Photo by Michele De Paola on Unsplash
Watching people you know grow old is not always a pleasant experience. It’s almost inevitable and almost certainly preferable to the alternative of seeing them die young. It strikes me, though, that there are a couple of traits which I observe and which I find particularly troubling and unpleasant. They are both aspects of growing old which you may witness or experience in people.
Their changing attitude to alcohol. I witness this again and again, older people appear to treat alcohol as a joke, as something to be taken lightly and even praised; completely forgetting that it is a dangerous and addictive drug. In our current times and society, Gin seems to be particularly prized but wine and beer are also singled out for praise.
What makes it worse is that they no longer appear to distinguish alcohol by its quality but by its price (lower is better) and by quantity. For example, you may hear people talking about having a good time when drinking bottles of wine instead of glasses. You may also hear silly phrases like ‘beer o’clock’ to signify that it is time to start drinking.
What makes this all the more concerning is that people do not seem to find anything wrong in this. Having seen past friends completely changed and even destroyed by alcohol, I find it really worrying the way older people seem to view and promote drinking.
Grumpiness and extremism. For some reason, these two often seem to go hand-in-hand. As people get older, they appear to get grumpier and they also seem to espouse extremist or intolerant views.
Recently I decided to stop following a former friend on Facebook and Twitter because of his increasing extremism and grumpiness. What did it for me was his assertion that all drone owners were social morons and that a carpet ban should be imposed on all drone flying in all wild open spaces. No consideration was given for people owning and using drones for a wide variety of purposes, nor any distinction made between trained or licenced users and casual users; all were to be tarred with the same brush and all barred from using their devices in the safest of all environments. Foolishly, I challenged him online and for my trouble I received abuse.
It was this position which led me to stop following him. I still occasionally see content from him in response to other people and I still witness the same grumpiness. Which is all very sad to see for this person was not the most extreme, and certainly not the moist right-wing extreme, of people when I first knew him. This change, I can only put down to his ageing badly.
I do not have a ‘cure’ for these traits and I cannot state that all people exhibit them as they grow older. My only hope is that people become more aware of these traits and, hopefully, can recognise and prevent them from taking hold as they, themselves, grow old.
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