The Spring 🐤 Edition

On age, time, and awareness

Emanuel Derman (ED) wrote the Japan edition, and Being Foreign. He grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, and came to Columbia University in New York to study for a PhD in physics. Since then he’s lived mostly in Manhattan. His memoir is My Life As A Quant. - Colin (CJN)

Emanuel here. The other night I had dinner with a work acquaintance from long ago, someone I hadn’t seen for ages, who was about 20 years younger than me. We’re interested in some of the same things — writing, reading, philosophy, movies — and we had a good time catching up. As we began to eat, he commented that ageism was the last of the isms you could still get away with, a fact I’ve been aware of for decades. 

Because I went to work in business as a second or third career, I often got joking remarks about my age or my grey hair. Those from Wall Street people were the funniest — they cultivate an aggressive poke-the-bear style of repartee. Once, while I was a partner in a money manager, I complained that though the cafeteria in our building offered a variety of different cuisines — Italian, Mexican, Sushi, French  —  they all tasted as though they’d been prepared by the same person*.  

“Naah, you’re just losing your taste buds,” a younger colleague said to me. “That’s what happened to my grandmother when she got to your age.”

So, because of my experience, I was sympathetic to my friend at dinner, and we chatted away the evening. Towards the end he told me he was thinking of retiring and intended to travel.

“I want to get to different places before I get to be 80 and have to be trundled from place to place in a wheelchair,” he said. I chuckled, partly at the sentiment but also at the way he had unawaredly revealed his own latent ageism too.

It’s not uncommon. Someone of 72 I know won’t make calls to social security or health insurance from work because she doesn’t want her colleagues at adjacent desks to hear her age. She won’t use a Reduced Fare Metrocard. But she belongs to a weekly dinner group that needs new members and she says she will blackball applicants older than her.

Why Is This Interesting?

Isms other than ageism I can understand. They are based on the perception of  permanent otherness in their bias: the quality you look down on is more or less permanently disjoint from you. If you’re antisemitic, you’re not (usually) Jewish. If you’re racist about Blacks, you’re not Black (and it’s very unlikely you will ever be). If you’re misogynist, you are not a woman (and the odds are you will never be). If you’re homophobic, you’re traditionally heterosexual. 

But with ageism the permanent otherness is missing. Ageism is a mystery and paradox of self-delusion. How can one make disparaging remarks about old people without the consciousness that, if you live long enough, you too will be old, suffer the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to, will bear the whips and scorns of time? How can you ridicule what you are pretty certainly going to become?

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* In this connection I am pretty certain that all Nespresso capsules contain the same coffee blend and they just put different labels on them.

Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Emanuel (ED)

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