Category: Ageing
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Old and Jaded
The trick is to get old without becoming jaded. My valued colleague H. N. couldn't pull it off. He had a certain depth and a certain wisdom, and we were on good terms. He knew how to take my intensity and he wasn't threatened by my intelligence: his was a healthy self-confidence. But he had…
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The Visage of Disillusion
The faces of the elderly, especially those of old men, often betray disillusionment with life: they've seen through it. It's a business that doesn't cover its costs. (Schopenhauer) Women too are among the disillusioned, but they are 'under-represented.' That is because women as a group are more child-like than men as a group. Is that…
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Just Getting Started at 70
A valued correspondent offers, I'm 70 years old, but I feel like I'm just getting started. Maybe that's a common experience. I follow not far behind, and I can relate to the sentiment. I am just getting started as I near the end of the trail. The clock is running and I feel like a…
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How to Grow Old and the Question of an Immortality Worth Wanting
Sage advice from Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) who grew old indeed. The best part of his short essay follows: I think that a successful old age is easiest for those who have strong impersonal interests involving appropriate activities. It is in this sphere that long experience is really fruitful, and it is in this sphere that…
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The Mid-Life Crisis and the Happiness Curve: Life is Better After Fifty
Here: The mid-life crisis is a cliché: balding, paunchy man in red sports car, frantically trying to convince himself that women still find him attractive. Implicit in the word “crisis” is a sudden change. You wake up some day in your forties to realize that you are no longer young. The resulting angst—it’s all straight…
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Becoming Old and Being Old: A Paradox
Most if not all want to become old, but few if any want to be old. ………………… That's an old thought, not original with me, but I do not know who deserves the attribution. Its literary effect trades on equivocation. In one sense, an old thing is a thing that has been in existence a…
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A Use for Ageing
Can I come to see myself as others see me? One way is by ageing: I become other than myself. The old man truly bent on self-knowledge can become as objective about his younger selves as he is about his contemporaries if he so desires. But he had better have an honest journal or diary…
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Compensation
To compensate us for loss of hearing, old age grants us the wisdom to appreciate that most of what is said is not worth hearing in the first place.
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Cornelius Plantinga on Cicero on Growing Old
Here
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Young to the Young
Ancient and tired, this world is yet young to the young. With each generation the process of disillusionment starts over again.
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A Philosopher on the Midlife Crisis
Kieran Setiya, The Midlife Crisis. An outstanding essay. What exactly is a midlife crisis? In the form that will concern us, then, the midlife crisis is an apparent absence of meaning or significance in life that allows for the continued presence of reasons to act. Although it is often inspired by the acknowledgement of mortality,…
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‘Baby Boomer’ Defined
Michael Kinsley, Old Age: A Beginner's Guide, Tim Duggan Books, 2016: Boomers — short for baby boomers — are Americans born during the "baby boom" that followed the end of World War II, as millions of couples tried to make up for lost time. Boomers include everybody born in the years between 1946 — the…
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Juvenilia
I pulled out my scribblings from the summer of '66. Puerile stuff from a half-century ago. Painful in places. But earnest and sincere with a good line here and there. The old man honors the adolescent he was. I wrote for posterity, though I didn't realize it at the time. And I still do. The…
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Is Age Only a Number?
Some say age is only a number. Not quite. It is a number that measures something. You may as well say that temperature is only a number; you are only as hot as you feel. Face reality, but don't exaggerate how bad things are.