By Keith C. Milne
I am a very lucky older man a little into my sixties, despite a growing list of annoying little health issues that are slowly, but surely beginning to creep into my former, always-in-perfect-health existence. I am lucky to still be alive, lucky to not have to worry about having enough money to live on any longer, lucky to know love and companionship, and extra-extra lucky to reside in the United States of America, despite how dangerous it is becoming to live in this country.
There are many people my age who aren’t so fortunate, and even more are downright miserable. The number of permutations of variables available to explain how any given person ends up with the life they have, or have lived, are as infintismal as the stars in the universe.
Most of our fate as we proceed through life is a function of a self-determining decision making. Whether or not these decisions are well thought out and planned intricately, like what job or career path you might seek, or are decided in the blink of an eye, such as in response to an emergency, or decided on something even more random, like just a generic coin-toss type of decision where you decide, to throw caution to the wind and do something exhilarating and exciting, even though you know that it could end your life or severly harm you.
This myriad of choices that we are all constantly making in real time as we live our lives shape what we experience, who we experience things with, where we live and the culture thereof, and how healthy we stay or how sick we become. As we get older, the finality of our cumulative choices make themselves apparent, and this can be a time when further reflection occurs and sometimes hardcore life regrets can manifest. This distillation process about our lives when we get old has an effect on our mental state, and can even shorten our lives if we haven’t come to terms with the choices we’ve made along the way, and are unhappy with the outcome.
One thing that has never stopped surprising me is just how fast my life has happened. Each decade I have taken notice about the general speed of the passing of time and sometimes comment on just how fast time seemed to be marching on. Now in my sixth decade, a month seems like a couple of weeks at best! It is both strange and interesting to me how our minds can cause a time shift or warp depending on our perception about how much time we still have to live. When the topic is mortality, the shorter the time you have to live, the faster time seems to pass.
When I was 5 years old, I can still remember gazing out of the big sunlit window of my bedroom on a sunny afternoon while thinking about how it already seemed like a long time since school let out, which had actually only been a whopping 3 weeks! I remember that I got super excited knowing that I had the rest of the whole summer still ahead! For me, that initial 3 weeks already seemed like a really long time, and also knowing that I still had over two whole months left before I would be back in school made it seem like I had eternity ahead of me before I would even need to concern myself about school again.
One really great surprise for me about this phenomenon is that now that I am retired and no longer working for others for money, that, despite the fast passage of time, and because I know in my heart that I have a much shorter amount of time left, I notice the things that I value more than ever. I notice happy people, I notice the love in the eyes of my pets, I notice all the little gifts that my spouse bestows upon me every single day. I don’t worry about the weather as much as I used to, because now I can wait and go out when it’s nice and enjoy not having to risk my life getting to work in inclement weather like I used to have to do for decades. I notice the clouds and the plants and trees around me more than I ever have.
It’s made me realize just how distracted we spend our lives. How not present, or un-present we are most of the time, keeping our heads filled with little sticky-notes, to-do lists, schedules, and itineraries most of our lives, filling every moment with activities tied to achievement and the future.
Now that I’m on the other side, it is, at times, quite strange and somewhat disorienting, and I’ve begun to realize that I’m entering the first phase of my un-becoming. I’ve spent my whole life becoming one thing or another, often starting completely over again, but always evolving and becoming something new. Now, even though I’m not done living and contributing yet by a long shot, I also recognize that my life is already slowly becoming about losing much of what I strived for all of my life and getting used to it–career advancement, greater income, significant responsibility, status, some power and control over others within the organizations I’ve worked for, and that clear sense of accomplishment that comes from successfully going through the struggle of years of toil, years of education and training, and completing them all admirably.
Another surprise for me has been how much pain I’ve experienced from my mid-forties forward. Wow! Pain from a lifetime of using my joints, pain from accidents and from the lingering changes that came from them. But the pain that has surprised me the most is the psychic pain from recognition and awareness that comes with experience and aging of all the injustice and wrong doing in the world: the lying, cheating, stealing, mayhem, rape, robbery, and horror that people create for, and towards each other, the planet, and animals. Pain from watching our country, and our planet become so negatively impacted in the name of profit, in the pursuit of power, and always to satisfy egos.
