I’ve heard this one before SHUT YOUR FACE

So why are the old happy? It comes with benefits – bus passes and pensions hang out of reach for the rest of us of like a carrot swinging comically off a medieval rod – and the elderly are (on paper) treated with respect and reverence according to their age. The catch is that you have to be young for a long time before that one comes a-calling.

Why? Well, suppose that most people work relatively hard their entire lives to earn a pension. This is what life is: hard work, then reward. My life’s work is wondering why I can’t just take the reward then run away. The very concept of continuous hard work is alien to me, and death scares me more than any god. No matter how I look at it, it feels a lot less like a reward and much more like someone kicking in my window then sulking when I decline their offer of cake.

Cruises, too. If you’re old you get to go on a lot of boats.

There’s a lot going on in general, and if you have to work a little to get big back, what’s the problem? Life plays out like a video game: put in the grind and you unlock the special tuxedo at the end. You might even see her naked in the shower, which just to clarify is another video game reference and not about old people.

All except one thing: that second playthrough, when Solid Snake has his tux you start again, anew, with better weapons and more health – but now this doesn’t work as an analogy for life. If anything, things get worse as the years go on – roughly from the age of twenty-five – and you don’t get a second go. Or extra lives. Only Walt Disney gets those. As noble as working your fingers literally to the bone over a meat packer, beer thinger or punching lathe (I don’t do labour) is, it’s not going to do you any favours once you’re fumbling the new PS10 controller and your grandson is screaming at you because you can’t even tear off your own face and incinerate Noob Saibot with a breath of flame. “What’s a Noob Saibot?” you ask. Oh, he was only big in the noughties, you old idiot.

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You start shrinking

No matter how robust you’re feeling now or immaculate in your self-care, the roulette of affliction guarantees only death. Things start to flake and peel away, like your face. Organs get tired, and the brain? Well, things start to flake and peel away, like your face. Organs get tired, and the brain? Well, things start to

One of those things is memory. As if it’s not bad enough that you inhabit a nightmare present in which you routinely forget details like the name of your children and where you keep your poo medicine, no one believes you anyway. You have one weapon left – and that’s rinsing your retirement fund before your children can benefit from it. After all, you worked for it. Maybe all you’re lacking is a sense of perspective.

Things change, but not that much. Not really. There are more black people around now. True, there are 100% more screens around and young people are a bit hunched nowadays. But they’ve always been stupid. It can’t be helped. Now we just have different ways of communicating it.

It helps of course that the old – who were young once – were young without screens connecting them to the big wide sexy world. The world today is one of transience and impermanence; it’s scary and it’s overbearing and moves at such a pace that you don’t interact anymore, you upload. And you can’t upload quickly enough. Unless you’re a racist or misogynist everything you say is forgotten immediately. And you only properly become those things when you get old and you stop understanding things like technology anyway, the irony so thick you could spread it on your toast.

And a bit about political correctness

How do you reconcile yourself with growing old? There’ll come a point in most of our lives when not just technology but ideas race ahead of you like the pack of wolves that raised you from birth. Most people lose the vim with which they hunt for new novels or bands; they trek their way into the middle of the great plains, plop themselves down somewhere around 1999 and eat crisps until they die. There are parts of the world that have already passed the point of visibility far, far on the horizon. L.P. Hartley said “the past is a foreign country”; well, there are whole continents no longer relevant to most of us. It’s only with the greatest effort that we cling on to everything else. Ten years from now, what’ll cause you to roll your eyes and utter the unutterable, Littlejohnable catchphrase “political correctness gone mad”? You’re only human. Mostly you’re an idiot. In fact, if you’re in any way intelligent you’re probably totally insane.

Time for bed

Not that it’s your fault. Change happens by default – you either embrace it or you don’t. If you’re expecting to stick to your morals until the very end then hold on tight, because as the external world undergoes some of the most amazing changes, the galaxy, the universe of neurons and electrons in your brain and the various cells and organs in your body will twist and buckle under the pressure, they’ll adapt, and they’ll hold out for all they’re worth. Sometimes things change without you noticing, and then whether or not you have that same grip on the world outside is left very much to chance. So take note of the way things are. Take note and try not to forget when you tell your stories to the people who will have their memories a little longer than you.

Art by Snook

Walt

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