I celebrated a rather significant birthday recently. Though, to be honest, “celebrated” is probably the wrong way to put it. I spent the day in moody contemplation, trying to decide if I was going to be one of those salt-and-pepper guys you see in vitamin supplement ads — With NAD+ and creatine, I feel like I’m just getting started! — or one of those old men with a permanent I am opting out of whatever this is look on his face.
I tried to strike a balance between the two. One of the most enjoyable prerogatives of getting older is that the list of things you don’t have to do gets longer. For instance, I don’t have to pretend to be enjoying myself when I’m not. I don’t have to pretend I don’t know how something unfolding in someone else’s life is going to turn out because I know exactly how it’s going to turn out. I don’t have to worry that people might not like me because I really don’t have enough time for the friends I already have. In other words, I don’t have to prove anything anymore. It’s amazing and exhausting to think back and realize how much of my life was spent trying to do just that.
Notice, though, that I haven’t told you exactly how old I am. Despite my feelings of liberation from the insecurities and obligations of my past, I’m still brought up short when I say my actual age out loud.
OK, I’ll tell you: I’m 60. I am a 60-year-old man, and in addition to having a (still active, but less so) career in Hollywood, I am the world’s oldest graduate student. In September, I will start my second year in the Master of Divinity program at Princeton Theological Seminary, and when it’s all over, I hope to be ordained in the Episcopal Church. As we Episcopalians say, inshallah.
If you start adding up the years (and trust me, I have), it becomes clear that I will go from being the world’s oldest graduate student to the world’s oldest newbie priest. So, as free and easy as I feel about turning 60, I am also aware that the clock is ticking. There’s probably a nicer way to put that, but you get what I’m saying.
The Instagram algorithm somehow knows I turned 60, and it has been serving me ads for all sorts of potions and treatments designed to muffle the sound of the ticking clock. In an idle few minutes of recent scrolling, I learned that I needed a new kind of moisturizer — sorry, skin serum — and what looks like a mascara brush for my white beard. My cells are also dying at an alarming rate, but David Beckham, the world-famous soccer player, is selling a powdered product that will reverse that. There are dating apps designed for men my age, workout guides for “aches and pains associated with age,” and even a service that sends me a daily mental puzzle to help slow down the dementia that Instagram is convinced I already have.
I don’t recall seeing those ads a month ago, though that may be a symptom of my mental decline. It seems they suddenly flooded my social media feeds right around the moment I turned 60. Somewhere there is a stack of research that suggests that men my age are paunchy bundles of low-energy neurotic fears, shuffling off to the home with back aches and fuzzy memories, and that they’re the perfect addressable market for all sorts of cures and schemes.
THE FOREMOST CAFE INTELLECTUAL
And maybe that’s true for some men. As for me, I’m just trying to enter my 60s with a realistic optimism. I am trying to free myself from a lot of old habits and social obligations without turning into a jerk. I am trying to hear the clock ticking without lapsing into despair or worse, putting mascara on my stubble.
In other words, I have reached the age when you discover that you can do anything you want, but you can’t do everything you want. I can live with that.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
