Lowering the Bar on “Old”
Last weekend, I dragged my husband to see “While We’re Young”, the Ben Stiller movie where he and wife Naomi Watts befriend the hip young couple played by Adam from “Girls” and Amanda Seyfried. Ben and Naomi (Josh + Cornelia) are fascinated and flattered that the much younger and seemingly cooler Adam (Fletcher) and Amanda (Darby) want to hang out with them.
It was interesting to watch Josh and Cornelia come alive around their new friends, and how surprised they were that their millennial couple crush surrounded themselves with vinyl and books and board-games, relics of their middle-aged lives they’d shunning for Pandora, iPads and Words With Friends.
Oh the irony.
I don’t want to give away how this all ends — go see for yourself. But I can tell you that it left me feeling pretty darn happy. Why?
1. It confirmed the fact that I really don’t want to be 20, or even 30 anymore. I’m pretty happy, at least today, to not be anywhere near that time of my life, and feel lucky to have lived those years in a blissfully gadget and hipster-free world.
Even better?
2. Josh and Cornelia are in their early 40s in “While We’re Young”. And they are “old.” Everyone over 30 is now considered “old” in our current cultural obsession with youth culture. What does mean?
MILLENNIAL SOCIETY HAS LOWERED THE BAR ON OLD!
When we were 30, or even 40, we still slid under that imaginary wire of an acceptable age. And now that many of us are past our mid-forties and into our fifties, truly crossing that Mason/Dixon line of age into the “middle”, those poor suckers 10 to 20 years our junior are now lumped in with us! The grading curve has expanded! This amuses me to no end.
So really, when you think about it, we are lucky ladies — to have been born when we were, experiencing youth when we did, and experiencing middle age when the middle keeps getting younger, and bigger. We rule. We really do. Go claim your crown.
xo
1. Si and Si Design silver crown ring, Bluefly. 2. Emily & Ashley crown necklace, Max & Chloe. 3. Amedeo Diamond and Sapphire ring, Kirna Zabete. 4. Stubbs & Wooten crown slippers, Stubbs & Wooten. 5. Elizabeth Knight lace crown ring, Ahalife.