Humans live 2 lives: 1)birth-adulthood and 2)old age. And old age is the most mysterious life. No one understands what it means to be old except the old themselves. And even they don’t understand it.
We focus a lot on the childhood thing. We talk about it, analyze it, study it, romanticize it, extrapolate from it. It seems very idyllic and nice. We put childhood— and youth in general— on a pedestal. Our culture, our society, our media, and our biology are youth/childhood obsessed. And I won’t argue with that. But another reason we focus on childhood is simply because everyone can relate to it. Everyone has been a child and we all like to think it really means something. Childhood and youth might be magical. Or maybe childhood and youth could just be the most simple common denominator we all have.
But not all of us have been old. In fact, the vast majority of us have never been old. And we don’t discuss old age, we don’t analyze it, we don’t romanticize it. Old age is not in our culture, it is not a part of our media, it goes against our biology— it’s invisible.
The old know exactly what it means to be young. No one understands what it’s like to be old.
When does someone become old? When is that exact point take place? I don’t know. But when one becomes old, they are born into a second life.
