This came out of left field
It’s weird
Embarrassing
Frankly unbelievable
Possible? Yes!
I like old people!
Well, some old people.
This isn’t like me. My concept of old was grey, sallow, bitter, cold, bent over, diminished, sick, complaining. Dastardly. Death. Anti-positive, true, but don’t get me wrong – even if I avoid old like the plague, I have respect. But time flies. Evasion hones. Old scares. Stay away.
That was pre-2023.
2023 and 24 were the same except for one – as it then seemed – innocuous thing: I joined a hiking club. Not fancy (no special gear) or hard (no rock climbing). Twelve to 16 kilometers per hike with an elevation change of no more than 500 meters. Cinch on the physical side. Everest on the social side. I abhor meeting new people. Almost a phobia. My heart rate increases, muscle tone decreases. And indeed on my first outing in September 2023 my shy-o-meter maxed as I approached the group I’d be hiking with weekly for the next year. Maxed because the youngest person other than myself was at least 70 years old! That was the kid of the group. I was the embryo. Half the group were in their 80s with a sprinkling of 90s. God. Couldn’t turn and walk away. I was in it up to my eyebrows.
Below is a discombobulated ramble about age. Birthdays, responsibility, free will, maintaining control, one’s aging and one’s perception of age, acceptance. Even if in some ways we can stop, slow, mask, or ignore it, aging is the ultimate.
Where old?
I’ve spent some time trying to figure out from where came this recent epiphany of liking old people. Boredom? Curiosity? Head injury? COVID? And I’ve tried reflecting on what old actually is. Outcasts? Parasites? Would-be zombies? Cruel hyperbole aside, I appreciate more than ever that what was my bias actually reflects a pervasive problem in society. A problem with the young, the active, the integrated. Hey, I don’t see many 20-year-olds chumming with 100+s! But then again.
It’s true we make exceptions with loved ones – but even then. Tell me: how much time do you want to spend with supercentenarians? “Mumm” curiosity aside, probably not much. But once the first minutes have elapsed you might be surprised to realize you want to spend a few more.
And I hear you say: “well, old can be young!”. A twenty-year-old is ‘old’ to someone who’s ten, who’s ‘old’ to a five-year-old, and so on up and down the number scale. But is a 100 old to 90? I suspect that beyond a certain age biologically, chronologically and mentally, old is just old. My own recent unexpected realization is that chronological age is often just a veneer. When the mask falls, what might then appear is a person seemingly far older or younger than their age. A 70-year-old might as well be 100. Or, more a delight: an 80-year-old really seems 30. Or the magic of when age vanishes altogether.
Masks take the right circumstances to fall. Time can be enough to produce that moment, but sometimes all the time in the world is not enough. My own experience is that out-of-comfort-zone situations are sure-fire to give glints of a more inner-self. Bad events, marvelously good ones. Ones that meld good and bad – and specifically the seeds of my epiphany: hiking. You can comfortably talk while hiking without losing your breath. Conversation during medium exertion is underappreciated for getting to know people. This turned out to be key in my shift to liking the old.
We all have masks or membranes. Unless getting help from a shrink, laying it out to a priest or babbling to a hair stylist, we can talk all we want but we won’t reveal anything particularly special about ourselves. Membranes protect us from others but also from ourselves. This is the logic of therapy – the oracle cannot be not someone we know and hence can be trusted with our inner secrets because they are not part of our network and so won’t tell anyone who we do know. Some of these secrets are so protected as to be inaccessible to anyone, ourselves included, but nevertheless under the right conditions, conjurable. The symptoms are everywhere and so mundane as to escape notice. They take different forms in people of different ages. Above 30s obsess at maintaining the vitrine and dress, make-up and act to simulate a desired achievable age. In contrast, below 20s often try to appear a few years older than they actually are. Trendy shirts, tattoos, taboos. Beyond 40s often try to show that their strength, endurance and memory are intact, such as coy squinting and quoting either obscure poetry or hip nostalgic references. 60+ oldies on the down-slope give up on the facile. Rather they content themselves to eat healthy, take supplements, use that magic cream for wrinkles and perhaps walk 30 minutes a day to extend their lives indefinitely. All of the above decorate the membrane. They impress upon others and protect ourselves from ourselves.
