My body has started making noises that sound like an old house settling. Knees click when I stand up. My back has opinions about chairs. I can pull a muscle doing something that used to count as sitting down.
There was a time when I assumed aches and pains were things that happened to other people, usually people who said “my back’s playing up” and then stood in a doorway for a while. Now I’m one of them. I make small noises when I get out of a car. I don’t know when that started. I suspect it happened gradually, while I was busy thinking I was still the same age as I was ten years ago.
The body seems to have moved into a sort of extended warranty period, except nobody can find the paperwork and the warranty has most definitely expired. Something hurts, then stops hurting, then something else starts. I’ve begun to treat a good night’s sleep as a minor medical intervention.
My mind is doing its own version of this. Fads come and go, and I watch them pass overhead like a small plane I haven’t been invited to board. There are new words, new apps, new ways to make a video, and some new thing everyone is apparently supposed to know about. By the time I’ve worked out what it is, people have moved on and are making fun of the thing I just learnt.
I can’t keep up with what’s cool. I’m not sure I ever could. I’ve always been a little behind, but now the gap has become wide enough to become a chasm that Thelma and Louise might want to drive into. Someone explains a trend to me and I nod in the manner of a person who is taking it all in, when really I’m trying to remember why I walked into the room.
I’m the oldest code monkey in the department, which means people talk about vibe coding and the next cool tool while I sit in the corner ranting, “In my day, we wrote code using our brains.” I hear myself and realise it makes me sound as though I learnt programming by scratching code in binary onto clay tablets. Probably in Roman numerals, comments in Latin no doubt!
I’m turning into the “old man yells at cloud” Simpsons meme. I have become the man muttering at a cloud, except the cloud is usually hosting a phone app that has now moved a button for no clear reason. Modern life has a lot of buttons that move. I don’t know who asked for this. Probably someone younger, with a better phone and fewer mysterious shoulder pains.
I’m grumpy and cantankerous in ways I used to find funny in other people. The queue is too slow. The queue is too fast. It’s too hot, too cold. The music is too loud, and somehow also too quiet to understand the words. I don’t want to scan a QR code to read a menu. I want a menu that can be held in one hand and left on the table when I’m done.
Retirement is starting to look less like a distant financial arrangement and more like a place I’d quite like to go. Somewhere with no meetings, fewer alarms, and time to recover from opening a jar. I know I’ll probably fill the days with jobs I’ve been putting off, then complain about having too much to do.
Still, I am looking forward to it. My operating system may be out of date, several components are making alarming noises, and customer support has been unavailable for years. But I’m not ready to be switched off yet. I’d just like a quieter room and a chair with decent back support.