GAF, revisited

There's an article I've read variants of over the years, and that's currently circulating in Styles article and Jezebel post form. It's the Silver Linings of Aging piece; the specific age anchoring it can vary, but if it's anything much under 30, people will just laugh.

The point will inevitably be that getting older means caring less. It will come from a place of, everything's kind of sorted in life. The 'I'm old and haggard now' will be part self-deprecation, part genuine anxiety, and part humble-brag about having ticked whichever list of personal and professional achievements. Much of Tracy Moore's list on Jezebel amounts to, she's too old to have no money. Which is a great sentiment, if one that relies on upward mobility, or on aging meaning higher earning. The proverbial basement-dwelling millennial will also reach 30, if he hasn't already.

Other aspects, though, are not financial, but follow the same general pattern. For example: Being "too old" for parties and bars and casual friends one doesn't even like is a great big euphemism for having already found a partner. Plenty of people "too old" to be at the bars are there all the same, for the same reason younger adults are, and some who now think they're "too old" will, at 45, post-divorce, wind up back at them, and it won't be because they've gotten any younger.

On the one hand, yes, people do, on average, sort their lives out as they get older. On the other hand, life isn't just this smooth upwards progression of self-improvement. The physical-decline bit is unavoidable, but there's no guarantee of a corresponding raise for each wrinkle.

A too-old-to-care that addresses this, though, I'm OK with. And Dominique Browning's NYT one does:

The key to life is resilience, and I’m old enough to make such a bald statement. We will always be knocked down. It’s the getting up that counts. By the time you reach upper middle age, you have started over, and over again.

This could well be why, like memoir, the too-old-for-this genre works better coming from someone a bit older.

But my initial reason for this post, which I seem to have lost track of, relates to the whole issue of "caring." In an ideal, rational world, getting older would mean caring less about nonsense. And on the whole, it does. But not in the neat, done-with-that-silliness way these articles suggest. The stupid, neurotic sort of caring - the unproductive, time-suck kind of GAF - may wane, only to (what's the non-clichéd version of 'rear its ugly head'?) return unexpectedly. You can go for years without much worrying what you look like, or whether you've been included in some social gathering, and think everything's going great professionally, and then for whatever reason, something internal or external brings those feelings back. Anyone who's been an adult, or who has witnessed adults while "off" (that is, at home) is going to be aware of this phenomenon. OK, not anyone. But enough people that it seems somehow off - or maybe just aspirational? - to declare non-caring an inherent perk of getting older.