The most perplexing group are the in-betweens – the 30s to 50s. They are demonstrably aging but feel good enough to really believe (and often exclaim) that they haven’t aged a bit. Those of you towards the upper end of this age range tenderly remembering your 30s and 40s might very well say “oh hogwash!”, “balderdash!”, “poppycock” or something similarly arcane. The truth is that we start to age[1] already in our twenties. The reasons for why we can keep-up or even improve in a remarkable range of endeavors are maturity, experience and health. A great athlete in her 30s is great not so much because she is less prone to injury, has a lower resting heart rate or can achieve more power without overdue fatigue, but rather because she has been perfecting her sport intelligence: knowing the potential dangers, better assessments of physical potential, technique, etc. I know of no sports that max out physiologically at or beyond 30 years-old. You will name a dozen sports that contradict what I just said, but the problem is that you can’t dismiss the effects of maturity and experience on athletic feats such as agility, strength or endurance.
Evidence for my claim – that is the shift from maximal capacities of speed, strength and endurance to contextual reaction, tactics and strategy – is bolstered by the fact that the age distributions of professionals in all sports are convex, and shift to older ages as sports require more experience. Look at ages in medals in the Olympic games. The age distribution of the 100m dash (low complexity) is left-shifted to younger ages compared to ages in equestrian events (higher complexity). As difficult and involved as optimizing sequences over 10 seconds in the 100m is, it takes more training and time to optimize symbiosis with a horse in equestrian events. Fat chance to find 38-year-old Usain Bolt competitively running the 100! This is not only since he has more interesting alternatives to competing (and nothing to prove anyway, which is one reason for why some athletes retire), but because at his age he would need more time and effort expended in training than he did at 25 to be competitive at the highest level. This said, equestrian is not only for 20 and 30-somethings. Teenage equestrian Olympic medalists do emerge from time to time.
Total tangent
I’m certainly not cut out for endurance, but at 54 years of age I did successfully complete the south half of the Robert Louis Stevenson Trail in the Lozère region of France (120km in 6 days). I was with a friend who was in much better shape than me and although at times had difficulties keeping up, felt that I showed some decent form in completing most day treks in about 6-7 hours, meaning averaging 3km/hour, which is good in the hilly terrain of the RLS trail.
Anyway, my retiree hiking club members were at 2.5km/hour in similar terrain, but this was fine and meant that talking would not suffer from the huffing and puffing of faster or harder treks. Naturally, not only was I faced with geezers, but they were French geezers! My French is decent and although I have embraced French culture, I totally lack French nostalgic zeitgeist. When my many French friends, wife (who’s French) or wife’s family talks about French culture in the 1960s and 70s, I draw a massive blank. The feeling is mutual - they have no idea about American TV, music or political culture. I often think something like “such a pity that they did not experience Gilligan's Island, Space Fidgets or Watergate!”. When I hear French nostalgic references I realize just how important references are to culture and society. So to get to the point, my abilities to fruitfully interact with the French, no less French geezers, is pretty limited.
Kids
I see kids as young old people. Unpredictable. Usually uninteresting. Oddly frail.
I gravitate to my age plus or minus a few years. Remembering way back, I mostly interacted with other kids my age simply because they were in the same classrooms. Thinking about it now I realize most of my same-age friendships had a competitive tint or at least a wait-and-seeness such that I was all to often on my guard. I didn’t have the intellectual maturity to be in touch with my survival-fight-or-flight instinct no less wonder whether other kids were like me. Perhaps my méfiance was deep-rooted although honestly, I have no recollection of much friendship trauma[2], save the real disruption when my parents moved house from Van Nuys to Northridge, California. This was in 1964 when I was just shy of 4. I have a handful of pre-four-year-old memories, one being very happy when together with slightly two older kids from the Van Nuys neighborhood where we lived. I clearly recall clamoring to play with them after having moved into our new house in Northridge and a vague memory of my mother once actually driving me to the other end of the Valley to play with these friends. I had a younger brother and a number of cousins in the LA area, but somehow playing with them was not the same. And indeed it was a tense experience to enter a brand-new kid-circle at 4, both the many children on the cul-de-sac where I lived and in school.
