The dreaded creep of the Old Man Opinion – and what to do about it
Special bonus: A couple good questions to ask on a first date in order to find out what kind of jabroni you're sitting across from
I was listening to two people talk the other day – is it still eavesdropping if you don’t actually want to hear anything they’re saying, but they’re talking so loudly in such a small space that they basically force you to? – and suddenly one of them said something that struck me.
“My biggest fear,” this person said, “is becoming one of those older people who can’t ever change their thinking about anything.”
Yeah, I thought. I definitely get that. You see it all the time. And, the older you get, the more you start to understand how it happens. It’s like there’s a thought calcification that sets in for a lot of people. At a certain point, they feel like they know what they know and it is no longer open to any editing process.
A friend of mine used to go into first dates with a few standard questions, mostly to weed out the people she wouldn’t be compatible with. (Side note: My personal favorite of these questions was: Where are you going when you die? This is a good one partially because it helps you find out who’s secretly very religious and was hoping you wouldn’t notice even though you very, very clearly stated on your profile that you’re not into that and here they are talking about going to Catholic Mass every week while you’re wondering how fast you can down the rest of this beer and bolt. But it’s also good because it shows you who’s weirded out and instantly uncomfortable with the question and who’s willing to dive right in and have fun discussing it. I have always preferred the latter, especially if we’re talking long-term relationships. At some point we will have heard all each other’s stories and we need to be able to get strange and dumb and abstract together or there will be nothing to talk about except the weather. But I digress.)
One of the most important questions was: What’s something you used to believe but don’t anymore? This is surprisingly tough for some people. They’ve never been wrong. At least not about anything that matters. They have all the same opinions they had 15 or 20 years ago. That’s a red flag, because it means they either don’t have the ability to update and question their own thinking or don’t have the ability to admit it. Either way, that’s the point in the date where you make up an excuse about having to go home and give your dog his medicine or whatever.
But the older people get, the harder it seems for many of them to adjust to new stuff. I’ve mentioned this on here before, but a few years back the big homie Dan Brooks wrote a really great feature on Norm Macdonald for the New York Times Magazine. Near the end of the article, Macdonald reflected on various social changes he found difficult to understand.
“At 58, he said, he was having the disturbing experience of recognizing some of his own opinions as the thinking of an old man.”
An example Macdonald gave was the shifting ideology around gender. A part of him recognized that all this was very real and legit for many people, but he still just couldn’t quite understand it and that bothered him. Note here that one of the key differences between Macdonald’s old man thinking and a lot of other people’s old man thinking is that he wanted to understand it. He didn’t just dismiss it as some fake bullshit the kids these days are up to. But he also couldn’t quite grasp it himself, and was ultimately comforted only by his son asking, what makes you think you need to understand everything?
You don’t have to be old or a man to develop Old Man Opinions. Some of them are mostly harmless. (Example from my own brain: The genre of literary fiction has largely ossified into a dull sludge of the same people publishing the same stuff – often with the same goddamn covers – for an increasingly narrow and homogenized audience.) But others, especially the very broad, loud ones that some people want to codify as laws rather than mere opinions, are a lot less so.
One way you can tell an Old Man Opinion is that it tends to equate new and different with bad and scary. It’s that ‘back in my day’ disease, where people a) cling to a romanticized and not terribly accurate idea of the past, and then b) insist that anything other than that must be a downgrade.
Even when we know this is an old person trope we sometimes still fall into it. I remember reading this amazing book that’s just Orson Welles talking during a series of lunches with a fellow director, and at one point the man asks him if Hollywood was really better back in his day.
“It’s terrible for older people to say that, because they always say things were better,” Welles said. “But they really were.”
(If you’re going to be a weirdly fascinating yet obnoxious old blowhard, as Orson Welles very much was, the least you can do is really look like one, so at least people have a chance to see it coming.)
Another hallmark of the form is that Old Man Opinions often center on things that do not really effect the holder of the opinion. It’s really none of their concern and none of their business. Because, honestly, what the fuck do you care if other people don’t want to act out the exact expressions of gender that you think they should? It isn’t something that is likely to impact your life at all. And even if it did, maybe ask yourself which total strangers should have the right to tell you how to live your one precious life.
What’s crazy is how many of these rigid old thinkers were once daring young people intent on remaking the world and breaking free of their parents’ and grandparents’ rules and norms. What the hell happened to them? Whatever it is, it’s been happening to people for thousands of years. That’s what is really disappointing about confronting your own Old Man Opinions, is you realize it’s such a predictable arc.
When Julius Caesar was an ambitious young man, his elders in Ancient Rome thought he and his friends were a bunch of effeminate punks with no work ethic and no respect. They thought his hairstyle was stupid. His clothes were slovenly. His lifestyle was decadent. It was basically all the same shit that the parents of the hippies said about them in the 1960s, and also the same shit many of those retired hippies are saying about the Gen Z kids now.
The scary thing is, a part of me gets it. I’m in a coffee shop and I see some 22-year-old dude with his dorky, intentionally ill-fitting clothes and the mustache he’s trying to grow because he saw enough girls on TikTok express a preference for it. He’s there with a woman who shaved her eyebrows completely off before apparently asking her drunkest friend to cut her bangs in a way that looks like something a toddler would do when left unsupervised with a pair of scissors. They’re talking about how a friend of theirs is in her spiraling girl era and it’s giving total despair. What the fuck, I think. Just what the fuck.
It takes a conscious effort sometimes to remind myself that they’re no dumber than we were – it just looks different. It always looks different. Some day they’ll probably look at the kids and see wayward idiots who are brimming with a misguided confidence, just as those kids will look at them and see rusted old geezers who very clearly don’t get it.
Maybe we can’t always stop ourselves from developing Old Man Opinions. But we don’t have to let them go unexamined. That part is still very much up to us. Maybe the main thing that happens to people who let themselves get too rigid in their thinking is that they stop doing the work of thinking about their own thinking.
Really, that’s the person you don’t want to be. Being that person only works if you can genuinely believe that you figured absolutely everything out a long time ago and nothing at all has changed about the world around you that would necessitate a refresh. And about whom has that ever been true? And what colossal arrogance would it take to assume you’re the first?