Because you are all brilliant and are keeping the comment thread going on John Kass’s column*, there’s something I want to ask, in all sincerity:
Is there an age after which you no longer have to grow and change and work and learn?
Because like 90 percent of the frustrating conversations I have with my fellow rapidly-approaching-middle-age humans revolve around how they’ve never learned a skill or changed an opinion and they think it’s cute not to have done so.
I’m not saying you have to WANT to text, or code, or spend all day playing Candy Crush on Facebook (fuck you, Doc, for sucking me into that game) or do deep thinking about politics or whatever, but the thing that drives me absolutely up a goddamn wall all the time is this idea that not growing, not learning, not changing, is in and of itself a virtue that age allows you to claim.
I used to tell the newspaper kids I worked with that I was too old to text, just call me, my fingers don’t work like that. Well, that was not, shall we say, a sustainable viewpoint if I wanted to communicate with the world in 2013. So now I text. Badly, but I do it.
And maybe I just know too many people who are in their 7th and 8th and 9th decades, who have never seen discrimination as a permissible thing, who have always embraced new ways of doing things, who when faced with something they don’t know about have dived into it, who have not wished for the world to wait for them but have hurried to keep up with the world. Maybe that’s skewing my view here. Maybe we all get tired. Maybe I will too. But I hope not.
I’m asking.
A.
*I’m predicting, right now, that the next column is nothing but quotes from people calling him a horrible bigot, and just proving his point. Would love to be wrong.