Now thinking back, I had an uncanny ability to divine the ages of other children. I could do this for kids within a few years of my age and had this ability into my early teenage years. For kids born in my year, I was able to accurately guess ages with a few months of the actual age and for those a year or more younger or older, I usually got the year right. I was the kid wandering the playground dumbly asking the ages of other kids and plausibly giving no sign that I was comparing each to my estimate. I figure that other kids could do this too but frankly I’ve never discussed this silly ability with anyone.
My comrades at the time were my age plus or minus a few years. I viewed 30+year-olds as would-be elders and treated them with deference and respect. Seeing a 30-year-old was seeing my parents. 60-year-olds were ancient - my grandparents. Would-be and true elders were parents of a sort and so I felt a bit like one of their kids or grand-kids. The young interact with their family elders differently than with other youth and as such it was not until my generationalism started dissipating – that is, when I entered my 50s – that I began to see relative ages very differently.
Perhaps the age-guessing game is about how kids learn to size-up their peers. Peers for children are within a couple years of age. Peers for elders can easily be many years older or decades younger. And this somehow seems written in our DNA or in society because we perceive time differently as we age. A week to a 6-year-old is perhaps like a year to a 60-year-old. Looking a random kid in the eye and thinking “he’s 5 months older than me” is like an elder with all her marbles doing the same to another elder and getting it right within 5 years. This age-related dilation could of course be written-off to reduced ability due to aging itself. Speaking for myself, I started noticing the dilation of time when I entered my 20’s. Days were becoming hours, months fled like weeks and years were something less than a child-year. I recall having a conversation about time dilation with my two college roommates. We each had our theories for why we perceive time moving more quickly as we age. I tend to favor the Groundhog Day syndrome although the relativistic idea seems perfectly credible. All I can say is that my interest and ability to gauge age evaporated a long time ago.
Birthdays
This brings me to something we adults easily forget, unless of course we have kids ourselves. Half birthdays! Unless you are very very old, it’s easy to remember your birthday. This, if for no other reason, because of its positive feedback (party, cake, cards, gifts). So sounds obvious why kids make an additional push for half-birthdays.
Until 2 our mother refers to our age in months. Why 2 years? Months make sense until 12, but beyond, why not just say “she’s a year old” or “she’s coming on her second year” rather than “she’s 21 months old”. Toddlers themselves generally don’t know their ages, or if they somehow do, will never refer to their age in months. And strangely you won’t hear a parent refer to their child as being “27 months old”. A 27-month-old will be referred to as “2 years and 3 months”. And even stranger, there’s a certain point where everyone seems to know the divisions become whole and half years… and know that this is valid until about 10 years. You won't hear "he's coming on 17 and a half in two weeks" very often.
Birthdays are not special in and unto themselves since nothing biological actually happens. Rather, birthdays are special because they provide an infrequent (once a year) reason to look at the clock, celebrate a special norm that each and every one of us has and have fun. So why not twice a year… or three or four times a year? Too frequent loses cachet. But what’s too frequent anyway? The birthday norm between parents and little kids appears to be 2: the full birthday and the half-birthday 6 months later. As important as it can be to youngsters most of us forget this as we enter adulthood and for good reason since it becomes increasingly foolish beyond about 10 years of age. Or does it?
As a youngster, I do recall anticipating my half birthdays. My half birthday was on March 15th and although it did not have the full-blown party of the annual event my parents would wish me a “Happy half birthday!”. There is a funny and unfortunate nota-bene here: Half birthdays become complicated when there are no days corresponding to month-ends 6 months after the real birthday. These turn out to be births on: May 31 (no November 31st), August 29 (3 out of every 4 years), August 30, 31, October 31 and December 31. Being smack in the middle of a month I was not concerned by this. I figure my last half birthday must have been at 9½.
