You're Too Old to Expect That Listicles Will Magically Fix Your Life
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
Just do these five things and you’ll live happily ever after…
Really now.
Second in popularity to articles advising Dear Reader how to make a six-figure income on Substack (or wherever), are listicles on how to fix whatever is wrong with you.
Ten ways to…the Five Secrets to….the Eight Tips to a Perfect….ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Always promising the perfect mate, face, hair, abs, job, whatever we desire and most certainly don’t have. Just do these six easy things and LIFE WILL BE PERFECT.
Oh, and purchase my handy-dandy online course, while you’re at it. Just $89.99.
Anyone who has ever tried those six easy steps to perfect diamond-cut six-pack abs can attest. There is no such thing as six easy steps to six-pack abs.
Oh my god the listicles are endless. And endlessly ridiculous. When I first began writing on Medium back in 2018 I wrote a few too many because like most noobs, I was trying to find my way.
They made me want to vomit, except for any list I wrote about how to prepare for hiking Kilimanjaro. When it comes to adventure trips, flying airplanes, scuba, the rest, checklists save your life.
That can indeed be useful. But fixing what ails us?
For the most part, you and I don’t need “fixing.”
What we were given at birth may irritate the holy hell out of us, like the bump on my mother’s patrician nose, or in my case a propensity for wide hips. Such judgments, such as skin color or our hair are born of societal prejudice. None of it needs fixing, per se.
What might beg “fixing” is how we frame our lives, ourselves and our relationship to aging, for example. Our tendency to believe we’re never enough no matter what, which makes us susceptible to the easy list of fix-its to give us the perfect whatsis.
Which leads me to where I really am going, which is the bucket list.
You and I are Way TOO OLD to believe that completing a bucket list is going to make us happier.
Since I can only speak for myself, here goes.
No listicle like a “bucket list,” is going to make my existence any more enjoyable, particularly if I throw myself into said bucket list with the same idiot abandon that so often accompanies a desperate desire to fix my life.
That said, I wouldn’t for one red second argue that having a bunch of experiences you would love to explore before you get your ticket punched is dumb. Not at all.
What’s dumb is to make that list, rush out do all that stuff, and end up frankly dissatisfied that you came back and you were still you.
Let’s explore this.
In about six weeks I turn 71. I can no longer claim youth in any way, shape or form. During my sixties I did the kinds of things that others talk about, dream about, brag about doing someday but never do.
The last twelve years were a living, breathing bucket list.
Rather, it was a lifestyle, not a listicle.
Barring the last few years or so getting my body repaired, remade and integrated with all manner of metals, I’ve lived a helluva life. I’ve paid for it all right. My body took terrible, repeated hits and I nearly crippled myself.
What a life I’ve lived.
Riding spicy horses all over the world, kayaking the Arctic Ocean, hiking some of the world’s biggest mountains, exploring the Amazon. All after sixty. All traveling solo. Serious fucking badass life for what some would consider an old biddy.
I was also old enough to know that not a thing would change if I didn’t fully embrace the often awful lessons which came with international travel: the cultural mistakes, the idiotic assumptions, the jokes which insulted, the gestures which meant something entirely different than at home, the swift, scouring and souring romances, the inevitability of disappointment, serious injury, and imploded plans and really stupid and dangerous tourons along on your adventure.
Including when I was one of those tourons.
What I learned from all that, and how those experiences changed, molded and matured me, were what made it all worthwhile.
It wasn’t a list at all. That’s my point.
What’s the LIFE you want to live, not the list you want to check off?
Even better, why? What do you expect to get out of those experiences? Bragging rights? Proof you’re not that old?
Life is so richly lived in the question, and that is precisely where I find myself right now as I skid towards 71, healing fast, heavily into PT, with at least another year of hard work to get my balance, dexterity and strength back.
Oh my. Here are questions for the ages, and the aged:
What do I want to do next?
How do I want to live the next many years?
I've been alternately avoiding, dancing with, hiding from, negotiating with and waltzing with these questions now for quite a while as I have navigated twelve difficult surgeries, recovery, PT and more endless PT since 2018. And face another year wherein there will be a few more, and more recovery and more PT.
I’ll do it all, too, for the alternative isn’t acceptable.
I don’t have an answer. Not yet, anyway.
As are we all, I am in the middle of a big fat life transition. This inevitably leads me to more listicles, this time created by very smart people.
I'm a certified trainer in Bill Bridges' Transition work. That model gives us three phases: Ending, Neutral Zone and New Beginning.
Neat, crisp, easy, right? Three box-checkable listicle items and then you’re all shiny, new, done. What is the problem?
Life hands you a Big Ending like empty nest, death of a spouse or child, end of a marriage. Then you waddle, wail, wander, whine and wish during The Neutral Zone until BAM! Your shiny New Beginning is here, ready for you to move in.
Here’s the problem:
If you're grizzled and grey enough, you know that there is no such thing as neat, crisp, easy when it comes to passages. Bridges’ work is good but incomplete in that regard.