All of this over my lifetime has become quite a heavy suitcase of different kinds of pain that I wasn’t counting on experiencing. This cumulative lifetime amalgamation of physical, mental, and spiritual pain is just another way that all of us are chipped away at by the mere act of living. I am happy and quite content to a degree, but also I often feel heavy in my heart at the way things are transforming globally, and I fear for the future of mankind more so now than at any other time in my life.
It seems that, as time marches forward, those in power continue keeping many policies and ways of being that are bad for people in place. We continue letting stupid, radical, dangerous people rule the roost and take the rest of us along for their crazy ride and screwed up radical agendas, and we pretend that, somehow, everything will be okay, and someone will come along and save the day when, in fact, over my lifetime, the life chances for a really good quality of living for most people has worsened, and continues to do so at an accellerated rate.
Surprise! Things don’t necessarily get better over time or evolve into something better. I was always a believer in the potential for science and technology and as a youngster who grew up watching “The Jetsons” and “Johnny Quest” cartoons on Saturday mornings, the original Star Trek series, and 2001 A Space Odyssey, and I fully expected to see much of the human misery that I gleaned from watching the horrible news on television would be fully addressed and solved from the knowledge that came out of modern science and technology. I was totally on board with that. Most of what I fantasized about either never materialized or was too impractical for the mainstream to adopt, like getting around using a “jetpack.” Instead, what we ended up with was just more complexity, more invasion of privacy, more ability to disinform and trick others into adopting a new mindset or attitude, even getting some to agree to become a part of the undermining of our democracy and the institutions that we’ve created for ourselves to be governed by.
Another “Gotcha” that I’ve experienced from aging is the lack of friendship that I now enjoy (not!). And, man have I tried! I continue to try to form meaningful friendships and, at times, long for the frienships I had as a young adult. But it seems that the concept of friendship is fast becoming another unforseen, negative offshoot of technology. Technology has enabled any person to talk to any other person, even using video, from almost anywhere in the world, and offers many other ways to communicate, like texting and email all in one device. It also enables people to scatter all over the globe under the guise of immediately being able to get ahold of loved ones, so what’s the big deal, right?
Yet with more ways to connect than ever, lonliness has reached almost epidemic proportions in our modern cultures. Many of us no longer “talk” to anyone anymore. Most people resort to strictly texting! I too love the immediacy of texting, and the hardware and software that enables it has vastly improved, but is still no substitute for real conversations. One new development along these lines, mainly by the youth of today, yeah twenty-somethings, this one is aimed squarely at you, is ignoring texts!
Texting has always been traditionally used when needing to get an immediate answer to a question or to request something that needs immediate attention, like “will you please stop and get some milk on your way home,” and it worked perfectly in that role for a couple of decades. Unfortunately, texting moved from that arena, to become the primary means of communicating between many people. Now, many of the (mainly) young people are ignoring the former immediacy factor that was formerly an inherent part of this type of communication. They either ignore it completely, or they get back to you when, and if, they feel like it, often without leaving an alternative means of getting in touch with them! Phone calls go to voice mail. Emails just go nowhere and never get answered by the younger folks, and texting responses become optional. Wow! The arrogance is stunning to me! The more we normalize this type of generic disrespect, the worse off all of us are going to be. What else is going to become okay? Where is the line? 🙁 Crazy!
The general lack of respect I have begun to experience from teenagers and young adults in general is very surprising and appalling to me. When I was younger I always felt grateful to be young and strong and horny. I felt bad for old people, especially the ones that could barely walk or talk any longer. If I had the pleasure of any meaningful conversations with them, I was always amazed at what they knew, how much they had experienced, the stories they could tell of travels, of becoming a parent for the first time, how they once faced danger, or how they once started a successful company. I felt a deep respect for them and would take time to ask them questions in order to learn more about them and what they had already shared with me or that I knew they had knowledge about from first knowing a little of their background from others. I was fascinated and loved learning by proxy this way.
I have not experienced any of this personally, at least yet. Much to my surprise, no one has asked me much of anything about my past, or my current life. I have had zero opportunities to share any of my knowledge at all with anyone. I have lived in three amazing states, I have been married twice, never divorced, having lost my first wife to cancer at an early age. I have two college degrees and twenty seven years in a field that encompasses math, science, engineering, biology, environmental science and law, and laboratory testing and procedures. I am someone who has built computers, fixed other people’s computers, and have more or less been a “jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none” (except in wastewater treatment, I am a “master”), and could sing the songs of my talents and abilities for awhile, but have never had a single person question me or be curious about any of it! Surprise!
