The advantages of older people over young people are named

And then one day my husband returns from the clinic and, telling how everything went, casually remarks: “The doctor there is so elderly. Well, our age.” And somewhere in the background of my consciousness, mourning music begins to sound. Because it turns out: for some time now, the elderly are us. Although according to the classification of the World Health Organization, an elderly person starts at 60 years of age. But two years difference makes little difference.

What happens to you when you move into this unknown world? I must say, there is quite a lot of unpleasant things here.

Something constantly aches – it hurts – it hurts a lot. Accordingly, new topics for conversations with relatives and friends appear. Which medicine is better for a particular disease. What about insomnia? Don’t you have a good cardiologist?

However, pain in the back (head, knee) is still treatable. In contrast to social weakness. This is when you call a potential employer, answer a question about your age, and you simply cease to be of interest to him. No, more precisely, this: you cease to interest anyone. Although it is incomprehensible to the mind why a 60-year-old educated person is bad for scientific, teaching, accounting and other work that does not require outstanding external data and does not involve regular lifting of weights?!

Having written these words now, I realized with horror that I did not completely agree with myself (also, probably, an age-related phenomenon). The elderly have some properties that are definitely not suitable for today’s labor market. For example, an attachment to paper media – books, notepads, pieces of paper – and a slight distrust of gadgets. This does not mean, of course, that those “who are for…” do not know how to use computers and mobile phones. It’s just not as natural to us as breathing. When I attend lectures with colleagues, or work in the library reading room, I take notes by hand on paper. For students, it looks a bit like me scratching a quill pen or carving writing on stone surfaces.

And we, the elderly, are no different from very old people in our selfless love for our own past. I am convinced that a young lecturer does not indulge in memories as irrepressibly as a 60-year-old. For some reason, we really want the students to imagine Soviet life that is infinitely distant from them. We passionately tell them about shortages, queues, Komsomol and party meetings, quote Gorky and Mayakovsky and are indignant when it turns out that the interlocutor has not read “Virgin Soil Upturned” and “The Young Guard”. Although, to be honest, maybe thank God?

It turns out that you become old when you begin to impose your picture of the world on others, to overwhelm them with quotes that tell them nothing and jokes that are absolutely not funny, from their point of view. After all, any joke about Khrushchev or Brezhnev needs to be explained to today’s students for about 10 minutes. It would be strange if after that they finally laughed.

But I don’t intend to indulge in self-flagellation yet. Yes, we have a craving for memoirs, we can be tiresome with our numerous excursions into history. So there won’t be another generation like this again! Now the age of around 60 means that a person was born and lived for two or three decades under Soviet rule, experienced perestroika while still very young, survived into the 90s, that is, became the owner of invaluable experience of not one, but several civilizations.

Maybe it seems to those around us that we are not quite in our right mind, when in our statements no, no, and “Sverdlov Square” instead of “Teatralnaya” and Leningrad instead of St. Petersburg flash through, an incomprehensible comparison slips through: “the queue is like a Mausoleum,” “ looked like Lenin at the bourgeoisie.” It is clear that for young people all this is nothing more than information noise. But for the history of the country it is of enormous value. In my opinion, my peers should be forced to write memoirs. But most often we don’t have time to do this: we all still work very hard.

There is one more sad circumstance. As we age, especially as we retire, we become a target for scammers. They call, of course, everyone, but the elderly with particular frenzy. They offer a wonderful remedy for everything. Its price, of course, is considerable. And it’s better to take several pieces at once. Then they promise monetary compensation for why for some reason the miraculous cure for everything didn’t work. To get it, you must first pay. Finally, an “investigator” appears who is “leading the case” about the miraculous cure for everything that did not work and the compensation that did not arrive in the bank account. Since he is terribly concerned about the safety of the money we still have, it must be urgently transferred to a “safe account.” And sometimes I want to shout during the next call like this: “Wait, you write us down as senile! We are elderly, but not weak-minded!”

One last sad thought. The elderly man develops a completely new relationship with literary characters. At the beginning of your reading journey, you are even younger than almost all the characters in adult books. Then you outgrow 16-year-old Petrusha Grinev, 26-year-old Onegin, Prince Andrey, who is just over 30… At some point you become the same age not as the main characters themselves, but as their parents, and over time you leave some of them far behind. And now you are already in the glorious company of Gogol’s old-world landowners – husband and wife, who are 60 and 55 years old and whom 25-year-old Gogol affectionately calls “two old men.”

And the classics themselves, looking sadly from their ceremonial portraits, have long been younger than us: M.Yu. Lermontov lived 27 years, A.S. Pushkin – 37, A.P. Chekhov – 40. Some turn out to be young men younger than our own children and students: for example, the great critic Nikolai Alexandrovich Dobrolyubov died at the age of 25. Re-reading the works of eternally young classics, you realize with bitterness how little you managed to do – in comparison with them, who never became elderly.

But enough about the bad. The transition to a new, elderly state has its undoubted advantages. For example, you can slow down your long-term concern for your own external attractiveness. If in your youth, when buying shoes without heels, it still made sense to reproach yourself and think that you should have bought heels, now the choice in favor of comfort is made completely calmly. I can’t go to a disco in these shoes, honestly!

The enormous advantage of adulthood is that you begin to be much less shy. You can easily and even cheerfully ask your friends and random passers-by where the toilet is nearby. In a subway car you sit and read, not feeling tormented by the fact that a far from young woman with two bags is looming over you: let the young people give in to her, well, not me, a pensioner!

And how I like it, when approaching one of the university elevators during a break between classes, for which a roaring crowd of students is waiting, not to stand at the end of the line, as before, but to say calmly and confidently: “Please let the elderly teacher through!” Most often they miss it.

They say that the aging of a nation is a serious socio-economic problem. The national economy objectively needs attractive young faces, strong young bodies, fresh young heads and hot young temperaments. Elderly people are not hired because they are ugly, physically weak and terribly slow. But I would like society to pay attention to our outstanding qualities.

Many of us have a good education. On average, we write fairly well, speak clearly, and can still do mental math. We are not slaves to the digital world and strongly prefer to gather friends around the table rather than on Zoom. Moreover, they are quite capable of setting the table themselves, preparing a delicious dinner for guests. We are unpretentious and incredibly adaptable. If necessary, we can wash clothes by hand or boil water over a fire. By the way, in case of a power outage we have a supply of matches and paraffin candles.

And these are small things in comparison with our main advantage. “Elderly” means “elderly.” Over our 30–40 adult years, we have hit a lot of bumps and learned a thing or two. We are responsible and reliable.

Many years ago, back in the Soviet district clinic, I had to donate blood from a vein. The young nurse could not get into my vein, which was really not particularly thick, with a needle and loudly criticized my unfortunate anatomical structure. The situation would have turned out to be hopeless if a cleaning lady of about 60 years old had not been mopping the floor in the laboratory at that moment. Saying something like: “Oh my God!” – She slowly took off her household gloves, put on medical gloves, walked up and, without visible effort, stuck the needle where it was needed. Then she continued to wash the floor. It is clear that this was a retired nurse working part-time. Not particularly pretty. Not fast. Simply professional and caring. In a word – elderly.