I just turned 55. I don’t think of it as a big deal. 55 is a fun number, but I remember looking forward to 2020 because it was a fun number, and most people didn’t like the year 2020.
My brother-in-law brought up a site listing all the discounts available to people over 55, and none appealed to me. He is turning 55 in a few months, so I think he was motivated more to research for himself than to educate me.
Except golfing. Many lower-tier courses give a roughly 10% discount to people over 55. I will gladly take those.
Since I turned 17 and could go to R-rated movies, nothing exciting has happened on my birthday. Looking back now, I overestimated the value of going to R-rated movies. The R rating is a warning to me now. It says this movie is either too raunchy or has too much violence for me to enjoy.
Even turning 18 wasn’t very exciting. It happened in a non-election year, so I had nothing to vote on, and nobody was having me sign contracts. The truth is, I slipped into adulthood without any fanfare. Ho hum.
How important is age? In my opinion, not really. I’m on Facebook and friends with many people I went to High School with. We are all the same age. Some, like me, seem to be aging, and others, like my wife and classmate, don’t seem to be aging.
Recently, I arrived at a city park to play pickleball first thing in the morning. (two signs of aging). We noticed the gate to the courts had broken off. A fellow player and older person said, “It had to be the young people who play at night. Probably a teenager.”
What? Why a teenager?
I remember being a teenager; in addition to not being able to go to R-rated movies or being allowed to vote, my fellow teenagers got blamed for a lot of things we didn’t do. I remember being upset about it. Now, as an old person, should I blame them for things I have no idea who did them?
Yesterday, the same day the gate was broken, two people older than me reacted to poor performance in a Pickleball game by throwing their rackets. Not a sign of maturity. Maybe they came back later and broke the gate. Doubtful, but you get the point.
I think people of all ages tend to set aside the concept of treating others the way they want to be treated and blame people generically for things they have no basis for blaming them for.
I remember watching television shows and attending PG movies as a young man. In those movies, the older people always considered the young generation lazy. In those cases, the younger generation were the people who are now Baby Boomers (Gilligan, Eddie Haskell, Lenny and Squiggy, Ralph Malph, or the entire cast of American Graffiti).
So, as I age, I will settle for three takeaways. I’ll be blamed for less, and I shouldn’t blame others without better information; plus, I should save a little on golf.