There is something almost comical about being young and believing that old people are a different species.

There is something almost comical about being young and believing that old people are a different species.

You look at them moving more slowly through the world and imagine there must have been some psychological border they crossed along the way. Surely they don't experience themselves the way you experience yourself. Surely an eighty-year-old doesn't still possess the same private interiority, the same unfinished questions, the same flashes of insecurity, desire, jealousy, embarrassment, curiosity, and absurd humor.

Then you start getting older.

And nothing happens.

That's the disturbing part.

There is no ceremony.

No morning when you wake up and discover that youth has officially left the building.

You simply accumulate birthdays while remaining, from the inside, strangely continuous with every person you've ever been.

The mirror changes faster than the witness behind it.

At twenty, forty looks ancient.

At forty, you remember twenty with such psychological immediacy that the mathematics feels vaguely insulting.

Eventually you begin to understand something you couldn't possibly have understood when you were young:

Old people were never old to themselves.

They were young people who kept waking up.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Until the face in the mirror began telling a different story from the one consciousness was experiencing.

I find that thought almost unbearable.

Imagine being eighty-five and remembering eighteen.

The summer nights.

The stupid jokes.

The person you were certain you'd marry.

The friends whose phone numbers you still remember even though some of them have been dead for thirty years.

Those memories aren't historical documents to the person carrying them. They're pieces of lived consciousness. Somewhere inside an elderly person sitting quietly at a restaurant is every age they've ever been.

We tend to see the final version.

They experience the entire archive.

That's why our cultural contempt for aging is so intellectually shallow.

Every generation commits essentially the same mistake.

Young people look at older people and see technological incompetence, outdated habits, unfashionable clothes, obsolete opinions.

They confuse unfamiliarity with irrelevance.

Meanwhile, older generations look at the young and see naïveté, entitlement, foolishness, declining standards.

They confuse experience with omniscience.

Both are staring at temporary conditions and mistaking them for identities.

Because youth isn't a personality.

And neither is age.

They're locations.

You pass through them.

That's what makes generational arrogance so absurd.

The young mock the old for struggling with technologies that didn't exist during most of their lives while remaining blissfully unaware that, if they're fortunate enough to survive, some future generation will watch them struggle with things that haven't been invented yet.

One day the device you currently operate effortlessly will look prehistoric.

Your vocabulary will sound dated.

Your cultural references will require explanation.

Music that still feels dangerous to you will be playing quietly somewhere while people buy groceries.

And some twenty-year-old will patiently explain an obvious piece of technology to you while privately wondering how anyone your age manages to function.

You will want to tell them:

I wasn't always this.

And you'll be right.

But you'll also be wrong.

Because you were always becoming this.

That's the part youth cannot comprehend.

Aging doesn't suddenly happen to old people.

It's happening to everyone right now.

The child is already becoming the teenager.

The teenager is already becoming the middle-aged stranger they'll swear they could never become.

The forty-year-old is already carrying the body that will eventually require patience from strangers.

We are all moving toward versions of ourselves we currently cannot imagine inhabiting.

And still we behave as though aging were something happening somewhere else.

Maybe that's why we fear elderly people more than we admit.

They are evidence.

They demonstrate physically what the rest of us work very hard to keep abstract.

Time is real.

Bodies deteriorate.

Friends disappear.

Parents become photographs.

Entire decades that once seemed endless collapse into anecdotes.

Eventually you find yourself saying things happened "twenty years ago" and realizing you remember them perfectly.

Then thirty.

Then forty.

If you're lucky, fifty.

And the astonishing thing is that life continues to feel like life.

You still wake up inside yourself.

You still want things.

You still get irritated.

You still laugh at ridiculous things.

You still occasionally wonder what you're going to do with your life, even after you've already lived most of it.

Perhaps that is the great humiliation and beauty of consciousness:

It never receives the memo that it's becoming old.

The body keeps the calendar.

The mind keeps the memories.

And somewhere between them lives a human being trying to understand how something that once seemed impossibly far away arrived without ever announcing itself.

So when you see an old person moving slowly through a supermarket, sitting alone in a restaurant, struggling with a phone, staring through a window, don't make the mistake of seeing only what time has done to them.

There is an entire civilization inside that person.

People they've loved.

Rooms that no longer exist.

Parents nobody remembers.

Songs that once made them feel immortal.

Mistakes they would give anything to undo.

Summer afternoons from sixty years ago that occasionally return with astonishing clarity.

They aren't standing outside of life looking backward.

They're still inside it.

Exactly like you.

Just farther down the road.

And if fortune is unusually kind,

one day someone young will look at you with the same incomprehension.

They'll see an old person.

You'll still see yourself.

And for the first time, you'll understand everyone who came before you.