Anyone dealing with grief, and I most assuredly am, knows that the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was never meant to be literally interpreted as a straightforward path with no circle-backs.
Life is a long series of circle-backs. Some of that work is essential for deep processing. Some of it keeps us solidly cemented in the past like the LaBrea tar pit. That's why it's called deep work.
So Kübler-Ross’ list of five stages of grief is a worthless listicle, as such.
Bridges’ list of three stages of transition is a worthless listicle, as such.
But only if we expect life to be neatly linear, crisp and easy, without the horribly messy, painful, tear-filled circle-backs which loss and grief can cause us.
Listicles, sadly, are a Venus fly trap.
Maybe this is one of the great gifts of aging long enough. Perhaps...
You and I are Way Too Old to hold onto expectations that may have never served us from the beginning.
Or put another way, perhaps I have aged beyond a lot of imaginary and patently unfair expectations that I falsely believed would earn me love, approval, friends.
Tick off the boxes on The List (lose weight boob job lip filler hair extensions etc) and you’ll be showered with love, fame, money, an easy life.
Fulfill your bucket list and finally, you will be deeply happy, satisfied, and well-loved and admired by all forever and ever amen.
Bullswocky.
I can't speak for anyone else but I wonder how universal that belief might be.
I'd been trying to rekindle my legendary zest for life while also dealing with a fair few challenges. What I've been doing simply hasn't worked.
I said I'd climb Kilimanjaro again. I know why I said it, but it wasn't the right thing.
I tried to reboot my training program to mimic what I've done in the past. I wanted to find that beast who would work out four hours a day, six days a week for a summit attempt.
It isn't just that my body isn't quite ready for it, it's also that I how have a very different body. That also wasn't the right thing.
I started my third book. Several times over. All three attempts fizzled. That wasn’t the right thing.
I made lists. Lots of them. Eighteen months later, a goodly number of those items are still on the list. Clearly I don’t give enough of a damn to get them done.
Not the right thing.
So what IS the "right thing?"
Wrong question.
I am so over the idea that we can map out a life. That we can set these long term goals and all you gotta do is...
Life slips us a Mickey, we slip on the sidewalk, we slip up so badly that we slip into a coma. Life just gets in the way of neat and tidy listicles.
I have a lot of accomplishments. Plenty in my resume. However it's fair to say that…
Most of the best stuff found me.
Well there's a thought.
In all my striving to establish some kind of control over my environment - which must give the Powers That Be endless hilarity - most of the very best things came out of life’s worst sideswipes, losses and rejections.
Most of the very best things that ever landed in my life were most assuredly NOT on my list of Stuff I Wanted.
Most landed while I was floating along in life’s rivers and got whacked in the hip hard enough by something better to turn my attention from something stupid- usually on my listicle of Stuff I Gotta Do to be Successful.
Then at some point, that ends, too. We get dumped into another transition, flail around trying to hang on to or recreate something that is done with us, and make endless lists to regain control.
We need to grow the testicles to let go of our listicles.
No listicle, bucket list or any other kind of line item life plan is going to fix us.
I think what we need is faith, not fixing. Not religion, faith.
Faith that what we need, what is perfectly attuned to our next phase, is slowly making its way towards us right now. Sometimes it shows up as a simply awful event or accident or change that we resist with all our might.
At some point later, with clear 20/20 hindsight, we realize that had X not happened, then we would not now be/have/enjoy who and what we are today.
No listicle gives us that. But courage does.
What needs to find us, finds us. The path that we need to be on, often opens up right in front of us.
I may be crazy, but every time I’ve been willing to let go of my witless lists and step onto what’s been put in front of me, magic happens.
It comes with a price, but I’m willing to pay for serious magic.
How about you?
Let’s play.
Lovely thanks to all who hang out on these pages, and I hope you were well rewarded by the challenges and respect offered here. If so, please consider
If someone you know is struggling, and kindly who isn’t these days, if this piece offers insight or perspective, please also consider
Either way I hope you are not too busy chasing stuff that the stardust that is everpresent in life doesn’t get the chance to settle on your shoulders. Thanks for reading.
Courage and faith (not religion, and not a To Do list) — indeed those are the keys to a fulfilling life because they acknowledge that we're not in control. But I need reminding of the All. The. Time. So thanks for this stirring piece.
Yeah, I hit 72 this year and over the course of last year spent a significant amount of money hiring and expert to help me solve a problem I was having organizing the 50K family pictures (three generations of prolific photographers in my family have left me with a treasure trove). It was the best money I've spent in awhile.
This gentleman helped me untied the Gordian Knot mess that I had made of my Lightroom database and showed me how to quickly and easily keep the knots at at bay!
Just yesterday, I bought a package of tutorials for Photoshop (I've been using it off and on for 30 years) and in the fourth video I watched, I learned some tricks that I didn't know existed! Again, it was life changing! I was making things WAY to hard.
I guess my point is that unless you are willing to learn EVERY day and search for and find good coaching when you're struggling, you're gonna slowly fade into mediocrity.