[SB #228] Acting our age. What does it mean?

I’m Matt, and welcome to Steady Beats. If you like to walk for a better life, and also like Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life,” you just might like this newsletter.

Part of the reason I write here is to raise my standards. My aspirations. And yours, also. I want to build our aspirations for what we can be, do, feel like, and accomplish in this modern era of middle age.

But here’s what I don’t mean:

Raising our standards doesn’t mean lowering our dignity.

There’s no problem with people in their 60s and 70s playing concerts. I’ve seen a lot of acts in that age range—Steely Dan, Chicago, The Doobie Brothers, Paul Simon, Stevie Nicks, Bryan Adams, and on and on—and so many of them are still excellent.

And none pretended they were 25 years old.

Madonna is free to do what she wants, of course. Critics of the video were called ageist by some.

Ageism is alive and well, but the criticism of her dancing is not ageism.

That’s just people pointing out a bad look—a clearly incongruent action with someone’s state of being—when they see it.

We should aspire to grand things in middle age. And this is a change in mindset from most previous generations. We should—we must!—rail against Father Time, as

Jon Finkel

says:

Let’s live with determination, vigor, creativity, self-expression, and, yes, dignity.

That’s what I mean by raising our middle-aged standards.

We can be strong and lean. We can have have tons of energy and cardiovascular capacity. We can and should look good. Nothing wrong with that. We should start businesses, or newsletters, or both, like

Rick Lewis

. Create a YouTube channel.

In fact, we have to do those things if we want longevity and healthspan. Middle age is no time to fade into a recliner. Midlife is the time to create missions of our best self-expression, and to create the health and vitality to fuel those missions.

So let’s not act our age. But let’s not act 40 years below our age, either.

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