Theory 20: A Picture of Dorian Graying

As a 35 year old man who has to stretch before playing ping pong, I have many reasons to suspect that I am old and past my prime. Hangovers are harder. New technologies frighten and confuse me.

Worst of all I remember how, when I was younger, people who are my age now would tell me how old they are. They would tell me how their bodies are changing, or how they are always tired. I remember thinking “35 is old.”

I suppose that most of us view life as some kind of crooked bell curve where, after running around like an idiot for 15 years, we suddenly begin this steep ascension leading to our glorious twenties, where all the energy of youth finally combines with the freedom of adulthood. Then, at the onset of thirty, mortality taps on the shoulder and the long process of watching your body deteriorate begins. For most of us, death isn’t a man in a black robe with a scythe, it is just a small innocuous leach that starts sucking the life out of you on your thirtieth birthday and never stops to breathe until many years later when you yourself finally stop breathing.

Something like this:

We modern humans make it tough on ourselves - we consider ourselves in the absolute prime of our lives when we are in our twenties and then one day the number on the left column changes and everyone shifts gears. Houses get bigger and further away from civilization, kids start dropping like troublseome triffles. We get tired. We get serious about the future. We settle down. The fun and silliness all slip away, and we start to feel older. We feel the days when we had limitless future as turned into our limited present, and our whole lives are no longer ahead of us.

Now that I have climbed the crooked mountain to 35 I have some observations.
It is true that we all experience a gradual physical decline for the majority of our lives. I haven’t bothered to look it up, but personal experience backs up the theory that this begins right around the age of 30. However, I have learned this slow decline is offset by sharp increase in our ability to navigate the challenges of our lives though wisdom and experience. In fact, I would go so far as to say that our "emotional prime", "intellectual prime", or even perhaps our "spiritual prime", doesn’t really greet us until after our physical prime has run its course.
When I was younger I remember hearing a lot of nonsense from older people who would say "if I only knew then what I know now . ." I never really believed this. After all, why couldn’t these people just tell me what they had learned? If there are these great secrets that you learn when you are older, why hasn’t someone shared them?

Sadly, I have now come to suspect that people tell the secrets that one learns with age all of the time:

"Be true to thine own self"
"You reap what you sew"
"The trick is to only get a LITTLE high"
(I could go on and on with these common wisdoms but I need to get back to going on and on about my main point.)

These are concepts I was able to grasp as a younger man when I first heard them. The problem is that they seem to gradually take on more and more meaning as time goes on, and I have realized how difficult it is to be true to yourself, or how it takes a life’s commitment to sew enough for a good reaping, or that sometimes you’re already much too high before you know it.

Thus the contrast of the human aging process: if we experience our spiritual or intellectual or emotional prime after our physical bodies have already passed their prime and started to decline, then at what point are we really in "the prime of our lives"?

It seems to me that to even make a cursory answer at such a complicated question I need to break down all aspects of the human personality and chart how they rise and fall during the human aging process. But that's just me. So, in the most cursory of ways, that’s is exactly what I am going to do now.
Noted sociologist/daydreamer Gary Gygax once, as part of some other less meaningful project, actually took the time to break down all human (and near human) characteristics, both physical and cerebral, into six main categories. I am now going to prepare a chart for each of these six categories attempting to describe how each one is affected by the human aging process. I am not going to bother commenting during these because that would make the theory too damn long. Suffice to say I put this together intuitively and without research. This remains a cursory glance based on immediate intuition: a simple experimient into my own perceptions and what I might learn about them.

Characteristic 1: Strength

Characteristic 2: Intelligence

Characteristic 3: Wisdom

Characteristic 4: Dexterity

Characteristic 5: Constitution

Characteristic 6: Charisma

I will say again, this is quickly thrown together and not meant to be scientific. In spite of this, I was still curious to see what I could learn when I jumbled it all together. Here is your composite chart of human characteristics through the human life cycle. complete with a trend line provided by the good people at Microsoft Powerpoint.

Turns out I accidentally proved (using the broadest possible context of the word) that the prime of your life, when you look beyond simple physical characteristics in order to incorporate the full life experience, is actually 35. More importantly, the ages of 45 and 55, despite further physical decline, still rank roughly as high as the period when we are 25. Gotta love the crap that you can mathematically prove with charts.

What does it all mean?

Before I alert the scientific community, there are a few small caveats we should all keep in mind:

1) The values I gave for each characteristic were arbitrarily chosen by me. I have no doubt that many of you will take issue with some of my choices. I encourage you to repeat the exercise yourself and determine your own average values.
2) I should confess that the human characteristics I based this analysis on are not quite universally accepted, though they do have a strong following.
3) The idea of giving all six characteristics equal weight, though damn sporting, is also arbitrary and without and scientific basis, in keeping with the general theme.
4) In spite of this negativity, I did stay true to the experiment and stick with my initial intuitive values for each human characteristic.

Nonetheless, (can I still say "nonetheless" or has that ship sailed?), it does leave us with one piece of information, a little thing I call "Theory 20":

We humans have a tendency to put far too much emphasis on our physical being when evaluating our own life span. This leads to a lot of unnecessary neurosis and insecurity, and prevents us from realizing how much opportunity we still have to develop. However, if one takes a balanced approach in looking at the full experience of life, taken in context with our continually expanding life spans and our gradual decline in physical ability, we are fortunate to be at or reasonably close to the prime of our lives for much longer than we allow ourselves to believe. Our strengths and/or our challenges may change, but life is no less enriching. As someone who is only beginning to get a glimpse of the value of experience and wisdom, and only beginning to understand the true commitment that applying these qualities require, I feel that 35 may very well be the best year that one gets to experience.

36 I am a little worried about.

In considering this theory one question stuck in my mind. If all of this ridiculous age-friendly optimism holds true, than why do most people over 30 not share in my theory?

Well, aside from very real and practical considerations like both having and raising children, or feeling naturally compelled to compare ourselves to our parents, I suspect the answer lies in something as simple and shallow as this: