To anyone who thinks that comma placement is unimportant, I would draw your attention to the title of this column, which does not refer to a sex-filled, moneymaking potboiler-turned-movie, but rather to the fact that last month I, along with approximately 4 million other Americans, turned 50.
50 snuck up on me; I don’t feel 50 years old, and apparently I’m not alone in that. A recent article in The Atlantic cites a study revealing that most adults over 40 feel themselves to be an average 20% younger than their chronological age.
The reasons for this phenomenon aren’t yet fully explained, but seem to include health, happiness, an innate sense of optimism, attitude toward aging, and more. An interviewee for the article mentions a “vigor-maturity index,” which seems as good a term as any to represent the unavoidable trade-off between physical vitality and wisdom from hard-earned experience.
Still, there are plenty of fifty year olds who delight in physical activity, following the mold of Molly Shannon’s Sally O’Malley character on Saturday Night Live, who liked to say (whether auditioning for the Rockettes or the Bada Bing Strip Club), “I’m 50! 50 years old! I like to kick, stretch, and kick!”
There are many online “tests” to determine your “mental age”—I took three and got results of 40, 34, and 33. But with questions like “Do you enjoy laughing at other people?” (Yes) and “Do you care about your style?” (No) These seem about as scientific as a Harry Potter Sorting Hat quiz, several of which I’ve taken (Gryffindor). As the body ages, some of us indulge in immaturity to goose the vigor-maturity index numbers.
50 is a milestone, but in some ways it’s a millstone around one’s neck. It’s old enough to be considered “old” by the 64% or so of the population that’s under 50, but not old enough to collect Social Security, be easily forgiven for offering unfiltered, politically incorrect opinions, or even buy a home in an Over-55 community.
I’ve always been attracted to the “Respect Your Elders” style names of these housing developments: “Vintage,” “Evergreen,” and the like. I thought I found a new one the other day called “Yesterday’s Treasures,” but it was actually a thrift store.
There aren’t any good names for fifty year olds themselves, however. At 80 you become an “octogenarian,” at 70 a “septuagenarian,” and at 60, you gain access to the highly coveted title “sexagenarian.” But at 50? You’re quinquagenarian, a word that sounds more like the product of a pharmaceutical marketing company brainstorming session than a Latin-based age-descriptive.
After reaching the half-century mark, I felt I deserved better. So, inspired by “centenarian,” the term for 100 year olds, and the rapper-turned-businessman Fifty Cent, I dubbed myself “Half Cent.” I also considered half-centurion, which sounded pretty cool but for some reason kept reminding me of the limbless Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Some people consider 50 to be the halfway point of life, but that seems overly optimistic, given the scarcity of centenarians in America today (.03%). I’ve decided instead to make age 89 my goal, which would allow for another viewing of Halley’s Comet (it last appeared in 1986). With a full 2% of Americans age 89 or older as of the 2020 Census, it’s not common but definitely doable. I realize, of course, that if I’m lucky enough to survive to age 89, there’s about a 99% chance that instead of fading gracefully and gratefully into the universe, I’ll be extending the age limit on that goal, even if the process is about as graceful as… well, the average 89-year-old.
In 50 years, I’ve gone from not understanding the references of people older than me to not understanding the references of people younger than me. Those younger people don’t get any of my references, either—references like, say, Molly Shannon, Monty Python, Fifty Cent, and even Fifty Shades of Grey.
Celebrating 50 is different from earlier birthdays. Candles have long since become representative rather than literal, especially since no one really wants someone blowing out half a hundred candles over a cake in the post-Covid era. If someone gave me 50 birthday punches, there’s a good chance I’d end up in the hospital.
So I celebrated, in part, by joining AARP and scheduling a series of overdue medical checkups. My hoped-for dream of age-related farsightedness balancing out my longtime nearsightedness has fallen flat; instead, my optometrist told me to try wearing one contact lens in one eye for reading, and a different lens in the other eye for distance. This sounded unbearably inconvenient, until I reminded myself that in the caveman era, I’d have been eaten by some predatory animal long before such concerns ever arose—a more inconvenient situation by far.
In the year 1900, the life expectancy for a baby was just 47 years (I’m guessing that in the caveman era, it was significantly less). Being alive at my age is a victory in itself, and a study by the Brookings Institute revealed that past age 50, happiness, as measured by life satisfaction, rises steadily. So there is cause to celebrate—even if there’s a little more creak in the joints, and shades of gray in the beard.
The interesting thing about being “over the hill” is that it indicates, logically, that “it’s all downhill from here,” an expression that can mean it all gets easier from this point forward, or that it all gets harder. Maybe it’s both, and how it appears in the moment just depends on your perspective—or which of two contact lenses it’s viewed through.
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