As I grow older my own birthdays become increasingly sideline and even ridiculous. So I’ve taken to spontaneous pranks. Two anecdotes.
In an earlier life I was the editor of a leading scientific journal called Ecology Letters. Indeed, my path to this was very unexpected and in a future blog I’ll visit what certainly changed my life, post 35, and changed the lives of many others. What could a scientific journal possibly have to do with a birthday? Well, the journal and my usually-embarrassing unpredictable unpredictability crossed paths at a lunch to celebrate the success of the journal with the publishers. I had an absolutely wonderful professional relationship with Blackwell Publishing – they were completely supportive of the journal at the highest level. We met two or more times a year during my tenure as editor, from 1998 to 2008 and I believe it was in 2003 that the incident occurred.
On that fateful day the editorial assistant and I traveled to England for our annual meeting. At the meeting we presented the latest figures of journal performance, including manuscript submission and rejection rates (for some odd reason journals usually report percent rejected and not accepted), times from submission to first decision and times to publication. These were basic journal statistics, but the one indicator that everyone cared about was the so-called Impact Factor (IF), which at the time was the property of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Very briefly, the IF of a journal Y in year X is calculated as the sum of citations in a select group of journals, of papers published in journal Y in years X-1 and X-2, divided by the number of papers published in Y in those years. So, an index of let’s say 5 would indicate that the average paper recently published in our journal was cited a total of about 5 times a year in journals covered by ISI. The top journals in the disciplines of ecology and evolution at that time had IFs ranging from about 2 to 5, and Ecology Letters was now past this approaching an IF of 10 when I stepped down as editor in 2009. Needless to say, Blackwell was ecstatic about the success of the journal and so rolled-out the red carpet whenever I visited their offices. Our meetings always culminated in a lunch or dinner in a nice restaurant and on this very memorable occasion we were a group of about 15 for lunch in Oxford. Blackwell took care of making the reservation and I recall that although we were a few minutes late we were cheerfully greeted by the hostess. We entered the restaurant single-file in a long line, and I was at the back, chatting with some of my colleagues as we slowly approached our table. We were all a bit worn out by our meeting and so were anxious to sit down and enjoy lunch together, when the hostess approached me since being the last entry, she probably suspected that I made the reservation. She asked me what was the occasion. Her curiosity was probably compounded by the fact that we were very well-dressed and at least two languages were being spoken as we filed past her. She looked at me attentively, very slightly bowed to gain my confidence, and said in an almost-whisper: “May I ask, what’s the occasion?”. I was surprised she was addressing me since I didn’t make the reservation and figured that it would just be too complicated to explain why. The others continued to the table. Something totally random popped into my head and I whispered “It’s my birthday”. No one else was in earshot range and she delightfully acknowledged what I said, but I figured it was ludicrous that the birthday boy himself would announce such a thing. I thought the information would just get lost in no small part because Blackwell had made the reservation in the first place and likely mentioned the real reason for our lunch engagement. It would soon become clear that as far as the restaurant was concerned, I had veto power.
So our lunch went as lunches go and it was time for coffee. To be honest having discussed so many things at the table I had forgotten about the birthday crank when the whole restaurant staff approached the table slowly singing “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!” carrying a cake with lit candles atop in my direction.
My colleagues joined in the singing as if they knew it was my birthday, which made the scene all the more camp. The restaurant staff didn’t know my name and so timed this so that the “happy birthday dear ___” was sung in unison with my colleagues. As I sheepishly blew out the candles with silly smirk looming in my head, I anticipated embarrassment followed by a comeuppance. Well, without exception, everyone at the table stared at me stunned, surprised, delighted, or whatever, waiting for an explanation. Luckily, the staff did not stay for long enough to digest the farce, though I recall seconds of uneasy, absolute silence as the receptionist cut the cake, wished me a happy birthday and left. The burning question was then politely put forward by a daring member of the Blackwell team: “Is today your birthday, Michael?”. I have decent comedy timing, so I paused to the perfect millisecond and adjusting the tambor of my voice and facial expression said anticipating the clack of the slap stick: “no”. Everyone at the table absolutely burst out laughing in apparent admiration and indeed, to this day, whenever I cross paths with colleagues present that day, they first reminisce about Ecology Letters and then say “I do remember that lunch….”.
