Who decides what is old?

What is old??

At some point we all just started acting like “old” is a real, measurable thing.
Like it’s a fact, the same way boiling point is a fact, or your shoe size. Except ask ten different people when someone becomes old and you’ll get ten different answers.
Different numbers, different conditions, different gut feelings.
Which tells you it’s not a fact at all. It’s just a guess that got repeated so many times it started sounding like one.
So I want to actually pick this apart. What is old. Who decided.
And why does the answer keep changing depending on who you ask.

An eighty year old who walks every day, does a bit of light weight training, still gets up a ladder to clean her own gutters, gets called “amazing for her age.” Impressive.
Almost suspicious, like she’s cheating somehow.

Meanwhile a twenty three year old who spends fourteen hours a day hunched in front of a screen, barely walking further than the fridge, gets called… normal. That’s just what young people do now.
Nobody says “he’s really let himself go for someone so young.” The whole standard only ever points in one direction.

The body part

So the number hasn’t actually changed, but everything around it has. Life expectancy, health, how we live.
A year lived in 1975 and a year lived now just aren’t the same thing, not physically, not in terms of what your life actually looks like.
So sure, if age just means years accumulated, fine, it’s accurate, nobody’s arguing with basic math.
But if age is supposed to tell you something about a person, whether they’re capable, whether they’re relevant, whether they’re worth listening to, it doesn’t tell you any of that!
It only tells you how long someone’s been alive … That’s it!
We took a number and put it in charge of judging a person’s entire worth, and then act surprised when it turns out to be terrible at the job.

Okay, say it’s not the number. Maybe it’s physical condition. Maybe old means your body slowed down, and young means it hasn’t yet.
There’s some truth in that, bodies do change, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But look at how selectively this gets applied.

If physical condition genuinely was the measure, it would have to work both ways.
That unfit twenty three year old would have to count as “older” than the active eighty year old. Nobody actually applies it that consistently, because it was never really about the body in the first place.

It’s about which age group gets the benefit of the doubt and which one doesn’t.
Young people get assumed capable until proven otherwise.
Older people get assumed incapable until proven otherwise.
Same behaviour, judged from two completely different starting points.

The rules nobody actually voted for
There’s this invisible rulebook floating around that nobody wrote, and yet everybody seems to know it … Apparently you’re too old for certain jeans … Too old for that haircut … Too old to dye your hair a colour that doesn’t grow in nature ... Too old to drive a certain kind of car, wear a certain swimsuit, dance a certain way at a wedding and … blahblahblah

And if you actually look at where these rules come from, it’s almost never a doctor, almost never a real safety issue, almost never anything to do with actual ability.
It’s usually just some stranger online, often younger than you,
deciding out loud that a woman in her fifties wearing the “wrong” jeans is somehow committing a crime.
As if clothes have an expiry date and only some people are required to check it. As if a body that’s lived fifty, sixty, seventy years loses the right to enjoy a colour, a haircut, a car with a bit of pep in it.
But at the same time it is perfectly alright to have lip fillers in your mid twenties and end up looking like a fish desperately gasping for air.

Which tells you “old” was never really describing a fixed group of people. It’s a moving target every generation points at the one just ahead of it, without ever noticing someone behind them is doing the exact same thing to them.
Useful isn’t the same as heard.

And here’s the part that actually bothers me, more than the jeans, more than the hair dye, more than any of it.
Being older used to come with something attached to it.
Respect.
The assumption that someone who’d lived longer had probably picked something up along the way, and that it was worth hearing.
That assumption has basically disappeared.
Somewhere along the line, being older stopped meaning “someone worth listening to” and started meaning “someone worth calling when the babysitter cancels, or when a bit of money’s needed.”
Useful, in specific, convenient ways. Present when it suits.
Otherwise, mostly left out of the conversation entirely.

Say something with actual conviction, something built on decades of watching patterns repeat, of having lived through earlier versions of whatever “new” crisis everyone’s suddenly panicking about, and watch how fast it gets waved off.
Not argued with … Waved off!
Like the years themselves disqualify you instead of qualifying you.
Like none of that time spent living actually added up to anything.
And it’s funny, that attitude tends to disappear the second the advice is about something practical, saving money, fixing a leak, and suddenly older people “actually do know a thing or two.”
Respect that only shows up when it’s convenient isn’t respect.
It’s just a transaction wearing a nicer outfit.

Decades ago, being the oldest person in the room meant something.
People actually deferred, not blindly, but because there was a real assumption that time spent living counted for something.

