I’m writing outside at the coffee shop and, sitting at a table a couple feet behind me, is a 20-something white woman in black hipster clothes (combat boots, yada yada) and half a head of jet-black hair. The other half of her head, the shaved half, has a five o’clock shadow. She is on the phone, and from her phone conversation, which it is manifestly impossible not to hear, I gather that she’s in a band. At some point, whoever is on the phone asks her if she knows of any available drummers. 

As it turns out, I myself have been itching to play a little recreational reggae lately (I play guitar, more or less). So, when she hangs up, I crane my head over my shoulder and say, “Excuse me, miss, sorry to bother you, but I overheard your call just now and I’m actually looking for a bass player around my age who likes reggae. Do you know of any?” 

She lifts her gaze from her phone. She looks at me. At first I can’t quite decipher her facial expression. I only know I suddenly feel oddly uncomfortable. “No,” she says, “I don’t know of any.”

It is then that I realize what I am seeing in her face. It’s an unmistakable phenomenon. I am seeing my own complete non-existence. What is being reflected back at me in this woman’s eyes is the empty void that she sees in a late-50s man. 

It isn’t contempt but I feel sure it could turn into contempt on a dime if, for some unimaginable reason, by some monstrous impertinence on my part, she was forced to take keener note of my entity-hood. To be clear: I’m not talking about being seen (or not seen) as a sexual object – simply as an extant human person. 

Ralph Ellison’s novel, The Invisible Man, was about many aspects of the oppression of African Americans. But one of those aspects had to do with white people plain old not seeing African Americans. I think a similar invisibility thing happens, in this country, to older people.

I feel like this young woman with the half-shaved head was a pure product of our youth-worshipping culture. In other words, it wasn’t just the hormonal swagger injected into her by evolution, the tiara of self-importance placed on her head by Mother Nature due to her brief ability to breed. Rather, it was the cartoonish magnification of that biological importance by an (according to me) adolescent and youth-obsessed culture. To be fair, I know plenty of people in their 20s and 30s who do not look at me the way this woman did. But I’m just saying: When you get a dose of this stuff, it is chilling.

Here’s a related anecdote from the trenches of the very same coffee shop. It was observed by a friend of mine, as he sat in the coffee shop working on his computer. Apparently, a man in his mid-to-late 50s stepped up to the counter to place his order. 

The particular barista who was helping him is covered in tattoos. Lots of spooky skulls and bloody daggers and whatnot. She’s got kind of a “Satan-lite” thing going on. Satan-adjacent. Satan-curious. In the summer she almost always wears shorts and tank tops, so you see lots of her tattoos, even when you try not to. After placing his order, he said to the barista, “Great tattoos.” 

Evidently, upon hearing this compliment, she spun around, pointed an accusatory finger at the man, and said, “Don’t you ever say that!” 

The man was visibly shocked. Bewildered, he said, “I wasn’t hitting on you…it wasn’t sexual…” 

She cut him off: “No! You don’t ever say that!” 

Now obviously, her reaction is fucked up on way more levels than I have the time, or the stomach, to go into in this post. Here I just want to call attention to the role of age in this interaction. I believe that this barista would never have taken that psychotically imperious tone if the customer had been a man her age (she’s probably in her late 20s). Plainly, in her worldview, older people are benighted, subhuman, vaguely yucky creatures shuffling around annoyingly on her planet – a planet that belongs to the glorious young. One chastises these older people as one pleases, as if one is the emperor Nero. 

Despite all appearances, this is not actually supposed to be a post about “ageism.” The term ageism would sound like I’m laying claim to a species of victimhood. And okay, fine, I guess I do sometimes feel hurt by the phenomenon – but that’s my own little jukebox number and I try to take responsibility for it whenever it starts up. I’ve read that ageism can have real economic consequences for many older people. Older people are often unable to get (or keep) jobs for which they are objectively well-qualified and so on. 

I’m just writing this post because I think it’s extremely important to be aware that, if you’re “older” – whatever that means to you – you are definitely receiving, from younger people and from the entire culture that adores and dotes upon them, very clear and specific messages about your value. And they are not good messages. The more aware you become of this dark and icky voodoo, the more you can let it bounce off you. 

Adi Da quotes I am reminded of:

“The usual human being, even by virtue of birth itself, has or acquires ‘psychological clocks,’ tacit beliefs regarding how his health and vitality are supposed to develop or degenerate according to his age. These clocks are generally an ‘age mythology’ that tends to perpetuate itself from generation to generation. Our habits and conditions of living tend to reflect our psychology and beliefs, and human beings do in fact become, develop, and degenerate in accordance with their subjective clocks. But the ‘clocks’ may be changed, if they are arbitrarily established and negative in effect…”

“If an individual lives a spiritual life, founded in truth and love, and practices a vitalizing or regenerative regimen of diet and life-activity in general, then he can change the clocks that are set by conventional beliefs and habitual reactivity. To begin with, he must simply and intelligently release all belief in the old clocks – the assumptions of necessary disease and degeneration…”

“Part of the belief psychology of these ‘clocks’ is that the body necessarily loses its vitality with aging. Life, like sex, is felt always to move toward a crisis of emptying, or the discharge of life….We are psychologically predisposed to expect and experience the progressive failure of experiential life as the years progress. We are convinced that aging will manifest a progressively degenerative cycle until death. And we can point to the experience of generations of human beings as proof that we are only being ‘realistic’ in our depressed convictions.”

“The degenerative crisis and its progressive cycle are, however, not necessary. They are likely, unless there is a complete change in the disposition and habits of the individual, but they are not necessary.”

If you ask me (you didn’t), one excellent way to reject debased cultural “norms” about aging is to subscribe to a new blog! How about this one?