The second anecdote is a hyperbole of the first. I spent the academic year 2013-2014 as a Fellow at the Wissenshaftskolleg zu Berlin (“Wiko”). I didn’t really know what to expect when I arrived (on my real birthday), except that I was to head a Focus Group on the evolution of cancer. There were 8 researchers in our group, and we were one of several Focus Groups, the remaining 30 or so residents working in areas of art history, politics, law, and culture, just to name a few. The residents each had a project but there was no pressure to actually work on the project no less complete it. The core idea of Wiko is that residents have time to think. Simple and wonderful. So much so that at the end of the stay many residents truly don’t want to return home. Wiko unlocks untapped abilities, creativity, philosophies and even personalities that residents either ignored or knew but veiled.
I was in some ways the epitome of this law. Perhaps my main personal discovery was overcoming the angst of parachuting into faraway places on my own. By faraway I don’t mean geographical – I’ve clearly done that. What I mean is overcoming inertia – getting out of my comfort zone. The inertia of going to a nightclub to see an unknown band; the inertia of walking to nowhere in particular for hours on end; and the inertia of starting conversations with perfect strangers. And so I discovered different dimensions in people that went beyond talking to them and through meditation discovered different dimensions in myself. As naïve as it sounds there is something particular and particularly limited in conversation. I had friendly interactions over the year with several of the other fellows that were chalked-full of the worst misunderstandings. Indeed, I came away thinking that, friend or no friend, one year of daily contact is usually not enough for people to understand one another in any meaningful way. I also figured out that to know people you can only glimpse some small part of an unknowable whole. That’s maybe why photography of anonymous people touches us so deeply. I tried my own spin in Berlin on this and photographed hundreds of feet – or rather shoed feet. Not art by any stretch but surely artistic freedom of some sort. Indeed, freedom is what I discovered at Wiko and my strange fascination with age and birthdays percolated to the surface in the idea that… why not?... every day was my birthday! I surely went too far with this, since the joke became that whenever someone would ask me how I was doing, I would just say “Great! Today’s my Birthday!”. No cakes, no songs, and little surprise – and sure, after a couple months of this, people started really getting annoyed. Misunderstandings. I gracefully stopped.
Kids' Ramble – Responsibility and Free will
Some people want to be kids, be around kids or have kids. Others – many of them kids themselves – are just the opposite. We usually associate kid-ness with freedom, fun, potential, innocence, naivete. Kids are either irresponsible or not expected to be responsible. This is why parents and educators, but also other kids, impart on little ones how they should act. There are many subtle and many not-so-subtle ways in which kids are molded when either following or not following code. Of course, different kids have different experiences in this regard and are naturally different from one another anyway, which could explain why adults themselves vary so much in responsibility.
I consider myself to be highly responsible and this is why I do my best to avoid the Play-dough-that-is-kids. I avoid kids because I want to treat them like adults and not like kids. As I believe strongly in unexpected bifurcations in life, I fear that in interacting with kids I might inadvertently change their life trajectories. Who knows which way a bifurcation goes? There’s a small but real chance that I propel the kid to into a bad trajectory. Kids are not anathema to me but I err on the side of avoiding looming bifurcations. I know, strange.
As far as I can relate to much younger people, I often wonder what they were like at even younger ages and what they’ll be like when they’re older. I muse similarly for people my age and older. What will that 15-year-old be like when he is 40? What was that 75-year-old like when she was 6? And so on. To what extent do we follow more or less predictable trajectories through life? This is a big question since it hints at the related bigger question of the extent to which we really have power to change our lives. Possibly taking just a tinsy turn, do we have (any) free will? Most would answer in the affirmative since we can do things that nothing from the past appears to predict. But appear is not clear.
