’s just life, and then, most of it has passed us by

TikTok isn’t just for teens.

As someone who needs to build a following so that I can get my new company off the ground, I am now on TikTok. In all fairness, it’s an open market (for now), and there are plenty of oldsters.

Some, in fact, are pretty damned good. For the most part though, the material is pure sludge, like anywhere else that anyone but anyone can post. My lane is Too Old for This Shit, as here. Over there I feature videos which are drawn from my years of adventure travel.

This is stuff you cannot create with AI (because it’s fucking real) and observations about aging, personal growth, all of it. Part of my education about learning to put videos online, this late-in-life set of college courses, is to see what folks are posting about the topic.

The other day I was watching a video of a flat-out gorgeous girl of 23, doing her makeup, flawless skin, perfect hair. And she was MOANING and GROANING about how fast time was passing her by.

I got genuinely pissed off at her.

To the point, and you can see this coming, I had to wonder what on earth was I so pissed about?

Natch, that level of irritation has nothing to do with said damsel in distress about getting too old too fast.

I was pissed off because I’d done the same thing at the same age.

Photo by Zulmaury Saavedra on Unsplash

We waste our youth these days obsessing about getting old SO FAST that we waste our actual youth focusing on our wasted youth until we hit about fifty. Then we realize what we’ve done, and spend the next X number of decades obsessing about BEING Too Old and moaning and groaning about how we had wasted our precious youth obsessing about getting older while we were actually young.

Then we age even faster when we obsess and stress about how MUCH we’ve aged so fast. And so on. So we are never young, never youthful when we are so bloody obsessed by what we cannot change: time, age and the inevitability of getting old. But only if we’re lucky.

Now if you can’t laugh out loud at this bullshit, you’re missing the point.

Of course it’s stupid. That’s why I write and talk about it. I’ve done it myself, paid the price of doing stupid things, and wish that someone had bitch-slapped my foolish face in my twenties and pointed it out to me.

I can’t say much to stop you from doing what you do, but I can hope to get you to think. You can age fast when stressing out about things you can’t change. That sends cortisol running through your body.

When cortisol levels doubled, biological age increased by about 50%, says a study from Colorado State University.

Yet learning how to chill backs this whole process off. Every single one of us can begin by putting the stupid phone DOWN. Stop doom-scrolling. Make more friends. Make friends with your mirror. Learn to laugh at the idiocy of what we do.

Laughter chills us out and keeps us youthful.

There are plenty of folks on Substack talking about how to age well. The best of the advice boils down to the same basics that research underscores again and again: the right good food for you, lots of movement, a solid social circle and a purpose.

Anything else has yet to top those four. Those four take work and investment.

When we do those four basics we reduce our stress. We also invest in a more youthful body, a more youthful outlook and functional fitness, something I mention regularly and so have other writers. We feel better, sleep better, ARE better. Do we look like a teenager?

Don’t be an asshole. When we can let the addiction to youth go, we are free.

I want to poke a hole in this whole notion of being Too Old for anything, barring insurmountable odds such as disease or disability.

Or death. Hell, there’s that. Hell, too. Hell on earth that we put ourselves through by hating on ourselves as we age, as we must.

You and I can start so many things all over again at any age that it’s ridiculous. Our idiot attitudes about how youth=beauty and above all that WE MUST BE BEAUTIFUL ignore the reality of what age and time must do.

They move us past reproduction (attraction), work/kids/whatever, and allow us to become something completely different having zero relation to age.

Of course age didn’t stop DeNiro, Pacino or Jagger from reproducing but they didn’t look any younger, and they sure won’t be around to watch their kids grow up…

To make it past sixty is such a gift. Yet we spit in the eye of our aging selves and hate what we see, missing the gift that we have: we’re still alive.

Depending on how we’ve lived, we might have to make a few concessions. Right now I’m missing bones in my hands, feet, hips and shoulders. All of them hurt. My back is damaged from skydives, horse accidents and a whole lot of stupidity (but boy do I have stories).

None of that, however, keeps me out of the gym. It doesn’t keep me from training to get back to hiking and/or running.

Those will allow me to return to all kinds of sports that I’ve been missing. The last few years have been brutal- and I’ll bet plenty of you can relate. But I’m not resentful- I’m damned grateful to be alive, to be able to start over at 72.

I’m very, very lucky.

In Easy Prey, book eleven of the Lucas Davenport crime thriller Prey series by John Sanford, one of the characters makes this terrific observation:

“Time passes, but sometimes it beats the shit out of you as it goes.”

Photo by Bernard Tuck on Unsplash

If we’re lucky, as time passes for us all, we’ll get the shit beaten out of us but survive to tell the tale. Learn to laugh. Rise again. The next time time has another trick, we’re better prepared.

None of us gets through life unscathed. Hell, we’d have no stories to tell. The trick is to treasure the time we have, whatever comes with it, no matter what. Not to resent its passing, and end up aged all too soon, bitter and twisted, having hardly lived at all.

If you want to be young forever, join the 27 Club.

Far better, aim to join the 107 Club, and have a lot life to laugh at. Create your own chapters and story arcs and adventures.

You can obsess about your looks or you can focus on your life.

You and I are way Too Old to waste our precious lives worrying about wrinkles. Let’s make wrinkles instead, by living full lives.

Let’s play.

The author heading up to Everest Base Camp at 61, getting wrinkled.

Thanks to my fellow Substack writers who push for healthy habits and a more joyful life free of the pressure to be perfect. We ain’t. And the sooner we let ourselves go play, the happier we can be.

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