![]() ![]() When rising from a chair there’s often a note of exasperation in it, as if the effort was barely worth the result on the way down there’s usually a ring of relief. This isn’t memory loss – just a natural shedding of things your brain has deemed superfluous.ģ At some point during your middle years you start to notice that whenever you stand up or sit down you make a noise: an involuntary groan of exertion. At the age of 20 you’ve lived so little you can remember virtually all of it by the age of 60 you will have forgotten entire holidays, scores of books you’ve read, hundreds of arguments, upwards of a thousand former acquaintances, all the popular music released between 19, and at least 10 Netflix passwords. This isn’t a problem as long as you restrict your conversational circle to other old people.Ģ Being old also means having to contend with the enormous, invisible volume of everything you have done and completely forgotten about. It just compresses time so that things that happened last week and things that happened in the mid-1980s sit side by side in your memory. You can call it experience if you want, but having a considerable past doesn’t necessarily confer any wisdom. It’s just the added weight of all the years piled up behind you. 1 The real difference between youth and age is not physical, or even mental. ![]()
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