Trajectories appear to be contingent on the choices we make. These bifurcation points are hard to predict in advance and seem mundane when they actually happen. In fact, we often don’t know that they happened until (much) afterward. This is another good reason to believe we don’t always have free will in our life trajectories since even if choices appear to be free it’s often impossible to predict their mid or long-term outcomes.
Even you believe in many-worlds, another argument against free will is that only a single sequence of events can and does happen in a given world trajectory. This is nothing other than the idea of perfect causation. Perfect causation is fate in the extreme. Yet, a more down to earth reality of many-worlds – superdeterminism – could give the illusion of Newtonian causation and thwart free will. Even if there is random jiggle in otherwise pristine billiard-ball cause and effect, the vibration merely influences (or not) the trajectory; that is, if jiggle dominates cause, then we have the illusion of free will; if cause dominates jiggle, then free will is an illusion.
Age obs
To this day, when I meet someone, the first thing I think is “what’s his age”? or the contrasting “how old is she”? This has become so routine that I don’t even notice. Sometimes I’ll try to hit it on the nose: “66 years old”! But more often, I’ll go for a range: “50s”. Indeed, as I grow older myself it gets harder to judge ages within a few, let alone 10 years.
The real bellwether of one’s own age is being surprised to hear someone is much older or younger than they appear. If they look much older, then comes the explanation: “they’ve had a hard life”, “they’ve abused themselves”, “they got bad genes”, or “maybe it’s just a bad day”. Less frequent are situations where someone looks significantly younger than their chronological age. Thinking about it, age biases are bizarre. Why should old people just look old, whereas middle-aged people can look a lot older or younger than they actually are and young people just look young? The only way I’ll see a 27-year-old as looking like a 14-year-old is if that person is shorter, more immature, or less physically developed than expected. Key here is latitude. Latitude is both large numbers (ages) and possibilities of variation in the path to these numbers. We parse age-related features but may not be more accurate in doing this as evolutionary theory might predict when we are young. Possible signs of physiological aging typically begin with gray hair, a slower gait, reduced skin and muscle tone and creaky speech. Many of us evade one or more of these until we are in our 40s or even 50s, and the latitude is such that the occasional 60-year-old can pass for a 40-something and a 50-year-old might unanimously be viewed as a 65-plus. The important question is what influences our perception of age? Appearance? Behavior? To what extent is another’s age in the eye of the beholder?
And why care about age at all?
Putting on my Darwinian hat, presumably there is something beneficial to our well-being about accurately determining another’s age. After all if I’m looking for clues in the likelihood someone will follow me or rather when it would be profitable that I follow (trust) another, sussing age is a first indication of what might lay beneath. So just maybe we should care about the ages of others. Pushing this idea a bit our ability to quickly and accurately determine age might affect our survival and reproduction – our fitness – that is be under selection as a function of the ages at which the ability is most important. What are these ages? Starting from birth it’s clear that all interactions are with older individuals, especially individuals we must trust (parents, cousins, clan members) and so there is little need to accurately know an other’s age. As we enter childhood making pacts (friendships) in-group or with like-age members of other groups becomes increasingly important for mutual help. Relative-age-contingent-strategy is key. If as a kid I want to extract help from another kid based on having more power then perhaps I want an association with someone the same age or younger than me, that is, assuming that that person can provide something useful. I’ll also want to be weary of older kids looking for help from me without returning services but nevertheless I’ll be keen to ‘learn the ropes’ from these older kids. There is a balance in making, keeping and breaking pacts. As we get older, an ever-larger fraction of acquaintances is younger than us yet we also have increasing numbers of interactions with older people. It’s a mystery as to why we tend to increasingly delegate trust to older people as we ourselves age. Surely, experience is part of the reason but could it be that elders have less to gain than younger adults in terms of Darwinian fitness?
All this sounds cynical. But at some level age recognition merits explanation and the Darwinian one is a solid, parsimonious and testable candidate.
