getting old is a complicated process. It is no simple matter. Now, there are some quick and easy ways to start off on the right foot to getting old. for example, you can get drunk and fall down a flight of stairs. if you are lucky, as I was when this happened to me, you will still be conscious when it happens, and you will be able to reflect on the meaning of what has happened to you. In fact, you have just taken a big step toward getting old.
If you get drunk and fall down a flight of stairs, and you are able to get up and walk or hobble, as I did and in my case I had to ride a bicycle back home, you really cannot avoid the impact on your thinking and awareness about the reality that you face. That reality is that you are getting old. now, I have started out with a quick and easy way of stumbling into the process of getting old. but for most people unfortunately the process is much more subtle and complicated.
For example in the United States which is the country that my ancestors destroyed, by which I mean they killed all of the Native American population that lived there before them (preventing millions of healthy people from enduring the joy of the gradual decay into decrepitude) in a genocide and now keep the small percentage of survivors on land called reservations, the process of getting old is Or can be very very tricky. it can be time consuming. now that I do not live in the United States I must rely on anecdotes from people I know who continue to live there. for example, I considered returning to the United States in the year 2014 to work for some time, and when I mentioned this to a friend she informed me that there is a new law in the United States which requires citizens to have insurance. this absurdity is called "obamacare" and is named after the president who promised and failed to repair the healthcare system in the United States. you have to be careful because this kind of thing can prevent or delay you indefinitely in your goal of old.
A few years before that, I remember hearing stories from my father and a few other people about the complications involved in selecting various types of insurance mostly medical insurance plans based on their expectations of illness and their imagination of the types of diseases that might afflict them and the types of medicines that they might need to combat the onset of old age and the decay of the immune system. these people who were technically already old would make jokes based on their calculation of when they would run out of money and they would say funny things like I need to die when I am 79 or I need to die when I am 84. The meaning of course was that it would be better to die before you run out of money. This type of thinking is a very advanced form of getting old, and this represents the fact that some people are naturals, if you will, at the art of getting old. when you look at these people you might think they had some training in how to get old. but the fact is they were probably born with that mentality, and like some people that we say "you are a natural at mathematics" and score well on math tests, there are those who are naturally good at getting old and make the rest of us look like we were born yesterday. It's not really easy for most of us. The truth is its painful and full of unexpected difficulties.
in my case, during many years of youth, I thought that I had coincidentally developed interests which would serve me both in youth and in old age. I studied many subjects, and enjoyed reading and many scientific topics. in brief, however, as I started getting older I noticed that my eyes would hurt when I would read a book. I adjusted the prescription on my reading glasses, but my eyes still hurt when I study. so now I am asking a question, how should I get old? I cannot get old the way I imagined that I would, so what should I do? Should I kill myself? That seems like a very quick and easy way to make the process of getting old very simple and take the word "long" completely out of the discussion.
in the interim, as I develop a strategy for coping with my new difficulty in my favorite pastime of reading, I have worked out some tactics which are very useful to me. for example, I spend a lot of time walking around looking at things that are far away, and just staring at them for a long time. I clear my mind and I recognize that there really is nothing worth thinking about. Some novices are people might confuse this with meditation. look up the word "tyro". this is not a form of meditation. This is a course about how to get old. To make this distinction clear let me give another anecdote.
I have a friend here in Cambodia whose name is Hans and he is from the Netherlands. he refers to himself as a yogi, renamed himself "lakshman" a god), he teaches yoga classes, and he claims that he wants to live to be 100 years old and I imagine that he wouldn't mind the assertion that he might live to be a hundred and ten. this is a person with a very positive attitude, but is not helpful for our current study, which is about how to get old.
getting old is a very horrible experience and I don't need some positive minded meditation talking yogi man rolling up on me and talking about getting into contortions and forcing my old body into uncomfortable positions that cause my bones to hurt. In fact, how to get old has nothing to do with having a positive attitude at all. it's quite the opposite. you get old by doing things stupid, things that will harm you, and you do them somewhat intentionally.
Here again I need to make a fine distinction. I did not fall down the stairs intentionally. I got drunk intentionally. before I got drunk, I knew that there was a fairly good possibility that something clumsy awkward and dangerous might happen, but I went ahead and drank half a bottle of vodka anyway and fell down the stairs accidentally. that part was a surprise, even though you might say that I set myself up to be surprised. A surprise is still a surprise.so here is the fine distinction. you need to do something that puts you at risk but does not guarantee 100% disaster or injury.
doing a lot of activities that involve a lack of creativity will help you get old. For example in this essay about how to get old I'm taking most of the examples from my own life. That's not very creative and it makes me feel old which is the point of this paper. As an illustration here is an anecdote from my own life.
One way to get old is to get involved with a complicated all consuming project that has a very high probability of failure. and be sure to use the word "try" a lot because it implies that you already have failure in mind.
find something that you really love and something that you really want but something that you probably can't get, and then go all out for it. think ideaslike, "if I lose I will kill myself with 10 grams of phenobarbital (yes, like the people from the cult who tried to ride a comet to heaven). put all your eggs in one basket as they say. when I say put everything into this project I mean diving head first with your hands in your pants. when this project fails it will take you years to recover from the emotional devastation. now you're on the right track to getting old!
During those years of emotional devastation you might think that you're recovering, when in fact you're just actually becoming an alcoholic! this is a spectacular advancement to getting old. that alcohol has a way of making you feel better about really horrible things that have happened. at some point you will look at yourself in the mirror and realize you are leaving Las Vegas as they say, and you will have gone a long way toward achieving the success of the goal as defined in this essay, namely how to get old.
I would be dissembling if I did not mention that
people who are born with a propensity for clinical depression or chronic depression have a natural advantage when they get ready to get old. depression works like a miracle in this respect throughout your life, like a savings account of hate, depression causes you to lose friends and jobs, burn bridges and actually destroy physical property by which I mean vandalism. in one case a person known to me vandalized a sign containing a picture of a political moron most widely hated, and it turned out to be a good tactic because the sign could not be repaired and so the entire sigame had to be removed. reflecting on actions of this kind in the days following a drunken stupor help you to realize your progress in "how to get old."
each time you burn a bridge leading to a brighter future you make a deposit into your own personal savings account of hate. the subtle aspect of this is that there is a uphill battle before the downhill slide into old. There is a struggle and some work involved in burning these bridges. you can'trely onneglect andjust sithome. people will think you're sick and bring you a fruit basket. you have to go out and make problems happen assertively. there is the inevitable guilt, introspection and deprecation resulting from these events of destruction. But the good news is that once you reach the peak of this struggle, and your savings account is busting at the seams, you are ready for the easy slide down the slope into old age and Oblivion.
you might find yourself living in a very neat clean new apartment with a nice view of the river and a sweet little market next door where you can buy organic vegetables, and you might look out your balcony one day and realize that there is not one thing that you care about in the world, that you have lost interest in everything, that you have lost hope, and you don't care. when this happens you will know that you are old. But if this happens and you don't know how to interpret it you can call me on the phone and I will explain it for you.
these days people need a metric for everything, so here it is. lay on the floor and test your apathy. think about something that you once wanted with all your heart and now don't give a rat's ass about. don't even think about. ask yourself if you could go back and do it differently and bring about a sparkling success would you go back? if the answer is "no" then you have reached zero.