Evidently I’m getting old. I played a streaming channel recently called “Classic Rock,” and the first song it played was Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication.” In other words, some of that new shit I can’t stand.

Demographically, I usually fit now into the highest “and older” category, for the purposes of surveys, scientific studies, and discounts at the bagel shop. I find that a little condescending. It puts me in the same category as centenarians, even though our interests are completely different. For example, I am not terribly broken up over the untimely loss of Rudolf Valentino.

I don’t feel old in my bones. I don’t feel creaky or weak. Even looking in the mirror, I don’t feel so old. I don’t feel like my mental capacity is deteriorating, although I have been getting more impatient with day-to-day chores. Is renewing my car registration going to make me happier, healthier, or more fulfilled? Or is it mainly going to get me an hour closer to the grave, when I could be reading Tolstoy or having a beer?

The times I do feel old is when I’m in the company of young people, even when they’re polite and respectful. Especially when they’re polite and respectful.  “Sir?” Look, man, it’s just me.

It’s interesting how an objectively unchanging artifact changes subjectively over time. For example, “The Girl From Ipanema” used to be just a wistful, breezy bossa nova chestnut about an unobtainably attractive girl. Now it’s a bit sadder than that— it’s a meditation on growing older, feeling the same desire as always but being invisible to the young and beautiful.

I suppose every aging generation thinks the world is going to pot, yet I can’t help but feel that the future of our planet, species and culture is in serious, even existential trouble. The planet is obviously getting dangerously, even fatally hot, and this country has a president who recently told the United Nations that green energy is one of the two greatest dangers facing mankind (the other was immigration). From a cultural and intellectual standpoint, I see a world where young people don’t have the need or desire to pay attention to any bit of music or literature that lasts more than a minute or so (and I feel the same thing happening to myself). All the great works of the past are becoming memes, mashups, cliches. Beethoven, Austen, Dali, Picasso…they’re all jokes now, written in shorthand. Or imitated, with zombies added to spice things up. From a political standpoint, the great American experiment, which I thought had reached a permanently elevated, more secure state of being after two Obama administrations, is now in doubt. Etcetera.

I don’t want to be another tiresome old curmudgeon whining about the loss of some non-existent idealized Great White Christian Father Knows Best America of the mid-fifties, powered by enormous, inefficient gas-guzzling engines and entertained by exactly three TV networks. But I also feel lucky to have experienced a time when you could pick up a newspaper from your driveway in the morning and be surprised by something that happened the day before; where letting a story unfold for one or two or three hours as a play or movie or opera was a typical form of entertainment, not to mention spending hours absorbed in a book without obtrusive ads; where going to school meant spending a day safely sequestered from the outside world, in the hands of an attentive human teacher; and where knowledge of the sordid realities of that adult world was, for many, delayed until actual adulthood. I’ve known the joy of opening my mailbox and finding a letter from someone I loved. And ice skating at night with a friend on section of the Midway in Chicago, purposely flooded by the university each winter and left to freeze until spring. That age of my childhood and youth had its problems and failures, some of which we’re living with today. But I miss it.