Hockey makes you feel young
One Friday night a few years ago, I was playing my weekly pickup hockey game in north Toronto, when the puck squirted loose at centre ice and I took off after it, with only one opposing player between me and the goalie. We both put our heads down and raced for the puck; I won by a hair, went in on goal and scored. It was a great feeling, but a greater one awaited. In the dressing room afterwards, the guy I'd beaten, a shortish, dark-haired fellow in his mid-twenties — the same age as most of the other players — said, "Man, Jay, you were really flying out there tonight. How old are you, anyway?"
"Forty," I said.
His jaw actually dropped. "Forty? I thought you were maybe 30 — okay, 32. I got beat like a rug by a guy who's 40?"
The satisfaction was so sweet it approached revenge. It was also my introduction to a deathless lesson. However you cut it, the age of 40 beats the age of 20 every time.
Why 40 is better than 20
Forty beats 20 because 40 is the fulcrum of surprise, the point at which you start to be able to really impress people, and better, confuse them, because of your age. "Forty?" the cry goes up, "but you look/sound/act so young." Twenty, on the other hand, is an age utterly without surprise. What's impressive about 20 is your age. What's impressive about 40 is you. "You're only 20?" people will say. "That explains it." Twenty elicits envy and maybe condescension, period. The only way you can surprise people at 20 is if you're prematurely arthritic or wise.
But 40 is a perpetual ambush. The fact is, these days a lot of men at 40 can still move relatively well, and some of them are even mildly attractive. And 40-year-old women can be even hotter. The age-old female plaint, "Sure, a man can still be attractive when he's 40, but not a woman" no longer holds. The salacious craze of the day is for MILFs, remember, not FILFs. And if a woman is globally hot at 40, she's doubly hot, because her heat is such a surprise, so titillating, so cool.
Most people feel 10 years younger in their minds than they are in reality. This means that by the time people turn 40, they're just getting used to the idea of being 30. But if 40 really is the new 30, then by the mathematical property of transitivity (if A=B and B=C, then A=C), 40 is now effectively the new 20. But of course it is. We know we're 20, our ID says we're 40; the rest of the world can't figure out what the hell we are. And that, my friends, is the definition of perfection.
Older than all your coworkers? Learn how to bridge the generation gap at work and make a professional comeback in midlife. Or, tell your own story by writing a view from her.
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of More