Somewhere between then and now, that flipped into the opposite assumption, that anyone who didn’t grow up with today’s technology, today’s slang, today’s pace, must automatically be behind on everything that matters.
Like wisdom needs a software update, and anyone who missed it is running on something outdated.

That’s not progress.
That’s just rudeness, rudeness with better branding!

The mindset thing
So if it’s not the number, and it’s not really the body, and it’s definitely not some stranger’s opinion about jeans, then what is it?
Honestly, I think it comes down to mindset.

Somewhere around the mid thirties, give or take, people tend to settle into who they’re going to be.
Not completely, not forever, but roughly. Whoever’s naturally curious tends to stay curious. Whoever’s rigid tends to get more rigid.
It basically means that if you were a prick at 35 chances are you will be a certified prick in your mid sixties.
Whatever the dominant pattern already is at that point tends to just harden rather than reverse.

That’s what actually separates people, far more than any birthday does. Someone who’s still willing to be wrong, still willing to be bad at something new before getting good at it, still able to laugh at their own mistakes instead of getting defensive, that person doesn’t read as old, no matter what their ID says.
.

Nobody ever actually explains what harm is being done.
They can’t, because there isn’t any. The rule isn’t protecting a single person. It’s just a way of making people feel better or more superior and it is keeping people in their assigned little box, and that box seems to get smaller every year past some line somebody else drew, for reasons nobody bothered to explain.

What gets me is how casually it’s said, like it’s obvious, like it’s common sense, when it’s really just leftover nonsense nobody ever questioned.

It depends entirely on where you’re standing
Here’s the part that really gives the whole thing away.
“Old” isn’t a fixed point on a line. It’s a direction, and it completely depends on where you happen to be standing when you point at it.

To a fifteen year old, thirty five looks ancient, practically a different species. To that same thirty five year old, someone in their sixties looks old. To the person in their sixties, eighty looks old.
And to the eighty year old, sixty probably looks like they’ve barely started, still got their whole life in front of them.
Everybody is “old” to somebody younger and “young” to somebody older, all at the exact same time, using the exact same word.

Someone who stopped being curious at twenty eight, who gets offended easily, who treats their opinions like finished products instead of works in progress, that person can read as old when they are just thirty, regardless of the number.

The part i don’t want to skip
But I’m not going to pretend the mindset thing explains everything either, because it doesn’t, and it would be a bit dishonest to leave it there.
The body genuinely doesn’t care how curious you are.
Bones will thin. Reflexes will slow down. Bouncing back from a bad night’s sleep or a long flight takes longer at seventy than it did at twenty, and no amount of mental flexibility changes that.
Some things really do get less with age, not because someone invented a rule, but because of plain physical reality.
A risk that was fine at twenty carries different odds at seventy.
That’s not ageism, it is common sense. It is just consequence.

And there’s a second thing worth admitting, one that’s a bit less comfortable.
The whole “old is just a mindset” idea is awfully convenient for whoever’s saying it.
It lets you wave off every real limitation, every actual change, as if none of it counts so long as your attitude is right.
Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it’s just a nice story people tell themselves so they don’t have to look at something that’s genuinely different now.
Honestly, the truth probably sits somewhere uncomfortable in the middle. Mindset explains a lot, but not everything, and pretending it does … well that eventually will create its own set of problems.

So what is old, then?
Maybe the real problem isn’t figuring out what old means.
Maybe the problem is that “old” was always too blunt a word to be doing this much work. People use it to mean tired.
They use it to mean cautious. They use it to mean closed off, or set in their ways, or just genuinely content and no longer chasing the next new thing.

Those are all different things, and none of them belong to any particular birthday.
A twenty three year old can be closed off.
A ninety year old can be completely open.
Lump all of that under one lazy word and you end up with eighty year olds getting patronised and twenty three year olds getting a free pass, using the exact same broken logic, just pointed in opposite directions.

So next time that word comes up, whether someone else says it or I catch myself thinking it, it’s probably worth stopping to ask what’s actually being pointed at. Tired isn’t old. Cautious isn’t old. Content isn’t old.
Being on the receiving end of someone else’s discomfort about their own future definitely isn’t old.
Whatever people actually mean when they reach for that word, it’s rarely the thing they claim it is.
And honestly, it’s about time we stopped letting one lazy word define who we are and decide who gets to be heard.

Yes… my body isn’t what it used to be.
Some mornings, getting up off my knees after painting the skirting board takes an embarrassing amount of negotiating.
Does that make me old? Maybe ... Probably.
Do I feel old? … Absolutely not!!

Old is something that’s happening to my knees. It’s not happening to me. Let’s be very clear about that.

Rosita

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