When I was young, there was a huge list of things you shouldn’t do, or specifically wear, over the age of 30; there were fewer explicit rules about what you should and shouldn’t wear over the age of 50, but they were all implied by the fact that it was 20 years since you’d been 30. Then someone lampooned the whole business – it was strikingly memorable but, teeth-gnashingly, not memorable enough that I can remember who it was – with a definitive list of Never Wear This Over 30, which included “a necklace made of ears”. The entire discourse was buried that day, and I never thought about it again, until the weekend, when I was walking up some stairs with a mirror all the way up. That, I could not help but notice, is a very 90s walking style.
I guess we all learned it from Bez out of Happy Mondays, the man specifically employed (if you would use such a LinkedIn word for it) to bring happiness to the nation with his physical joie de vivre: leading with the shoulders, as if you’re in a ferocious hurry to get to the front of somewhere, with your neck hunched in to bypass the attention of the authorities because of all the drugs you are about to either sell or buy, the rest of your body an afterthought.
How long can you carry on walking like that? It must at some point merge with the ravages of osteoporosis, so that you’re hunched for ever, in brutal proof of the concept that the wind can change and you can get stuck like that. I don’t need a new walk that looks young, and I don’t need one that looks fitting for my time of life. I just need one that’s different.
And if we’re updating preferences anyway, there are others. There’s a distinctive middle-aged listening style, where you listen for some keywords that give you the gist of what your interlocutor is on about, fill in the rest of their noise predictively, like ChatGPT, and reply as if they’ve said a thing they haven’t necessarily said. You hear it a lot on Radio 4, and while it would be crass to name names, let’s just say that the way every interview lands back with immigration or the benefits bill is rarely the interviewee’s idea.
You have to really watch this: it’s hideously ageing if whole new realities and modes of thinking emerge and you haven’t noticed because you weren’t completely listening. Worst-case scenario, you will do a Michael Grade and present, with a flourish, the view that GB News is a necessary corrective to the “liberal, Islington consensus”. Whatever that consensus was, it hasn’t held for a decade or more. Whatever the rightwing agenda-setting, billionaire-backed channel is, it isn’t a grassroots pipsqueak standing up for the little guy. This is like turning up to a cocktail party in a ra-ra skirt.
People entering their later years on Facebook are always worrying about their crepe neck and sunspots, when they ought to be worrying about being on Facebook. I’m going to stick my (crepey) neck out here and say that no one over 30, never mind over 50, should be on social media for anything except the promulgation of delight and the discovery of like minds. You can do what you like with emojis, you’re allowed to keep using aubergine as if it means “aubergine”, but all the first-wave uses – the showing off, the beefing, the not-very-coded complaints about people who will definitely recognise themselves – have to stop.
And one final thing on wellness: it is extremely ageing to have a set of rules around diet and exercise to ward off ageing. Not because those things don’t make a difference, but because it belongs to a distinct era, 50s through to the 90s, to think of yourself as constantly in debt, always needing a brisk walk to pay back some misdemeanour that was probably croissant-related. To think of cake as “naughty”, to act as if crisps are a moral failure: all this is unbecoming.
I think this is “growing old gracefully” nailed; but if anyone has a better idea, I am, obviously, all ears.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
