What can you say to someone acting their age?

“Grow up!” That’s what you say to someone not acting their age, right. When someone is acting crotchety, can you tell them to… grow down?

At work, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about life cycles of products. We know most products follow patterns of entry, growth maturity and decline. Well I guess its no surprise as we call it life cycle for a reason; a product follows what we live as humans. After a product hits maturity, let’s say a bologna, for example, the company has to figure what to do with it to sell more, right? Voila! Lunchables. Companies must decide whether to reinvest in their product and create the next iteration or let it decline.

The entry or introduction, growth, maturity and decline of a product life cycle is often depicted as a bell curve with maturity at the top, entry and growth climbing toward it and the slippage to decline on the other side into a grave yard of betamaxes, buggy whips, telephone tables, bookmarks, and so on. 

So, thinking about life cycles of things brings me back to thinking about our human life cycle. It’s clear, us boomers are in the phase of maturity and in some cases and unfortunately, moving over the hill to decline. For the most part, I think this is our bologna time. It’s time to figure out what’s next. I see the decline. In all honesty, I feel the decline sometimes, when staying in feels better than the effort of going out. Or, I find myself thinking, we tried that already.  

So, what’s the opposite of “grow up” or “act your age”?   

It drives me crazy that few conversations begin with anything other than health or news of a death. I’m distressed when I encounter peers tsk-tsking about the clothes or shoes of younger women. Yet, those same girls (with the grandmother faces, as May Sarton called them) wore revealing halters, midriffs and fuck-me-pumps (as we called them) themselves. It gets to me when perhaps changes in hearing causes my cohort to speak loudly (in movie theaters) as if everyone else is going deaf. Maybe, it’s changes in vision, reflexes and nerves that cause my pals to moan at intersections, then again, maybe it’s my driving. But really, it’s not going to get the other car or me to stop sooner.  

My own whining in writing this makes me think, I am the pot calling the kettle black. Or I am varicose vein deep in denial.  Someone tell me how to tell myself to stop acting my age.