Badoldays
Even if divining birthyear is long gone, I can still predict generation. I’m a resolute Baby-Boomer and know a non-Boomer when I see one. Well, almost. The Boomer – Gen X transition is designated as 1964, meaning that if you take this literally, those born on December 31, 1963 are somehow different from Jan 1, 1964. Well, they sure are if you tell them so! Notwithstanding, being born in the middle of a “generation” likely gives one a different perspective than being on the cusp of two generations. But perspective on what?
The fact that we grow chronologically older (even if we did not actually age) means that successive generations are exposed to successive historical events. Events occur sequentially and can occupy different spaces and contexts. A distinct political event that follows social turmoil in a faraway country in 1954 is a very different beast from a nebulous social transformation that follows technological breakthroughs in the 2010s. The possibilities are huge and we each build our own personal encyclopedia of those experienced as time passes. Each of us sees particular things in relevance to our own generation. These things might overlap in meaning for different generations but each generation inescapably still lives a given event somewhat differently. We are prisoners of our experience and experiences have an inescapable time signature.
One event type that is not so much an event but rather a cultural phenomenon is technology. I was a teenager in the 1970s when computing technology was entering the public sphere. Two anecdotes. In 1971, I was 10 years-old and in the same elementary school as a kid (Eric W.) whose father worked in computing and Eric invited me to his house one day to show me his dad’s computer. I can still see where the computer was in their garage. The computer amounted to a massive typewriter with a paper spool. It was housed in a cabinet, connected to a phone line and I remember Eric turning it on, dialing and giving the computer a simple command – surely “1+1” – and it returning 2. Very legit and not cocky. Although I felt privileged, for the 100+ kilo machine and beyond the few commands Eric entered this was not a terribly exciting experience. In the early 70s the first hand-held calculators were entering households (as I recall, my first hand-held calculator cost about $100!) and so the computer demonstration seemed massively lightweight. However, what made the visit well-worth it was a poster above the computer. It was of a well-dressed engineer, exasperated, hair disheveled, with an axe in hand, having just destroyed a (smoking as I recall) computer. I distinctly remember telling my friend “I don’t really understand this poster”. He explained it to me and I told him that that’s indeed what I had understood.
Second anecdote. In 1975 I was in 10th grade and took a course in geometry. Consistent with the D-grade I got on the midterms, my memories of the class are non-existent; that is, except for the wonderful access that students had to computer terminals. For whatever reason, the computer room (H1) at our high school was accessible via the geometry classroom (H2).
Most students couldn’t care less about computers but I was intrigued and learned some very basic programming and wrote a few simple programs (occasionally with dreaded infinite loops). The main amusement I have now of that experience was just how cumbersome executing a program was. We would punch the commands on special cards (or pencil-in boxes), pile the cards up in order of the commands and place the cards in a stack on the computer ready for reading – a so-called “batch” or “job”. This technology did not seem absurd at the time because we had no to-be innovations for comparison. Thinking about it more now the biggest nightmare was actually dropping your card stack. If you were smart you would write the card number on the back of each card before dropping. I did this on my second or third batch.
These were the days before PCs, email and the Internet. And here enters a postscript to the two anecdotes. In 1977, 11th grade, I attended a technology fair in LA. I saw my first public lecture, which was delivered by an older gentleman who was remarkably charismatic and bubbled with enthusiasm about the innovation represented by “floppy” disks. They were massively better than card stacks and the slightly more compact punched tape rolls. The large audience at the lecture were from high schools all around Los Angeles. We marveled at these strange innovations and some particularly erudite kids showed off their jargony knowledge after the show that made, me anyway, head prematurely to the bus returning home. And so I came away from that lecture confused. I didn’t see how computers would change my life no less had any inkling as to what the “magic” of floppy disks really was. As far as I knew, computers just were massive, powerful calculating robots. Not even three years later I would make a decision involving computing that would totally change the course of my life.