Talk about social cues that you no longer matter! The loud and clear societal message being broadcast as this phenomenon increases is that not only a way of reminding you that you are no longer a contributing member of society once you retire, (unless you move right into another occupation or employment situation) and no longer working, and no one cares one iota what your contributions have been over a lifetime of toil, training, and accumulated experiences. Wow! No wonder depression and loneliness are the number one diseases of the elderly! I get it, this time up close and personally.
Another surprise that I wasn’t counting on regarding aging and retirement is age discrimination. Oh my, that too is becoming self-evident but impossible to prove. First, I’ve noticed that since turning sixty a few years ago, that younger medical people that I have interacted with talk to me differently. How? How about talking to me like I’m some kind of a little kid again! Nothing will turn me off or make my blood boil faster that a young female nurse, PA, or medical assistant who talks to me with that silly, high-pitched “little girl” voice that makes THEM sound like they are six years old again, speaking to me as if I, too, am a little boy again. They talk like little girls but are asking me questions and giving me directives like they mothering their own little boy, which is what they think I am! STOP IT!!
Even more than that, when I retired, I didn’t think I would ever want to work for anyone else ever again, but now a year out and I have decided that, perhaps, a little outside employment, PART-TIME would offer me the social interaction and structure that I have grown to miss a little. Well, as qualified as I am for almost any of the manual labor, cashiering, stocking, delivering type jobs out there, I have had a really difficult time even getting an interview, all the while hearing about how short-handed everyone is and how hard it is for employers to find workers, and how “no one wants to work!” REALLY?? I do.
What I learned was that on my resume, in my profile section I had typed up a little diddy about who I was and what I wanted to do and included that I had recently retired (young) etc. The only interview I was called for was for a job I applied for and DID NOT INCLUDE THAT I HAD RECENTLY RETIRED! All other applications have gone unresponded to! I was a utility manager for two wastewater treatment plants for the last 7 of my 27 years in that field.
Ultimately, I wasn’t hired by the company giving me the interview because I wanted to work no more than 18 hours/week, but they wanted someone willing to work 25-30 hours. It was fairly apparent to me that they really wanted a part-time person doing a full-time person’,s job, and then being able to get away with less benefits because of them still calling it “part-time.”
Another surprise for me is that I never thought I would actually see history repeat itself like I used to hear that it would, but apparently I have lived long enough to see it happen. Some fashions that have been “in” in the last couple of decades were “in” when I was in high school! A return to a rise in fascism in the world, even after seeing where that leads; e.g., WWII. The recent overturning of Roe v. Wade leaving abortion to be decided by the states! WOW, women have less rights now than they did 50 years ago!
I’ll wrap this up with mentioning one final major category tied to aging and being a senior citizen that has somewhat surprised me, and it is how all the habits of your life come to pay you a visit, starting in your fifties, and for some, that’s where the end of the road is, in their fifties.
I recall from my “Psychology of Aging” class at UMass-Amherst while an undergraduate I learned that the biggest determining factor of how long any one person lives and the quality of their life while living in their elder years, should they make it to that point, age 60, were the personis lifestyle choices while they were living. That means, how much or little they exercised, what they ate, how much alcohol they drank, heroin they banged, cocaine they snorted, ecstasy they dropped, or repetitive tasks they performed, or the number of walls they had jumped off of. Decisions around these activities and others that constitute a gradation of safety to danger, made all the difference in the world in determining how long they lived, and how healthy or not they were while living in their elder years.
The upside of learning about aging was learning that, if someone made the right lifestyle choices enough to make it to age sixty, that the odds increased greatly that they would now live out their genetic potential for old age longevity, and that lifestyle choices made, thus far, were now well entrenched habits that virtually guaranteed this outcome.
So far, so good with my own advancing age. However, there are many aspects to aging that have surprised me and continue doing so currently. My now more advanced age is just another chapter in my life. I feel largely the same as when I was 35, but am a lot wiser from all the experiences since then. I’m making the necessary adjustments just as I always have, but there are times when I do feel a deep sadness about the short time I have left.
I also feel a deep disappointment quite often at just how little progress we humans have made towards achieveing a beneficial co-existence and a iron-clad bond and union GLOBALLY between ourselves that would result in cooperation, solving of much of the misery and suffering in the world, while ensuring that the future will be a healthier, brighter, better place than it was when we first entered the world. I hope you see this in your lifetime! I doubt very much that I will.
