I Want To Be An Old Man

I have long believed that the only advantage conferred by senescence was that you were no longer troubled by the imperative passions of youth, where everything seems like it’s so important and meaningful, nor the anxieties of your middle years, when the realization of your own mortality forces you to confront the emptiness of life, causing you only pain and distress and an often crippling sense of futility. The benefit of old age, I thought, was the final easing of those burdens by an acceptance born of the steady accretion of sorrow and loss. But it turns out, particularly if you’re a man, that this seeming equanimity is the result of cognitive impairment, and basically you’re just not able to think anymore. Which, on further consideration, doesn’t actually sound all that terrible. [Via]

Photo by Ryan Jorgensen // Jorgo, via Shutterstock