Kids again
I seemed to do things that few other kids did. This included geeking-out at simple-minded TV cartoons, spending tens of hours a week engrossed by baseball cards (and anything collectable), and having a massively-ever-present survival instinct. Whereas the first two claims were verifiable the latter was something personal. I never really felt particularly in need and rarely felt threatened, but yet the shield was always there. It must have been in my genes. Although I figure all kids have this instinct, to this day I know of no one who has even alluded to this powerful feeling.
Reflecting back, I was pretty damn confused. I struggled to make sense of my environment, social contexts and especially what goes on in other people’s heads. I believe that in social interactions we consciously or unconsciously either seek something or don’t really care. We are polite and eventually go away. For me anyway, meeting a new person entails some anxiety of how to interact. Maybe a better way to put it is that I generally go into an interaction not really caring, make some small talk while devising a plan about how I can get away. As I mentioned above, I usually loathe meeting someone new. Embarrassingly this extends to some people I know. Just to clarify: It’s not them – it’s me! Perhaps I feel entitled not to have to go through motions, feel superficial, contemplate having to put-out someone’s senseless fires, etc. And yes, I can often detect when others view meeting me the same way. Very awkward. So uncomfortable.
Age definitely does come into the angst equation. I have less when I meet someone about my age, but again, I’m increasingly less able to discern ages. I should have said this at the beginning of this essay, but nowadays I break ages into six categories. (1) babies, kids and young teens; (2) old teens into 20s or even early 30s; (3) early 30s into 40s; (4) 40s into mid-50s; (5) my age group: late 50s into 60s and finally (6) those who appear well older than me and beyond. The “and beyond” is important since a 70-year-old will usually not look like a 95-year-old, but believe me, many exceptions exist! So, I lump them together. And this oddly brings me back to the point of this essay.
I like old people.
Virgos are fussy
I can’t help but notice details. For example, how straight someone’s wall posters, paintings and photos are hung. I can pick-off a millimeter tilt on a frame 30cm high from 3 meters away. Don’t know why this is but ‘things being square’ goes back to my early childhood. If I want someone to despise me then all I have to do is comment on the crooked frames on their wall. I cherish friendships and so only share unpopular honesties if asked. Responsibility again.
As I’ve gone through life, I’ve become increasingly fastidious. Paradoxically I write this off to my quest of perfection in control. (I’m not a control freak!). Control can be many things but to me it is a search for ease, predictability, comfort. It’s fostering good and preventing bad. Experience is key to control and age gives experience. On the one hand experience is efficiency. The time saved and energy conserved fostering good and staving-off bad that can be repurposed to fun stuff. On the other hand life can be too predictable and, oddly, the fun stuff becomes scarce. So the problem with being a control freak (which I’m not) is that we slip through age into comfort and boredom. I’ve only become aware of this recently and am working on dealing with my default of chercher la petite bête. To this, I’ve honed tricks to dissimulate my optimization and my retunue itself has come to be perfected. I’m master at defusing mess. The problem is old people are often messy and therefore in need. I’ve gotten over my fear that I’ll be obliged to help them or worse take care of them.
FIN
What is the point of this ramble? The various threads come together to weave something unexpected. My impulsiveness (recall Berlin and Oxford) led me to one day – out of nowhere – decide to join a hiking club in a nearby village. My shyness meant that I knew that I would not be talkative during our first outing. My shock was to drive to the meeting site only to see a group of 20 people all their 70s and beyond. These were not elderly people: they were as or more fit than I, and if you were blind and massaged their voices, you would swear they were decades younger.
Even if still work in progress I can say that I am taking a liking to old people. I’m still a little bit afraid of them, but I’m becoming more like them day by day. And I can say with certainty that had my random number generator not tell me to join a hiking club in the first place then I’d still be viewing the old as old.
NOTES
[1] Again, by aging, I mean changes to biology of the organism that lower function and resilience. Of course, aging is not “one size fits all”. Aging profiles differ between individuals, due to genetics, congenital and early post-natal environments, and more malleable choices throughout life.
[2] Bodyguards (oddly?) gravitated to me in primary school.
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