...Ain’t nothin’ but a number, as Aaliyah said
Do just what you want and have fun doing it ... except all the things in this article that you shouldn’t even think of
Ihave never seen a parade of elephants come together to celebrate a birthday. For the other members of the animal kingdom, age just exists as a marker for when you need to leave the nest, get your mating on or potentially challenge your dad to a fight to the death. Humans, however, use age for many things including as a herald for certain behaviours to start or stop. With each revolution around the sun we get saddled with more rules until we reach an age where we become too tired to care anymore. If you have already turned 67 then feel free to ignore this, if not then bear in mind that after a certain age some things are no longer for you, while others are. For example:
BEING REFERRED TO BY YOUR NICKNAME IN PUBLIC
Nicknames are fun. They are part of the glue that bonds peer groups together and as a youth they bestow much-needed cool points upon you. What happens when you aren’t a youth anymore? As a general rule the best nicknames come from a time in your life when you lived on a diet of poor life choices. Being introduced as Yo Man Don’t Give a Damn or Sip-hoe worked in your teens and early 20s because that’s what that time in your life is for, but come 35 and the whole endeavour starts to feel a little ridiculous.
USING NEW SLANG
Were you born before 1990? Have you lived long enough to remember Vinolia from Jam Alley? If your answer is yes then new slang is no longer your business. Don’t try to learn it, understand it or enunciate it, you’ll only end up looking like those elderly men with greased hair that used to wear Ed Hardy shirts.
BEING EXCITED AT THE PROSPECT OF SPENDING AN ENTIRE WEEKEND AT HOME
FOMO (fear of missing out) is a young person’s game and that’s because young people are still naive enough to think that standing in a noisy, smoky room, paying R60 for a beer and shouting at strangers in the hopes that they will sleep with you is fun. Experience teaches you that it is not. By age 30 clubs and late nights out should be a special treat rather than a regular occurrence. Getting drunk at your own house, with people you actually like, is so infinitely more fun than being in the middle of town at 4am helping someone avoid throwing up on their shoes. Conversely, being a homebody at 21 is deeply suspicious.
OPENLY HAVING A “ROSTER”
In days of yore they may have called it a harem but many have taken to calling it a roster. Essentially this is a revolving group of casual sex partners. Again, in your 20s and probably even early 30s, this is awesome. Everyone wants to hear your stories and give you mildly misogynistic high fives. The thing is there comes an age when your sexcapades start to sound a little lecherous. Walking into a room of fully grown adults and bombarding them with tales from the wild oats farm is more likely to have people feeling sorry for you than impressed. After 36, keep those stories for your young friends.
LISTENING TO PEOPLE TELL YOU WHAT AND WHEN YOU SHOULD STOP/ START DOING THINGS
You are an entire adult. You are the only person who has or ever will live in your skin, unless the movie Freaky Friday comes true. Do what you want, live your best life and have fun doing it, whatever that looks like. Your 90-yearold self will thank you. LS
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