I'm about to turn 70. How do I cope with aging?

With advice from Carlyle, Shakespeare, Rilke, Tennyson, and Miranda July

‘Tho much is taken, much abides’

Aging sucks... I'm turning 70 in another month, and this is what I'm discovering about myself: an increase of anxiety (the election! climate change! disinformation and AI!) and the chronic depression with which I've lived most of my life, not to mention a near constant worry over mortality issues (my own and those I love). My health is okay (I wouldn't call it great, but it is okay), our financial picture is only a problem when I make it so, and family is close by if needs arise. I have no interest in treating my issues pharmacologically, but I would like to have a little better emotional equilibrium. Any examples come to mind? (Literature is too often written for and about the young, who don't often "get" it until they're too old for it to matter.)

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At thirty years old, I suppose I may still count as a young person in your eyes. Fortunately, however, I have been scared of dying for as long as I can remember, so I am perhaps better positioned to ‘get it’ than most (always knew there’d be a silver lining). I really sympathise with you. Mortality is frightening. It is also, I think, one of literature’s great obsessions, so I hope I can help you find comfort by sharing some things that have comforted me. (This answer is going to be quite long but by the end you won’t be scared of death anymore so it’s probably worth sticking around for.)

The first thing I want to say is in response to your fears about climate change, disinformation and AI. One truth which a long literature survey demonstrates is that every generation believes their problems to be the most existential. In response to growing industrialisation in 1829, Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle dubbed his period ‘The Mechanical Age’ - ‘we war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.’ Carlyle felt this growing faith in mechanisation meant that ‘only the material, the immediately practical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us’ and that while ‘many things have reached their height… the time is sick and out of joint’.

Although the way Carlyle talks about his era bears striking similarities with discourse today, it is reductive to say our problems are always the same. In fact, society changes enormously across generations, and each of us plays an important part in bringing about this social and political change. What I do mean to say is that the feeling you’re experiencing - that our time is sick like never before; that the world you’re leaving behind is the worst it has ever been - is a feeling, rather than a fact. It’s true we face challenges globally that none of us can afford to be apathetic about. It’s also true there are things about life today that have improved since Carlyle’s gloomy assessment (women’s rights, for example). And there are lots of people who feel the same way you do about politics and climate change. In light of this, and in light of history more generally, it seems unlikely to me that society will continue to decline in every way, as you fear. Small comfort, perhaps. But I get the feeling you’re not in the market for bumper sticker platitudes.

Another perspective shift I want to offer is to do with the dangers of romanticising your own past. You mention living with chronic depression. This must be very hard. But it makes me wonder: is being 70 actually worse than being 20, or are you remembering 20 through rose-tinted glasses; using nostalgia as another stick to beat yourself with? When I mentioned your problem to my housemate, he reminded me of the moment in Henry IV in which Shallow waxes lyrical about his glory days - the moment Falstaff is alone with the audience, he bursts Shallow’s rosy bubble with a single line: ‘Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!’ I don’t mean to target old men in particular; I’m the worst for this. I can literally hate an experience and then long for it ten seconds later. (There should be a cool German word for that, shouldn’t there.) If you can resist glorifying your youth, you may feel more open to the idea that good times are just as likely to await as to be over. Of course, this tendency to mourn the past even when the past was bad seems tied up with a general anxiety about the passage of time, doesn’t it. So now let’s move on to the meat of the problem.

How do we walk through the valley of the shadow of death without giving in to despair? Lots of self-help books (and lots of fictional books) will tell you that the secret lies in living well in the present. Marcus Aurelius - Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher - advocates this theory in his Meditations. Aurelius argues that our real fear is not death, but a failure to make the most of our short lives. So instead of hiding from mortality, we should invite it in, as a kind of motivating force: ‘to live each day as though one’s last, never flustered, never apathetic, never attitudinising, is the perfection of character’. If we have lived fully in this way, we can face death with equanimity.

There is lots of great stuff in Meditations, and I know that many centuries of clever people (my own dad included) find its Stoic philosophies of self-control and acceptance comforting. But, personally, I find the statement quoted above anxiety inducing. What if I fail to live each day in this embodied, calm, and curious manner? What if I never learn to be properly present? What if I never even manage to stop endlessly singing the Crazy Frog ringtone in my head?

I think, really, this is my biggest fear: that I will reach my death-bed, and not have figured my shit out; that I will still be the flawed, restless, lacking human that I am today. And what would this mean, a therapist would ask. Well, it would mean I had failed, in the grandest and most cosmic sense. As a person who suffers from chronic depression, I wonder if you share this fear of not having fixed yourself before the end.

But here’s the next thought experiment: if you never did fully fix yourself, never found all the answers, would that, actually, be okay? Lately I have begun to feel that the answer is yes. One of the things that has helped me to feel this way is Rilke’s poem ‘The Man Watching’, translated by Robert Bly. There’s a line I’ve had stuck in my head, going round and round like a mantra (much more satisfying than Crazy Frog). This is it:

What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us. 

