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What Does Old Mean?
Old is a relative concept, like an aged aunt or a cantankerous geriatric grandfather.
Old is someone else’s age. When we’re in our teens, old is the nearly unimaginable decrepitude of forty.
(That, by the way, is why older people generally find teens so annoying.)
For geologists, old is half a billion years or more. For cosmologists, old is measured in many billions of years. But for us humans, old is measured against the “standard candle” of the average rich-country lifespan, which is somewhere in the mid-seventies.
Therefore, I am by this standard now officially old.
O.L.D.
Which I think stands for On Life’s Downhill-stretch.
In my head I’m somewhere around 17,831 years old. I hated the Ice Age and was very excited when global warming finally melted the Bering Straits. On my watch we killed the last of the woolly mammoths and accidentally invented agriculture, which in an entirely unplanned way led to the rise of the city-state and ultimately to nations.
I remember the early records of stored grain done by equivalence counting which meant marking symbols on soft clay tablets that looked exactly like the things being counted, only much smaller and in just two dimensions. Eventually we gave up on the effort of drawing bales of hay…
