The Beautiful Thing About Getting Older

Maybe it's not all downhill after age 25.

I love asking people older than me about how they’re experiencing life. We think we know what other people are experiencing but we do we really? Someone going through life in their 40s is totally foreign to me. But sometimes if you listen carefully, someone with 20 years more life experience than you can give you a little window into what your future might look like.

Not always. Age does not automatically mean wisdom. What I’m saying is a little more nuanced than that. It’s more like this: you can learn a lot about what your future might look like by observing what people at a later stage of life are struggling or grappling with. They don’t even have to say anything about it. But you can learn a lot just by how someone responds to a question.

The topic of aging in particular always brings strong opinions. By almost all accounts, it seems like everyone above the age of 45 hates the physical side of aging: more aches and pains, more wrinkles, less energy…

I’m 26 so I know I’m not dealing with this just yet and it’s either going to creep up on me over the years or one day I’ll wake up and it’ll smack me in the face. Either way, it’s a slightly depressing thought.

That being said, it doesn’t seem all bad. There’s another side to getting older that I have to say, is pretty fantastic, and I’ve gotten a small taste of it: life at 26 is way, wayyyyyyy better than life at 16.

I could be wrong. It could all be downhill from here. But I’m not so sure and I think a lot of it comes down to what I’m going to call improved life navigation. If you’re plugged into your life, you’re gathering life experience and self-knowledge all the time. You’re developing skills you lack when you’re younger, like patience, grit, the ability to withstand a storm. You get battle-hardened. And simultaneously you get worn down, which can open you up to experiencing a greater depth in day-to-day life.

What I didn’t realize when I was 20 was that I was engaging in all kinds of stuff that I didn’t really enjoy. You lack data so you just have to blindly try things out and see what works. A lot of the stuff you try doesn’t pan out.

Getting older means that you trade the energy and vitality you had when you’re young for an improved management of your resources. This allows you to engage a little less often in stuff you don’t care about. Less of the pointless conversations about stuff you don’t care about.

This is one of the greatest gifts that my parents gave me: I’ve watched them try things out over the decades and slowly get better at cutting out the things they don’t wanna do anymore. They seem happier. They have less energy but they “waste” a lot less of the energy they have, too.

I did an unpaid internship when I was 18 at a Media Production Association. I was willing to drive to work and be assigned tasks I didn’t want to do and talk to people about things that I didn’t care about for no money because I didn’t know yet if I cared about any of that stuff.

That’s ok, that was an important chapter of my life. I needed that information. That’s what’s beautiful about aging. If you’re paying attention, it gives you the data/knowledge you need to build a life around what you love.