Feeling Old on the Internet

By ANNA NORTHJUNE 6, 2014 11:52 AM

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Would you like to know how many times the moon has orbited the earth since you were born — or, more soberingly, what percentage of people born on the same day as you have died? Now you can find out this information, along with a great many more depressing facts about your senescence, at the website You’re Getting Old.

Brian Koerber of Mashable says the site “serves as a good reminder to be grateful and enjoy life — while you’re still alive.” But its typical users have many years left to enjoy — the average visitor to You’re Getting Old, at least as of this writing, is a relatively youthful 31. This isn’t surprising — increasingly, the feeling of oldness is being decoupled from actual biological aging, and offered as an end in itself.

In a recent essay at The London Review of Books, Jenny Diski says other people make her feel old.

They’ve begun responding to all her statements with a condescending, “Ah, bless,” changing the way she sees herself: In her mind, she’s now “a small, nondescript old lady going bravely about her business.” She is 66, but notes that feeling old can start much younger — she cites meditations on aging by Bronwen Clune, 39, and Molly Crabapple, 30.

In response to Ms. Diski’s essay, Jia Tolentino of The Hairpin writes, “I’ve always thought that technology and habits delineate us so finely today that we’ve all got a bit of ‘In my day’ syndrome.” But it’s not just the fast pace of technological change that separates doddering 22-year-olds from their still-vibrant 18-year-old siblings. Media outlets now explicitly encourage us to feel old, no matter our age.

There’s an entire genre of BuzzFeed posts devoted to “things that will make you feel old” (recent examples include a 2000 photo of the “Harry Potter” cast, Blur’s “Parklife” video, and the fact that “Friends” has been off the air for ten years). Deadspin recently invited readers to “Feel Old With Our ‘How Many Pro Athletes Are Younger Than You?’ Tool.” (This writer is older than 74.6 percent of Major League Baseball players, but holds out hope for her career as a knuckleballer.) And in April, Alexandra Petri of The Washington Post bemoaned the proliferation of “Want to feel old?” headlines. Her explanation for the vogue of Old:

“Nostalgia, never out of fashion, comes on faster than ever, these days. Back in my day, as they say, it took a much longer time to feel nostalgia about anything. You wanted nostalgia, you had to wait for a countdown of Best Cotton Gins or Musical Artists From Before The Present. Now we get instant nostalgia, as fast as we want it. Hey, remember dial-up? Remember back when the Rectangular Object That Was Essential For Communicating With Your Friends And Hearing Music was DIFFERENT? Remember NOUN? It used to be here just a minute ago, but now it’s GONE FOREVER!”

For Ms. Petri, pushing oldness on us is a way of capitalizing on today’s rapid-cycling sentimentality — it’s not so much aging we’re encouraged to embrace as a certain misty-eyed fondness for last year’s slightly more unwieldy smartphones. If indeed an emotional hook is what makes online content go viral, then putting a sepia filter over the recent past may be a smart business decision.

But Ms. Diski’s essay suggests a less mercenary use for the premature feeling of oldness. She praises Ms. Crabapple and Ms. Clune for thinking about aging while still in their 30s: “It’s right and proper that they should try on their older selves rather than sit in the warm but rapidly cooling bath of thinking themselves simply young.”

As Ms. Diski notes, growing actually old means confronting a variety of indignities, from the constant onslaught of anti-aging products to the inescapable decline of the body. Of the latter, she writes: “It comes to you that whatever ailment you’ve got at this point is decay inflected by decay, in one form or another, and, to people who aren’t you, only to be expected. It is, to put it simply, which they won’t, a recognition of the beginnings of the approach of death.”

That recognition isn’t pleasant, and it’s no surprise that some people might want time to get used to it — that they might start thinking about their impending demise long before the actuarial tables suggest they need to. For some people on the younger side, maybe feeling old isn’t just nostalgia. Maybe it’s practice.

http://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/201...p&rref=opinion