"Aging Isn't Fun, But It's Better Than Death"

by Charlie Brooker

"Age has been a lingering obsession of mine since I left my teens. However old I've been is too old. At 26, I felt totally washed up. At 32, I regretted wasting time worrying about my age as a 26-year-old, because now I was convinced I really was totally washed up. At 38, I look back at my 32-year-old self and regret that he wasted time with those regrets about wasted time. Then I regret wasting my current time regretting regrets about regrets. This is pretty sophisticated regretting I'm doing. That's the sole advantage of aging: I can now effortlessly consolidate my regrets into one manageable block of misery. Otherwise, by the age of 44, I'd need complex database software just to keep track of precisely how many things I'm regretting at once.

Age is an odd thing. At every point in my life I've regarded those both above and below me on the age ladder with unwarranted contempt. Anyone younger was a barking idiot; anyone older, an outmoded embarrassment. But rather than mellowing into acceptance as I ascend the ladder, my distaste for both groups sharpens into bitter focus. The young ones are even more idiotic because they don't appreciate how short-lived their youth will be, dammit – while the old ones are now a horrifying vision of a steadily approaching future. I'm not talking about OAPs, incidentally, but people just a few years older than I am now. To my eyes, they're walking victims of the Great Inescapable Time Disaster.

On a rational level, I know there's nothing wrong with aging. If anything, it should be taken as a sign of continued success. Congratulations! You haven't dropped dead yet. But that doesn't stop me seeing each individual grey hair as a tiny shoot of failure. Like millions of us, I've been indoctrinated into believing the aging process some how reeks of indignity. I've been conditioned to view everything from the POV of a conceited twenty-something. My brain's lodged near the bottom of the ladder while my body clambers creakingly toward the top. Look at those silver flecks; that foul, rotting carcass: you stink of shame, you disgusting loser.

When you're young, anyone a decade older or more can seem like a gauche joke, tragically unaware of their own crashing irrelevance. They're either hopelessly out-of-touch (LOL! He's never heard of Lady Gaga!), embarrassingly immature (Ugh! He listens to Lady Gaga!) or hovering awkwardly in-between (Pff! He uses Lady Gaga as a catch-all reference for youth!). At the same time, you somehow believe that when – if – you ever grow to be so impossibly ancient yourself, you'll be wiser and less embarrassing. How could you not be? These people are just pathetic.

The good news is that when you get there, you are wiser – albeit only slightly. Chances are you're still flailing around, just as clueless about What Happens Next. Slightly more terrified at what the world might have in store, but slightly more confident in your ability to pilot a way through. And the only real wisdom you've gained is a fresh understanding of just how ignorant and arrogant you were in the past: a realisation that the joke was ultimately on you. Pointing and laughing at your own destiny is futile. The harder you sneer at the old, the more uncomfortable you feel when you age.

And unless you die, you will age. Age and age and age, to a previously unimaginable degree, to the farthest reaches of "age space" and beyond. To the point where, one day, the shadow chancellor is younger than you. At which point you experience a subtle, cathartic little death – and thus liberated, finally start to grow up and get on with it."

- http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/12/charlie-brooker