The Year I Officially Turned Old

[August 2026]

I have decided that this is the year I officially turned old.

Not elderly. Let's not get fucking carried away.

I am 46, not 86 (will be 47 in November). I am not sitting around complaining that the supermarket music is too loud while explaining to a cashier that everything was better when bread cost twelve cents. I still know how to use the internet. I still understand memes. I know how to use emojis. I still have opinions about music that was released after 2000. I am not going to start referring to my television as "the picture box" or telling young people that they need to get off my lawn.

But something has happened.

I have crossed a line.

And the weird thing is that it has nothing to do with the things people usually associate with getting older.

It isn't my hair.

My hair went completely grey in about two months when I was 35 because apparently my nervous system decided that surviving yet another major trauma was going to come with a complimentary transformation into an elderly wizard. I decided to keep it grey. I actually like my grey hair. It has been mine for more than a decade now. At this point, pretending it is some shocking sign of aging would be ridiculous. My hair isn't evidence that I am getting old. My hair is evidence that I had already been through some shit and survived. And Andy calls me a silver fox.

It isn't arthritis, either.

I've had arthritis symptoms since I was 31. My joints have been filing formal complaints against my existence for fifteen years. At this point, creaky knees and assorted orthopedic grievances are not some new development that suddenly appeared because I turned 46. They have been part of the package for a long time.

No, I knew I had officially become old when I started getting transported to medical appointments and the drivers began putting on the oldies station.

Or the classic rock station.

And I don't mean oldies and classic rock in the traditional sense, where I hear Elvis or the Beatles or Led Zeppelin and think, "Well, yes, those are obviously old."

No.

I mean I get into the vehicle, buckle my seatbelt, and the radio cheerfully has a station identifcation bumper as oldies or classic rock and then commences playing the soundtrack of my fucking youth.

"If You Could Only See" by Tonic.

"Take a Picture" by Filter.

"Counting Blue Cars" by Dishwalla.

Excuse me?

Those are not oldies.

Those are songs I remember being contemporary.

Those songs are supposed to be sitting in a CD wallet in the glove compartment of a 1998 Honda Civic. They are supposed to be playing while I am riding around with questionable hair and questionable fashion choices, feeling like I have my entire life ahead of me. They are not supposed to be coming through the speakers of a medical transportation van while I am on my way to an appointment where yet another specialist is going to discuss my bloodwork.

And yet, there I am.

"Hey, that's Tonic!"

The driver probably thinks, "Oh good, the old guy likes this one."

The old guy.

Me.

I am the old guy.

That realization is particularly brutal because there was a time when I would have heard a song from my youth on a station labeled "classic rock" and thought, "Wow, they're really stretching the definition of classic."

Now I am apparently the historical period.

And the medical appointments don't exactly help.

At this age, going to the doctor has increasingly become an exercise in discovering new ways in which my body is apparently a federally funded research project.

I go in for one thing and somebody wants to know when I last had a mammogram.

(Yes, a mammogram. I am a dude. But I have not been able to access top surgery and get the damn moobs off. Thanks, MAGA.)

So yes, I have had a mammogram this year.

I have also had a uterine biopsy.

I will be having a colonoscopy next year.

There is something uniquely surreal about being a 46-year-old man and having conversations about mammograms, uterine biopsies, and future colonoscopies while simultaneously having to explain that yes, I really am a man, and no, that isn't actually contradictory.

Middle age apparently comes with a punch card.

Congratulations! You've reached 46. Your reward is a list of cancer screenings.

I suppose there is something deeply reassuring about preventive medicine. I am glad these screenings exist. I am glad doctors care about catching cancer early. I am glad that people are encouraged to get checked rather than discovering something after it has become much harder to treat.

But there is something undeniably funny about being told, with increasing regularity, that you are now at the age where everyone would really like to have a look around inside you.

When I was 25, nobody was particularly interested in whether I had received all my recommended cancer screenings.

At 46, apparently my entire body is on a watchlist.

And then there was the moment my roommate came home from work and delivered what may be the most devastating evidence yet that I am old.

My roommate manages a Starbucks. One day she casually mentioned Bono at work while talking about the current celebrity tendency to have an opinion about everything political.

Bono, of course, is the guy from U2 who has been famously willing to offer his opinions about world affairs since approximately the invention of electricity, before it became a thing everyone did.

There was a time when Bono's tendency to appear on television and discuss global politics was practically a running joke. He was the celebrity who had an opinion about everything. Bono would show up and tell you about poverty, international development, world leaders, Africa, debt relief, geopolitics, or whatever else was happening, and everyone knew exactly what the joke was.

Apparently, that reference is now historically inaccessible.

One of my roommate's Gen Z employees asked:

"Who's Bono?"

My roommate explained that he was the guy from U2.

The Gen Z employee then asked:

"Who's U2?"

I would like to pause here so that everyone can fully appreciate the scale of this catastrophe.

WHO'S U2?

U2.

Not some obscure one-hit-wonder from 1974.

​Not a progressive rock band whose most famous album requires a Wikipedia page to understand.

U2.

The band whose lead singer's sunglasses were practically a secondary member of the group.

The band that was so fucking famous that everybody, including people who didn't particularly like them, knew who they were.

And now there is an entire generation of people who can hear "Bono" and reasonably respond, "Who?"

I don't blame the kid.

That's the thing.

I cannot even be properly annoyed about it because I remember being young and having no idea who some famous person from an earlier generation was. History happens. Music moves on. Cultural references expire. Every generation eventually becomes the one that has to explain who the hell somebody is.

But Jesus Christ.

Who's U2?

That was one of the moments when I realized I had crossed over.

And then there is the final indignity: the doctors.

