Sometimes old people get a bad wrap. We’re too slow, frail, stupid, confused, tech-inept…course young people are stereotyped too but that discussion is for another day. In some cultures, old people are revered and looked up to for their wisdom. In America, not so much. It’s a shame as surely we can learn from each other and benefit from “old people wisdom” even if we are old ourselves.
Before I go on, I suppose we should define “old”. According to Google and Oxford Languages, old is defined as “having lived for a long time; no longer young”. This seems pretty subjective. For instance, when I was 45, I didn’t feel young per se but I definitely didn’t feel old, but a younger individual called me “Grandma”. I guess it’s all about your perspective. For purposes of this article, we will define “old” as persons 60 years and older.
I had a young person tell me I must be old as I wanted to write a check cause “no one uses checks anymore”. According to Google and AI, “Roughly 46% to 61% of Americans still use checks, with about 11 billion checks written annually in the U.S.. While usage is in decline…they remain popular for large payments like rent and utilities…” I’m just mentioning this as there seems to be a lot of opinions that are not based on facts1 including stereotypes.
As I write this article, I am almost 63. I have been young, middle-aged, and now “old”. Although my body gives me indications of oldness, my mind does not. I have had many jobs in my life including teaching computer classes, so being perceived as “tech-inept” is annoying. So how does one change impressions? We can dye our hair, change our clothes, or get a make-over to look younger and therefore be perceived hopefully better. Or we can just say forget it and let nature take it course. Or maybe we can be “Bitchin Old People” and take the world by storm.
- To tell on myself, when I heard children were not being taught cursive in school anymore, I thought they wouldn’t be able to read the constittution (not that they would really gravitate towards that anyway), but the constitution is widely available in print so that busted that opinion. I will say though, that I taught 7th graders and I wrote some notes on the board and they couldn’t read them – they were not entirely cursive, more like print and cursive combined, but it was disheartening to me that they couldn’t read it. ↩︎