Feeling My Age

It's not just a number

Do you feel your age? What is that like?

It’s not that I don’t feel my age, it’s that I don’t really know what it means to feel your age. I might feel my age - maybe how I feel right now is how it feels to be my age. But I don’t know.

I don’t think I feel any different to how I felt twenty years ago. But then I don’t remember how I felt twenty years ago. I am sure that twenty years ago my knees and my back hurt much more seldom, but I have no real recollection of my knees and back in my twenties. All I really recall is my state of mind - and even that’s pretty hazy.

But from what I can remember, I felt mostly the same back then, with the obvious qualification that back then I was sad and panicky about things happening to me back then, whereas now I’m sad and panicky about a whole different set of shit.

Point is, I do not feel my age, unless by coincidence how I feel now happens to be “my age”.

This may be because I haven’t ever felt my age. I didn’t feel eighteen when I was eighteen, or ten when I was ten, so why would I feel forty-four when I’m forty-four?

Again, I don’t actually know what “Feeling eighteen” means, so for all I know I did. But I neither had a specific feeling of eighteenness, nor felt what I thought eighteen-year-olds should feel like. That is, insofar as I gleaned any sense of how society at large viewed teenagers, I didn’t ever feel like I fit that view.

So…do you feel your age? Is there a major difference in your sense of self compared to what it was when you were younger? Do you feel closer to death than you once did? Do you feel more tired? Or do you feel wiser, more in control of yourself, more at ease with the world? Or less at ease with the world? Has everything become simpler, or more complicated, than it used to be, in a way that seems to be determined by the passage of years on your personal timeline?

In a nutshell, do you feel older than you used to?

Like I said, I don’t really know what it means to feel older. I know what it means to BE older. I’m older now, but that’s not a feeling, it’s just a fact because I know how many years have passed since the unfortunate incident that my mother refers to as my “birth”.

Sometimes I do feel like I’m running out of time…is that what it means to feel your age? Is feeling my age nothing more nor less than occasionally being reminded that the ratio of time left to things I want to do with my life is changing by the day?

I feel like it should be more than that. I feel like feeling my age should in some way mean I feel like I’m a different person than I used to be. But I don’t.

When I really sit down to think about it, I don’t feel my age, because I think if I did, I would feel like the world is getting smaller. As you get older, your path narrows - or so you’d think. The longer you live, the more possibilities fall away. The older you are, the less opportunity you have. Is that right?

Well…no. It’s not. If anything, I feel like my path has become wider than it was. Yes, time is running out, but to be honest that feeling is more intense for the very fact that the number of things I want to do - and feel that I can do - keeps increasing. The world is getting bigger and bigger, the possibilities seem to be multiplying. That’s absolutely terrifying, because inevitably not every possibility can come to pass. But it’s exciting to think that they’re all there, ready to be chosen.

It just occurred to me that I might actually feel my age. Because getting to this age might’ve been what needed to happen for me to realise just how mucb future I have.

But anyway…do you feel your age?

The Weekly List

These are the 20 best sketch comedy TV shows of all time, in no particular order. If you disagree with this list, feel free to explain why you’re wrong in the comments.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus

The Micallef P(r)ogram(me)

That Mitchell and Webb Look

The Fast Show

Mr Show With Bob and David

Big Train

French and Saunders

A Bit of Fry and Laurie

Not The Nine O’Clock News

Saturday Night Live

Kids In The Hall

I Think You Should Leave

Little Britain

The Two Ronnies

Victoria Wood: As Seen On TV

Alexei Sayle’s Stuff

The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer

Rutland Weekend Television

Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun

Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!

The Weekly Irritant

What’s bugging me this week - besides the crossword clue “Son left boring low buzzer - it’s annoying”: the answer is MOSQUITO, but I still don’t know why and it’s driving me fucking INSANE - is what I call the “total war” approach to online argument. I am sure the impulse to be this way existed before Twitter or Facebook, but social media has exposed it to the world and I really wish I hadn’t been exposed to it.

“Total war” means that people, once they have decided that someone is a bad person - or Bad Person, as it is treated as an official designation - they take it as given that any and all actions are justified if they damage that bad person.

In other words, it’s OK to lie about someone, make shit up, attack them at whatever vulnerable point you can identify, as long as they are bad and therefore “deserve” it.

As noted above, I am very old and therefore out of joint with today’s world, but nevertheless I have to confess I can’t get on board with this mentality. I can’t relate to deciding that anything goes when it comes to attacking another person, as long as I believe the attack is merited.

I think it is a bad thing to make up lies about someone. I think it is a bad thing to do this no matter who that someone is. And I think it only exacerbates the bad thing when, once your lying is pointed out, you respond with some variation of “well yes, but you can easily imagine it being true”. Or even worse, “Well yes, but doesn’t the fact that this lie is so believable say something very profound”?

It never says anything profound. It only says that either you’re gullible and believed a lie, or that you’re an arsehole who’s lying.

What’s more, if you really believe someone is evil, you must be able to point to something they’ve actually said or done that demonstrates that. If you can’t, the fact of their evil must be in doubt.

Beyond actual lies, I really feel uncomfortable when I see people piling onto someone on the basis of some distressing event in their personal life. When a complete bastard’s marriage falls apart, for example, I hate seeing people ripping into them about that. I hate it even if the bastard in question is exactly the sort of person who would do the same thing to others. When tragedy strikes a bad person, I think it’s diminishing to use that tragedy to slam them.

All this is not only because I am instinctively distrustful of people who elect themselves the arbiter of who is or isn’t a bad person. There is always a risk, when we declare, “It’s OK to treat this person this way, because they asked for it”, that we are making an unjustified judgment, letting the mob tell us what to think rather than making up our own minds.

But even if they DID ask for it - and we all know there are people in this world awful enough to be asking for almost anything - I don’t like making the public discourse no-holds-barred.

The reason is, I don’t want to dehumanise anyone. Even the worst people, even the people who take delight in dehumanising others: I want to keep their humanity in my mind.

Because even the worst people in the world are humans. Not even they consist only of their worst aspects. And I believe that treating them as less than human makes us slightly less human, every time we do it.

Even terrible terrible people suffer. Even people we hate feel pain. When a person’s life crumbles and they are crushed by grief and loss, that is something that binds them to the rest of the human race. And that is a good thing. Capitalising on that grief and loss to score points in the great neverending Virtue Game frays those bonds. That is a bad thing. Even if they deserve it. Even if you’re definitely a better person than they are, and even if that will be true no matter how many slurs you hurl and how many slurs they absorb, you’ll be a worse person than if you hadn’t.

So, you know…don’t do that, huh?

The Weekly Plug

I have a book coming out shortly about the weirdest stuff in Australia. Naturally our Big Things get a mention in this book, so with that in mind please read my favourite British investigative journalist Jonn Elledge’s deep dive into the colossi of my native land. There’s also some very serious things about proper issues, as usual.