My primary care physician is younger than I am.

This fact still feels vaguely illegal.

There was a time when doctors seemed impossibly old to me. When I was a kid, a doctor was an adult adult. Not merely someone old enough to have a driver's license and a mortgage, but someone who seemed to have been practicing medicine since the invention of medicine itself.

Now I walk into an exam room and the person wearing the white coat is younger than me.

My previous primary care physician could have been my daughter.

My current PCP is younger than I am.

When I had surgery over the summer, everybody in the operating room except the surgeon himself was younger than me by somewhere between ten and twenty years.

The anesthesiologist was younger than me, probably thirtysomething.

His assistant was Gen Z with a septum ring and full-sleeve tats.

The people doing things to my body while I was unconscious were, collectively, a demographic group I remember thinking of as "the kids."

There is something profoundly strange about realizing that the people responsible for keeping you alive during surgery were born into a world in which some of the music you remember as new was already old.

And then, about a month later, I went to the emergency room.

The attending physician was in his late twenties.

His late twenties.

That is not a doctor.

That is a baby with a medical degree.

Okay, obviously, I know that's not fair.

A person in their late twenties can be an excellent physician. They have gone through years of medical school and residency and training. They know vastly more about medicine than I do, regardless of their age. I would much rather be treated by a competent 28-year-old than an incompetent 58-year-old.

But that doesn't stop my brain from going:

"Are you sure you should be operating the hospital?"

Meanwhile, the doctor is probably thinking, "This patient is 46."

And I am thinking, "This doctor is 28."

We are both having an experience.

The strangest part of turning 46 isn't actually feeling old.

I don't wake up every morning thinking, "I am an old man."

I still feel like myself.

I still have the same interests, the same sense of humor, the same ridiculous collection of thoughts in my head. I still get excited about things. I still make art. I still write. I still listen to music. I still have things I want to do. I still have plans for the future.

But suddenly, the world keeps providing little reminders that I am no longer young.

The radio station has started making me nostalgic.

The medical system has started making me undergo screenings.

People younger than me are treating me.

People younger than me are asking me who famous musicians are.

And I have reached the age where "middle-aged" is no longer something that happens to other people.

I am middle-aged.

There.

I said it.

And honestly?

It's weird as hell.

Because 46 doesn't feel like the age I imagined middle age would be.

I think that's probably true for most people. When you're young, every age beyond your own seems impossibly old. Thirty sounds ancient when you're fifteen. Forty sounds ancient when you're twenty. Fifty sounds ancient when you're thirty.

Then you get there and discover that you are still you.

You still have the same internal voice you had when you were younger. You still have memories from when you were a kid that feel like they happened yesterday. You still have songs that can transport you instantly back to being 17, or 22, or 30.

The difference is that now some of those songs are being played on the fucking oldies station.

There are, however, some genuine benefits to being this age.

One is that I care considerably less about being physically attractive than I did when I was younger. There is a freedom in realizing that you do not have to spend your entire life trying to convince other people that you are hot.

I don't mean that I have stopped caring about my appearance entirely. I still like looking good. I still have clothes I like and a personal aesthetic and things I enjoy about how I look. I think I look younger than 46 facially (and most people don't see my grey hair since I cover my head for religious reasons). But the pressure is different.

When I was younger, there was this constant sense that I was supposed to be improving myself physically. I was supposed to be fitter, thinner, stronger, more attractive, younger-looking, more sexually desirable, more whatever the hell the current cultural standard demanded.

At 46, some of that bullshit has lost its grip.

I don't have to be "hot" or "cute".

I don't have to have the body of a 25-year-old.

I don't have to prove that I am young.

And frankly, thank fucking G-d.

I would like to have the strength and stamina I had in my twenties. Absolutely. There are things my 20-something body could do that my 46-year-old body would now regard as an act of war.

But you couldn't pay me to be 20-something again.

Not a chance.

Because one of the things you gain with age is perspective.

You learn what matters. You learn what doesn't.

You learn that some disasters really are disasters, and some things that felt like the end of the world were simply things you survived.

You learn people.

You learn yourself.

You learn that life can be spectacularly unfair and still contain moments of astonishing beauty.

And, unfortunately, you learn a lot of this through trauma.

I wish there were a way to acquire wisdom without having to earn so much of it the hard way. I wish experience came primarily from pleasant adventures, good books, interesting conversations, and wise elders.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes you learn because life kicks you in the fucking teeth.

And then you get back up.

You remember.

You adapt.

You become somebody who knows things you didn't know before.

That's what 46 feels like to me.

Not decrepitude.

Not surrender.

Not the end of anything.

Just the increasingly undeniable realization that I have accumulated enough years that the culture I grew up in has started becoming history.

The songs I remember as new are now oldies.

The celebrities I assumed everybody knew are becoming trivia questions.

The doctors treating me are younger than I am.

My body has accumulated enough mileage that preventative maintenance is now a regular part of my calendar.

And somewhere out there, apparently, there is a Gen Z employee at a Starbucks who genuinely has no idea who Bono is.

I am officially old.

And you know what?

That's okay.

I didn't expect to get here quite like this.

But I am here.

I have survived enough to have stories. I have lived long enough to have perspective. I have reached an age where I can look at the younger version of myself with something approaching compassion rather than embarrassment.

And if the price of getting here is that some medical transportation driver puts on "Counting Blue Cars" while driving me to an appointment where somebody wants to discuss my cancer screening schedule, well...

Fine.

I'll sing along.

But I am absolutely going to complain about being called an oldie.

Because I'm not old.

I'm 46.

There is a difference.

At least until they start playing Tonic on the fucking Golden Oldies station with the Beach Boys.