Senator Bernie Sanders is the same age I am, seventy-four, so I always notice very quickly when someone comments on his age as if it were something negative about him. I think it is probably the standard, most widely-accepted, position in the U.S. that being young is better than being old.
I was accordingly surprised, for example, when I visited a warehouse in Houston a few times not long ago that was staffed entirely by Chinese people - not only “Chinese-Americans” but people native to China. Their respect, or lack of disrespect, for my old age was quite striking to me, and my first thought was “What’s this?!”
It has also been surprising to me to have found, and contrary to common expectation, my old age to be far better than my youth, in every way, even physically.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of old age is that you’ve had the time to integrate those aspects of your own life that are unique, differing from common interpretations. Coming to know yourself, and believe it, takes long experience and reflection. Noting down your dreams every night for fifty years and conscientiously working out what they are telling you are invaluable. Listening over a long time to what the fairy tales symbolize by “the little people” or “animals” or "those in need" is definitely helpful, too.
Then there is this matter of what I think of as an accumulation of burden and accumulation of strength. There is an accumulation of error and malice over the course of a lifetime, each lie or crime entailing a subsequent lie or crime, so that the burden after seventy years does in fact make one “out of it,” a mentally and spiritually deficient monster. And conversely, there is an accumulation of strength that follows every genuine act of love or truth, that brings astonishingly strong, delightful, helpful clarity with age.
