Getting older gives people plenty to be mad about.
The back hurts. So does the foot, and the left elbow. Driving at night stopped being an option somewhere around 2019.
Everything takes longer than it used to, including getting off the couch, and the names of things go missing in mid-air. Friends who used to be a phone call away aren’t around anymore.
Nobody has to earn the right to be annoyed by that. Some people are, permanently, and you can hear it in the first two minutes of any conversation with them.
But that isn’t the common outcome, which surprises most people. Most of them soften.
The losses arrive either way. What differs is what gets done with them.
1. They grieve the loss instead of nursing the grievance
Two people gave up their licenses the same year, for the same reason, at the same age.
One of them says she misses driving. She’ll tell you she misses the specific thing, being able to decide at four in the afternoon that she wants to go somewhere, and going.
The other says his daughter took his keys.
Same fact. Only one of them has somebody to blame for it.
Sadness is heavy, but it passes through. Blame needs a person at fault, and keeping a person at fault takes ongoing work.
The soft ones are often sadder than they look from outside. They just aren’t angry at anybody about it.
2. They stopped keeping count
Who called after the surgery. Who came the first week and who waited until it was convenient. Which grandchild sent a card and which one had his wife do it.
The count is easy to start and almost impossible to stop, because the numbers always come out badly. Nobody ever tallies it up and finds they were loved more than they thought.
People who soften let the count go, and they tend to be the ones who take slights lightly anyway. Across twelve years of tracking the same Americans, the older people got, the fewer negative emotions they reported.
The ones who keep counting are working against something that would otherwise happen on its own.
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3. They let the world change without taking it as an insult
Restaurants got louder. Everything wants an app now. Nobody writes thank-you notes, the menu is a square you point your phone at, and half the words on television are a string of random letters.
All of that is annoying, and both kinds of people find it annoying. The difference is whether it gets read as a personal message.
The hardened version treats every change as something done to them, on purpose, by people who didn’t ask.
The softer version files it as the world doing what the world does, which is carry on without consulting anybody, exactly as it did when they were the young ones changing everything.
4. They forgive people who are never going to apologize
There’s usually one. A brother who said something at a funeral. A friend who repeated a thing that shouldn’t have gone anywhere. Someone who was told what they’d done and disagreed.
The apology isn’t coming. It was never coming, and forty years of waiting has produced nothing except forty years of waiting.
So they drop it one-sided, which is the only way it was ever going to happen. Not a scene, not a phone call, no announcement. They stop thinking about it, and after a while they stop noticing they’ve stopped.
This isn’t the same as deciding it was fine. Plenty of them will tell you exactly what happened and that it was wrong.
They’ve simply worked out that being owed something is not the same as getting it, and that waiting only hurts the person doing the waiting.
5. They say plainly what they can’t do anymore
“I can’t get down there anymore, so you’ll have to reach it.” “I don’t do the stairs twice in a day.” “You’ll need to say that again, my left ear’s gone.”
No drama in it, no apology attached, and no pretending either. The ladder is out. That’s the whole announcement.
It sounds like nothing, and it’s one of the harder ones, because the alternative is spending years fighting a fact. That fight goes badly, and it takes up an enormous amount of a person.
When people can’t distract themselves from something unpleasant, accepting the feeling works better than pushing it down.
Older adults are notably less likely than younger ones to treat their own feelings as inappropriate or shameful. They let it be true and get on with the afternoon.
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6. They’re still responsible for something alive
The bird feeder needs filling, which means somebody has to buy the seed and get the lid off. The tomatoes want water in July whether anyone feels like it or not.
The man two doors down gets checked on because his son lives in another state and somebody needs to.
That’s not what you’d call a hobby. A hobby can be skipped. What matters is having something that would notice if you didn’t turn up.
There’s a difference between being cared for and being needed, and people who are only ever cared for get angry about it. In one long-running study of adults in their seventies, those who rarely felt useful to others fared worse over the following seven years.
7. They still make plans further out than seems sensible
Bulbs go in the ground in October for a spring nobody has promised them. A course starts in September, and they’ve paid for it in June. There’s a wedding in two years, and they’ve already decided what they’re wearing.
Somebody usually points out the obvious, gently, and gets waved off.
This is the tense a person lives in, and it shows up in their sentences. The hardened ones talk almost entirely about what already happened. Everything good is behind them, described in detail, and nothing is scheduled.
Ordering seeds for next year is a small act of assuming there’ll be a next year, and people who do it sound different when they talk.
8. They admit they’re lonely rather than getting angry about it
Saying “I’m lonely, the days are long” out loud, to your own daughter, is exposing. Being furious that nobody calls anymore is not.
Anger lets you keep your dignity and puts somebody else in the wrong, which beats sitting in a chair admitting you miss people.
So a lot of people take the anger. It’s the same feeling, and it’s way easier to say out loud.
The trouble is what each version produces. “I’ve been lonely this week” gets a visit. “Nobody in this family bothers with me” gets an argument, and then it gets fewer visits, which confirms the whole thing.
The ones who soften say it, usually awkwardly, and it tends to work.
