You and I are Too Old to Hang Out With Angry, Bitter People: Especially Ourselves
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back
Okay. Most especially ourselves, right?
You and I are way Too Old to hang out with pissed-off people.
Nothing ruins a day faster than a phone call from that friend who pours poop all over our day.
Sometimes that’s us.
That barky. bitter, bitchy whoever-that-is in our morning mirror. That one.
Chances are that if you’re not around anyone who is like that, and you’re not around anyone at all, you may be the one who’s pissed off.
That just sucks, right? It’s us, not the ubiquitous them.
We’re the one nobody wants to be around. Oh, I’ve had to come to terms with those times I’ve been the one radiating the butt-uglies.
We all get time in the pity party. It’s part of life. We just don’t need to stay there, right?
There’s a quote living in my Daytimer-yes I still have one and my phone can’t replace it- which speaks to this so eloquently:
“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
― George Bernard Shaw (author bolded)
I have on occasion been that “feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances.”
Not proud of it, either. However, having been there and done that, I also can see it coming. That’s the power of aging, wisdom, and the choice to change.
When you and I stop blaming everyone else, we can change. When we change, we create space for people to really want to hang out with us. Then we can stop being that person people avoid.
Not always easy. But always possible.
I suspect all of us have had reason to be angry. Those of us who carry pretty ugly things in our buckets, and all of us do, we can be mad that life laid that on us. That’s legit.
One man who married into my family complains constantly about things his mother did to him as a child. Every phone call it’s the same litany, as though it’s a streaming service of the same movie. It’s exhausting. I give that air twice a year, then have to take a long vacay from him.
If we let our butt-uglies weave themselves into who we are, we’re likely to end up very lonely.
America’s Surgeon General announced this year that loneliness is one of the great epidemics of our time. As you and I age, loneliness is one of the worst enemies of aging vibrantly.
For those of you watching Blue Zones on Netflix (I’m still catching up on Friday Night Lights, okay so laugh), one of the keys to becoming long-lived is to be long-loved.
Not necessarily married, or even partnered. Connected and valued in a community where you are well-known, appreciated. Like that TV show Cheers, everybody knows your name.
People really enjoy seeing you walk in the door. What a gift.
How do we not become bitter, given all the awfulness of what’s going on? Your awfulness might be different from mine, but everyone seems to have a lot to say about how awful things are.
That of course touches social media, but that’s another article.
So how do we beat back the bitter beer face? How do we stay in the mix, engaged, positive and with plenty of pals?
Part of this is changing who we hang with.
The late, great speaker Jim Rohn (not the sports guy, Jim Rome) said
"You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with."
Not true. Feels true, but it isn’t, like that hilarious quote from Sleepless in Seattle:
“It’s easier to be killed by a terrorist than it is to find a husband over the age of 40.”
Feels true. Isn’t.
I’ve made the mistake of perpetuating the Rohn quote as though it’s gospel.
Isn’t.
Here’s what is true, and one secret to getting your community mojo back.
We are the reflection of our entire extended social networks, a fact that writer David Burkus explores in his 2018 book Friend Of A Friend: Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career.
One study he quotes is about obesity, and how we can gain weight because a friend of a friend….of a friend, etcetera, is obese.
The same researchers found nearly identical results around smoking.
Burkus writes:
And it doesn’t stop at obesity. In a follow-up study, Christakis and Fowler found something similar with smoking rates. Using the same social network data they had borrowed from the Framingham Heart Study, they found that if your friend smokes, you are 61 percent more likely to be a smoker yourself. If a friend of your friend smokes, you are still 29 percent more likely to smoke.
And so on. Our social networks are very powerful. We underestimate the power of the extended network on how we think and feel.
Since I’ve trained networking skills for several decades, the theory of social capital is near and dear to my heart. As we age, those people, their friends, their families and much more, have a way of worming their way into our lives, values, beliefs and behaviors.
This can have disastrous effects, or it can be transformational.
This touched my family directly in opposite ways.
My folks, two very lively and energetic people who took off to explore the Americas in their sixties, retired to a Colorado community of old people. People who thought old, spoke old, and blanketed everyone around them with the defeated beliefs about being old.
They lived in terror of being sent over to that part of the villa which was for people in their final stages. The terrible inevitability of that Last Stop cast a pall over all the residents. They watched their friends and neighbors get rolled in, then out the door in a casket.
They were my age, seventy, when they moved in.
In no time my parents visibly shrank. Their bodies curled over, their language changed, they barely went out, their world diminished.
Dad got bitter and angry. He drank more. His language turned mean, estranging their friends, my friends and me completely, to say nothing of my mother. His only “friends” were the checkout folks at the local Kroger store.
This intelligent, capable man, whose brain was so fertile, found little late in his life to give him joy. My mother struggled to keep her sense of humor and her ebullient personality intact. The brightest aspects of her indomitable personality went into hibernation until my father passed at eighty-four.
At that point, my mother reconnected with an old family friend who’d been widowed. She fell in love, and spent plenty of time in her eighties either talking to the “boyfriend” or flying out to California to rediscover what good company was all about.
Including sex, which she hadn’t had for decades.
That’ll cheer you right up.
Ed had worked for Rand Corporation, was brilliant and kind and funny. His extended community became hers. For one golden, happy decade, I watched my mother bloom. She had her intellectual community back, someone to share dirty limericks with every Friday night and the occasional sexy visit out West.
My mother’s final decade was the best of her long life. She died a few hours after her last limerick reading with Ed, just after her 91st birthday. Her final years had been full of everything she had missed: intimacy, laughter, intellectual stimulation, literature, ideas and more.
Joyful.
You and I deserve to have our final years be just that good, too.
Bearing witness to how extended community affected my parents was an object lesson in how powerful our networks are, especially as we age, as people die, move away or otherwise leave us.
Communities need constant refreshing
In order to have networks, we have to keep creating new ones, as Mother Nature’s waters carry our friends home. The longer we live, the more people we’re likely to lose. It’s incumbent upon us to do the work to keep our communities well-stocked with friends, both new and old, young and old.
I keep meeting older people whose social circles are packed with friends of all ages, backgrounds, cultures and ideas.
People care about them and value their company. Their kids’ friends ask them out. They’re engaged fully and work hard at being interesting and fun.
As a result, they have a busy social calendar. My closest friend has to take rest weekends, her life is that busy.
I’m right in the middle of building my local community here in Oregon after Covid and being isolated for more than a year with constant surgeries, PT and lack of mobility. So I’ll be writing more about this, and how to do it.
Perhaps at times, the bitter beer face is ours, and we suffer from loneliness. To that, here’s the question I put to myself:
Am I lonely, and that makes me bitter and angry? Or am I bitter and angry, which keeps people from wanting to hang with me?
Either way, we can choose to change. Lots more on this to come.
Meanwhile,
Let’s play.
Thanks for spending a few precious minutes with me. You don’t get those back so I hope this was worthy of your time.
If you liked this, please check out my other material. If you REALLY liked it, you’re invited to hang out with me:
If you know someone who needs this kind of messaging, please consider:
This is another very important ingredient to the recipe for making your own personal Blue Zone.