The good column: Lepers at the fax machine

At first you don’t think about it for a long time and let it happen indifferently, then suddenly everything happens very quickly: No, we’re not talking about sex here, but about aging. One morning you wake up and suddenly you’re old without even noticing it before. Well, admittedly, there were small signs in everyday life that indicated that something had changed, but they came out of the blue: suddenly buttons on pants that you had worn for years without ever being able to fasten could no longer be fastened the slightest problem had occurred. With a quick glance in the bathroom mirror in the morning, you suddenly thought you saw your own father’s face. And where did the yellow skin on his face come from? How did you suddenly and silently mutate overnight into the image of Homer Simpson?

There were also an increasing number of worrying moments in public: for example, when you looked up briefly in the subway and then realized that you were the only one in the carriage holding paper in your hand and not a smartphone. At pop concerts you were the strange oddity who didn’t look at what was happening on stage through the display of your cell phone held up. While the smooth and rosy-cheeked pubescents around you looked at someone partly incredulous and partly with obvious disgust in their eyes, which seemed to ask: “Are you coming here to die already?”

So what the Spanish writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna once taught us suddenly came true: “We look into the abyss of old age, and the children come from behind and push us into it.” But you were actually already old news, just because you could still remember what a fax machine was and what noises it made? Did you really deserve to be treated like a leper by 30-year-olds just because you still knew who Helmut Kohl was, could concentrate on one thing for longer than 15 seconds and still mastered the antiquated cultural technique of reading?

As Theo Nahmmacher once described it, as Theo Nahmmacher once described it: “First you notice it yourself, then the others too, and later only the others.” At first you notice with dismay that your hair is falling out of your hair from one day to the next ears grow; then one day on the way to the gym, strangers ask you if you need help crossing the street; and some time later you wonder who put the freshly washed socks in the fridge.

Aging happens incredibly quickly: you just felt a vague sense of pride about having finally successfully recorded the song “Video Killed The Radio Star” by the Buggles on the radio with your brand new mono cassette recorder, without the presenter interrupting at the beginning or end Song chatted into it, and before you know it – time flies – you’re stared at by big children’s eyes and suspiciously asked how people used to be able to listen to Spotify if there was supposedly no internet back then.

Did you really deserve to be treated like a leper by 30-year-olds just because you still knew who Helmut Kohl was and could concentrate on one thing for more than 15 seconds?

–

I’m not sure whether, in a better future, the way we deal with aging and dying shouldn’t be fundamentally different. Today, a person in their mid-50s is usually treated as if they had one foot in the grave and were nothing more than a useless eater that the employment agency can only use as a bollard in the pedestrian zone.

In contrast to this, age is portrayed in a glossed way in all brochures and magazines: photos only show neat, silver-curled, well-trained pensioners with a fresh complexion, who have a steely joie de vivre literally chiseled into their facial features and who are still “actively participating in life” – a formulation that which in itself is an infamous mockery because it assumes that a 70-year-old person can be disposed of without leaving any residue if he does not want to actively take part in the degrading ox-tour that is presented here as “life”.

Or the aging body disappears completely from public perception, is pushed into the Orwellian memory hole, so to speak. The fact that there are frail and old people, that every life ends sooner or later in the morgue, should be erased from people’s consciousness as much as possible. While advertising and the media provide us non-stop with images of young people exuding joy in life and thus give us the certainty that we are in a kind of eternal paradise without any worries, the old people die every day, mostly hidden from our sight Death rooms in hospitals and senior care facilities.

One thing is certain: young people today will follow suit, in three or four decades at the latest.