The value of old men
Old men are a dime a dozen and worth less than my .02
I spend more time than I should on TikTok and even more time on twitter. The overwhelming opinion about older men on both platforms is we are ruining the world with our archaic point of view.
But the truth is far more nuanced than that. In the first place, we exist in fewer numbers* than older women. We don’t have a union or a community† regardless of how our popular media and influencer women want to portray us. We don’t roam in packs and we’re mostly loners. We die sooner than women. The vast majority of us have no political, social or economic power.
Old men are only valued by our culture if they are able to fuel the ambitions of the young.
The few loudmouths you do see abusing power are so rare that they suck up all the oxygen, giving media personalities and influencers fuel to point to them as representative of us all.
If you’ve come here to affirm that older men are role models for young boys on how to be a man, I’m gonna disappoint you. At one point in my life when I was a young man, I believed that.
I envied friends who had dads around when they were growing up, who had them in their lives well into middle age. Having arrived at this side of the fence, I realize those dads were always playing the character of someone else; even as they lay breathing their last, they were a character in someone else’s diorama, with well-established fences on a full electrical charge.
“Don’t touch the thin wires.” They might be unplugged, but you’re never quite sure.
Just as it didn’t matter to others what you thought or felt while living, it won’t matter as you lay dying.
“Go quietly, as un-opinionated as you lived.” Nobody is listening and fewer still are writing it down. There’s very little point in saying any last words.
Most of us are just tired, want to be left alone and die quietly with little to no fuss. We’ve lived a life of not living up to anyone’s expectations, including our own. At some point, we realized we were just excess baggage in everyone else’s life, a convenient excuse for their own failures and dying dreams.
*Of course I researched this. Do you think I just pull numbers out of my butt? Men outpace women slightly until about 45 where the drop-off is significant and accelerated. Men just die earlier.
†The local Dunkin’ doesn’t count. It doesn’t. That’s just hospice without the morphine and co-pays. (For my non-American readers, co-pay is the money you have to spend before your over-priced medical insurance will pay for any care. If you have no money, you get no care.)