Ann, Stop This. You're not 54. You're not born in '68. You're a 1950s, American white girl. nttawwt

Own Your Privilege, Sister!

It's okay to act your age, or even to act younger.

But I know 54-year-olds, ann.  You're not one of us.  You've never been one of us.  Scram back to your pack of boomers, that's who you are and where you belong.   NO BODY SNATCHING.  Go pay a surrogate to make you a grandbaby, but no pretending you're in with the cool crowd now.

From "Feeling younger than your age may be good for your health/Older adults who feel young at heart may not just live longer, but may also have more life satisfaction, lower dementia risk and reduced depression symptoms" (WaPo).

I'll just quote Bob Dylan: "She's 68, but she says she's 54."

I was 14 when I first heard that, but I feel like I'm 54 now. I'm 72.

Anyway... I'd just like to say that you know what age you are. And you know how you feel. Rationally, you ought to think the age that you are feels like the age that you are. What better evidence do I have of how 72 feels than how I myself feel? Whence this notion of the inner life of other 72-year-olds — this faceless crowd, averaged out? How absurd and unseemly to imagine their sad decline — compared to me, the ever-young, full of life me! Actually, I myself don't have such absurd and unseemly imaginings. I was just imagining some other 72-year-old who is embarrassingly un-self-aware and vain.

(Did I read in a national newspaper that she wed a younger "commoner" years back to keep her from being lonely in old age?  A proudly uneducated former landscape person, iirc.  Surely she is not sniffing around the younger people now -- as if 54 is Youth -- for story ideas on how to promote her work?)

HINT TO THE OLDSTERS?  It's not your bodies, it's your brains.  What is going on in the human brain -- study it? -- can help you understand so much of what is happening in the scientific world today.  You have to do the work though, hard reading.  You can't wait for the world to drop its goodies on you, as so many of your generation have done, wasting so much...  Good luck, professor.  It's never to late to grow. yourself.   *Read like you ain't got no tenure, the books aren't comped -- you paid for them yourself, and the primary person you are supporting is yourself.   "Free Your Mind, and the rest will follow..."

I hope she can do it.  She's a late starter, just starting to realize what she needs to do to, and it will take a lot of work for her to get there, but...  I love to see when their minds first start to open, and they begin to understand what a big world is out there awaiting them.  If only they don't reflexibly close back up, based on the habits and people they've chosen to surround themselves with during the wasted years shut up in their academic Towers, away from the people they were purporting to serve all those tenured years in time.  (back when Wisconsin was photoshopping in black faces into their football crowd scenes, say... ;-) 

Oh, how the facades all fall, in time...