How I Don’t Want to Grow Old

As I approach my 60s and hang around a lot of folks (mainly white dudes, and sometimes the women who love them) in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, behaviors come to mind that I hope to avoid.

Angry old man, courtesy of ChatGPT o4-mini

1. Be angry with and afraid of immigrants, because they bring unwelcome change to our society¹.
2. Be angry about society as a whole and talk about how things are just going downhill².
3. Opine about how we’ve lost our strong sense of values³.
4. Complain about the country becoming a socialist state while happily collecting my social security checks and medicare health insurance.
5. Limit my news sources to those that agree with my current opinions, never seeking out counter-arguments to see if it is time to update my own priors⁴.
6. Wish for a society that was more strongly based in religious values⁵.
7. Complain about “young people these days”, because they don’t agree 100% with your values or because they don’t have the same work ethic.
8. Be afraid and/or angry about perceived threats that we read about in the news, or see on broadcast news, that almost certainly have no bearing on my everyday well-being.⁶

1. FBI report and Undocumented Immigrants Are Half as Likely to Be Arrested for Violent Crimes as U.S.-Born Citizens. ↩

2. While subject to change, every generation being born is better off than the generation before in terms of healthcare, economic opportunity, and quality of life measures. ↩

3. If you are in your 80s, the societal values you grew up included segregation, overt policies that prevented others from moving into your neighborhood, and explicit homophobia and misogyny. ↩

4. Update your priors. ↩

5. Better hope the religion is yours! Want prayer in school? OK, how about a call to muslim prayer ringing out through your grandchildren’s elementary school? ↩

6. The media wants us to be outraged, they want us to be afraid. They will manufacture possible outcomes to activate their audiences. ↩