Bly’s poem does not deny the existence of great truths: in fact, it acknowledges them. It also encourages us to seek them out, while embracing the fact that this seeking will remain inconclusive. Life is too mysterious to be solved as neatly and definitively as a rubik’s cube: that is part of its magnificence (and its terror). Instead, living is more like scratching around in a giant sandpit, mostly seeing only sand but occasionally catching sight of the corner of a breathtaking jewel. The jewel is not devalued by all the time you had to spend scratching - if anything, it’s all the more precious for it.

Was that too strange an analogy? Does it sound depressing rather than comforting? What I am trying to say is that all the moments of love, joy and blinding clarity you have experienced over your seventy years can never be devalued by your suffering and your pain. If you continue to have depressive days, continue to ‘waste’ days worrying about your finances, that’s alright. There will also be days when you watch a sparrow playing on a hedge and it’s so sweet and beautiful that it makes you cry. If you have experienced even a handful of these precious moments then perhaps you will have come as close to making sense of life as you were ever intended to.

Bly’s poem is about embracing failure. But it does not make me want to give up. Instead, it makes me feel free - free to make imperfect art, to take risks, to pursue friendships that might come to nothing. All we’re doing is scratching around in the sand-pit, anyway - the results aren’t meant to be perfect. But what if I get to have another glimpse of that jewel?

The poem wants to make us feel this way: it tells us we can never succeed in order to make us feel invincible. Because if ‘being defeated, decisively’ is the point, then there really is nothing to lose, right? I want you to feel this way, too - a little more devil-may-care - because I don’t think the solution to your anxiety lies in a greater degree of caution. If you can free yourself from this pressure to solve all your problems, you may find new space opens up for moments in which beauty or happiness hit you over the head with their force. You may even find the courage to seek out these moments: to be bold, adventurous, and take some risks. Remember that any such moment you experience remains precious and meaningful, even if the following day takes you emotionally back to square one.

And - at the risk of sounding like a Disney movie - you are never, ever too old to have an adventure. You really aren’t. If your pesky brain is telling you otherwise, try reading Tennyson’s poem ‘Ulysses’, a dramatic monologue told from an elderly Odysseus’ perspective. Tennyson imagines the King of Ithaca safely home, many decades after the adventures recounted in Homer’s The Odyssey - but far from being content to rest, Odysseus longs to set sail again, and encourages his friends to come with him: ‘How dull it is to pause, to make an end/ To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!’ The great adventurer knows he is not the same man he once was - but age can’t take away his willpower; his hunger for new experience:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Perhaps you are thinking, this is all very well for Odysseus, but I am not a King with access to a large and powerful ship and a rich mythological landscape. True. But what Odysseus does is not exhilarating because of its epic scale: it is exhilarating because he throws off the shackles of societal and age-related expectations to pursue once more what he deeply desires.

I am reading

Miranda July

’s All Fours at the moment, a brilliant and riveting novel about a woman having a mid-life crisis. And while July’s narrator does ultimately make radical changes to her life (as this is a modern novel, I’ll do no spoilers) some of the smaller things she does along the way feel equally if not more gasp-inducingly subversive. At one point she checks into a cheap motel room, and pays someone to redecorate it for her in the style of a hotel she loves in Paris, with wallpaper, re-tiling and all. It’s just so deliciously crazy. And for an example that doesn’t cost any money, I was thinking the other day how thrilling it would be to read a book from start to finish, over the course of however many days it took, stopping perhaps to make food but not talking to anyone throughout and certainly not checking my phone. To me this feels more scandalous and, bizarrely, harder to achieve than doing something like a six month backpacking tour of Mexico. I actually think people might be more surprised by it too (‘Have you heard what Emma’s doing, reading a book from start to finish? Who does she think she is, Yoko Ono?’) This just goes to show that the true spirit of adventure lies in doing small things that go against the grain but are in tune with your own needs, rather than in having big yet predictable experiences. Perhaps spending three days reading does not feel as wild to you as it does to me. But I’m sure if you thought about it you could pinpoint some things that give you that feeling of Could I? Dare I? Things that would trip you off your casters and into a new groove.

And really, adventure is just a mindset. You know those people that stuff always happens to? That’s just a way of seeing the world, of allowing funny little conversations to affect you, of allowing yourself to be knocked off course now and again. In the end,

Miranda July

’s narrator realises that what she needs is ‘a life that [is] continually surprising’ - not reckless, not dangerous, not good, not bad, just surprising. I’m aware you asked me for emotional equilibrium, which might seem like the opposite state to frequent surprise. But allowing yourself to fully feel a range of emotions is how we achieve catharsis, a step on the path to equilibrium. And without the emotions part, what you’d actually be feeling is nothing at all.

That was a pretty long answer - so, to summarise. The world is dark, but it has always been, and I think it’s likely that some things will improve for the better. Dying is scary, and life is basically incomprehensible, so if you have seen glimpses of its greatest truths then you will have done very well. Do not confuse emotional equilibrium with numbness. Be afraid. Be delighted, too. Surprise yourself. More beautiful glimpses are waiting.