The mirror doesn’t lie, though God knows I wish it would. Another line carved into this weathered face, another gray hair sprouting like a weed in the garden of my fading youth. Fifty-seven years on this godforsaken planet and what do I have to show for it? A mind that won’t shut up and a body that’s filing for early retirement.

This society—this plastic fantastic wonderland we’ve built—has no use for the old, the questioning, the perpetually unsatisfied. Turn on any screen, flip through any magazine, walk down any street and what do you see? Beautiful twenty-somethings selling you everything from insurance to enlightenment, their perfect teeth gleaming like tombstones in a millionaire’s cemetery.

The young rule this kingdom of surfaces, and why shouldn’t they? They’ve got energy where we have exhaustion, optimism where we have hard-earned cynicism, and most importantly—they’ve got time. Beautiful, unlimited time stretching ahead of them like an eight-lane highway to nowhere special.

The Curse of Curiosity

But here’s the real kick in the teeth: being smart in this world is like being a vegetarian at a barbecue convention. Nobody wants to hear what you have to say, and everyone thinks you’re ruining the fun.

I spent decades reading, thinking, questioning everything from the price of milk to the meaning of existence. I studied philosophy and poetry, science and history. I filled my head with the thoughts of dead men and living fools alike. And what did it get me? The ability to see through every commercial, every political promise, every Instagram-filtered moment of manufactured happiness.

Intellectual curiosity—that beautiful, terrible gift—becomes a lead weight around your neck as you age. The more you know, the more you realize how little everyone else wants to know. The deeper you dig, the more you understand that most people are perfectly content to live on the surface, scrolling through their lives like they’re channel-surfing through a nightmare.

You start to see the patterns, the endless recycling of human stupidity dressed up in new packaging. You watch the same mistakes repeated by each generation, the same lies told with different words, the same tragedies repackaged as entertainment.

The Weight of Knowing

And then there’s the big one—the elephant in every room, the uninvited guest at every party: death. That final punctuation mark at the end of the sentence we’re all writing.

When you’re young, death is theoretical. It’s something that happens to other people, in other places, at other times. It’s a distant storm cloud on a sunny day. But as you age, as your friends start dropping like flies at a pesticide convention, death becomes your shadow, your constant companion, your most reliable friend.

The young can afford to be stupid because they think they have forever. We who are older know better. We feel time slipping through our fingers like sand, each day a small death, each wrinkle a reminder that the clock is ticking toward midnight.

This knowledge—this terrible, beautiful awareness of our own mortality—sits on your chest like a sleeping cat you can’t move without waking the beast. It colors everything: your morning coffee tastes different when you know you might only have a few thousand left. Your conversations with loved ones carry extra weight when you realize this might be one of the last times.

The Youth Industrial Complex

Meanwhile, the world spins on, powered by the naive energy of those who still believe in permanent solutions to temporary problems. The advertising executives and social media moguls, the politicians and pop stars—they’ve built an empire on youth, beauty, and blissful ignorance.

They sell dreams to people who don’t know enough to recognize nightmares. They package emptiness in pretty bottles and call it fulfillment. They turn wisdom into a liability and ignorance into a virtue.

The old, the thoughtful, the perpetually wondering—we’re relics in a world that values the shiny and new over the seasoned and tested. Our wrinkles tell stories nobody wants to read. Our questions puncture holes in the balloons of hope that keep the whole circus floating.

The Bitter Sweetness

So here we are, those of us who’ve made the mistake of living long enough to know better. We carry our intelligence like a cross, our awareness like a stone in our shoe. We watch the beautiful idiots dance their way through life with something approaching envy, wondering what it would be like to care more about the Kardashians than Kierkegaard.

But maybe—just maybe—there’s something to be said for being the ones who remember, who question, who refuse to go gentle into that good night of comfortable ignorance. Maybe our burden is also our gift: to be the witnesses, the record-keepers, the ones who know the difference between wisdom and clever marketing.

The young will inherit the earth, sure enough. But we who are older, we who think too much and know too little—we get to see the whole beautiful, terrible show for what it really is.

And sometimes, in the quiet moments between the chaos, that’s enough.