As I age, I am told that I am becoming more and more conservative. I am also told this is normal. I am not sure what is happening but I seem to be moving slower and the social zeitgeist is passing me by.
I think when you are young, you are on the leading edge (or sometimes, even ahead) of the movement taking society forward.
When you are middle-aged, you start falling back. It isn’t that your views have suddenly become more rigid or conservative or regressive. In fact, they have not even stopped progressing. Except that your pace of progress is not keeping up with the society’s around you.
As you get older and older, and you live long enough, you fall back more and more, until you drop off right at the back and the entire society overtakes you.
This is true regardless of where you started from. You could have started at absolutely any point in the ideological spectrum as a young adult. But you will end up at the conservative end by the time you are a senior citizen. So, this is not just about liberals. Even conservatives probably become more conservative as they age.
There are only two ways to avoid this:
- Work hard to keep up. Have FOMO. Get panic attacks when you think your views are ageing as compared to youngsters or people who the media tells you to look up to. Attack your own idols who are ageing themselves, whenever they so much as look like slipping, even by accident. Make very loud and public noises about how woke you are and how these ‘Boomer’ uncles and aunties (of which you too are a part, but never mind) just don’t get it. Split hair. Nitpick. Find a fault in every hero of your movement. In every celebrated figure, past, present, even future. Bring them down. Join a lynch mob for someone who till yesterday was representing your movement, but said something that does not fit exactly into the new understanding of that something. Keep looking over your shoulder. Be snarky. Use sarcasm and rhetoric to drill home a point. Be one up. Tell others how easy it is to keep up and that their paranoia only shows their intrinsic bias and that if they have to worry about being good in these times, they are bad people inside. Tell them their questions are cute. Call them bad people without actually saying that to their face. Make memes. Share memes. Cancel things. Cancel people. Smirk at those who say times are changing too fast to keep up. Disagree with everything and everyone. Become a Marxist (no, not Karl, Groucho, who said, ‘Whatever it is, I am against it.’). Cultivate the superior look. Condescend. Patronise. Be the ‘elder’ while still trying to keep up with the youngest. Appear calm and serene over water pretending to manage all of this almost without trying. Paddle furiously underwater. Be a duck.
- Die young.
There is no other way.
Unless you accept that there are no good humans, only good intentions. And that as long as yours are honourable, and that you do not mean harm and are prepared to keep learning, there is nothing you need to panic about.
That you accept that you are ageing and will, by default, fall behind. And that does not make you wrong. Or a bad human. It only makes you slightly behind, and as long as you are willing to listen, you’d be fine.
That you decide to forgive yourself, your heroes, and even random strangers their weaknesses. And that you agree and accept that you, or anyone else, cannot be judged on a scale that only has zero or infinity on it all the time for every little thought that pops into your (or their) head.
That you don’t owe an explanation to everyone for everything. And that you are at peace with and in your skin.
I think I am too tired to do the first (keep up), too old to have died young, and as for being at peace with myself, if you can figure out how that is done, let me know, OK?
