You know how you paid attention to your grandfather’s little personal habits and thought to yourself, wow that’s pretty quirky. Usually old people’s quirky translates easily to endearing. You probably wondered just how those habits were formed, and assumed that old people did things in strange ways long before you were born, and Grandpa is just still doing those same things today in a cute, anachronistic way.
Bullshit.
I’ll tell you how it happens, because it’s happening to me at the ripe old age of 40.
I mentioned last year to Nikki that I started to buy these containers of two hard boiled eggs, with cheese and crackers from the cafeteria at work and eat them for breakfast. I noted that I wasn’t as hungry for lunch because the eggs kept me a little fuller than just fruit would. Pretty logical, an astute observation about my caloric intake and appetite. I didn’t see any of the danger signs because a man in his thirties is still young and virile.
A year later though, as a man in his forties who has been doing the same thing most mornings for over a year now, I now realize I’m already on the slippery slope of Quirky Old Grandpa Courtney and picking up speed. It’s too late for me now, even if I stopped doing that egg thing immediately. I am conditioned now. If I went cold turkey I would be grumpy and hungry well before lunchtime. If I changed customers (no doubt that will happen eventually) I would probably spend some time looking around for options to keep buying my hard boiled eggs in the morning at the new customer location. If I couldn’t find anything I would probably start making my own and bringing them. That’s the kiss of death right there. The amount of effort and energy I would expend to keep that habit as close as possible to the SAME would increase. The defining criteria of old people as I recall from my 8,9,10 year old eyes was that they like everything to be exactly the SAME. The catch is that I have spent 40 years now trying to develop good habits. The problem is that after 40 habits just become doing things the SAME.
The only thing that separates me from Grandpa now is when I do the same damn thing I’m just weird, and I don’t have the benefit of being really old and also OCD. Cause that’s just cute, instead of what I am now. Which is just weird.
So, the threshold of old is defined by the new desire to maintain habits that require increasing amounts of energy to maintain, which make no sense to people who have not yet crossed the threshold. All I can do is to shout advice from the other side of the threshold back to the young people. Who will ignore me because from their side of the threshold I’m just cute old Courtney, clutching his eggs and waving his arms and yelling adorably in his old man way; something about cassette tapes and rotary dial phones.
