How Not To Act Old

Just when you think you’ve figured out How Not To Act Old, the Evil Young go and change the rules on you.

When I started this blog in the summer of 2008, the most flagrant old-acting I observed was people boring everyone at parties with endless talk about their grownup kids. Way back then, nobody I knew was on Facebook and Twitter was just an ugly rumor.

Then, by the time I wrote the How Not To Act Old book in the winter, women over 55 had become the fastest growing group on Facebook so I included an all-new section on How Not To Facebook Old.  (Sorry, it’s not here and won’t be — you’re gonna have to shell out the ten bucks for the book to learn how not to shame yourself on fb.)

And now the great age divide has been drawn on Twitter, the subject of my first How Not To Act Old blog on More magazine’s site — where I’ll be posting something exclusive every Wednesday — last week.  The idea of tweeting, seemingly broadcasting your moment-by-moment thoughts and actions, makes some people very nervous.  By some people, I mean people who, old-style, prefer to keep things private.

It’s not fear of the technology that makes the Old Acters Twitter-averse, I’ve decided, but fear of revelation.  The kind of thing that, a generation or two ago, made people (not my grandmother) pretend that those who’d done something bad to them (not my grandfather) had simply never existed.  In those days, if you didn’t talk about it — it including alcoholism, child abuse, sexual hijinks in the Oval Office — then it didn’t exist.

Teenagers, at one extreme, share nude pictures and blog about their periods and eating disorders.  Grandma, at the other, refuses to share anything more intimate than her meatloaf recipe — and then only with people she’s know a couple of decades.

The lesson: Open up.  Friend strangers.  Talk on message boards.  Yes, goddamn it, tweet.  Self-revelation, at least to the faceless digital universe, can take at least ten years off your persona.