The perks of getting old

I now wear these on Zoom calls and in restaurants, and the response from everyone has been uniformly upbeat.

“They look great,” people say, their voice going up at the end, which is the universal sound of a lie being told.

“They give you gravity,” they add. “No, seriously,” they say when I wave off their compliments. “They really look fine.” Upward inflection, upward inflection.

In other words, what they say is “distinguished, thoughtful, commanding.” What they think is, “Old and in the way.”

Now, I know: This is just what happens to eyes that are in their mid to late… actually, it’s none of your business how mid or where late. But I know it’s the result of years of reading and screen-staring and all sorts of things that exhaust the optic nerve. So while I’m not really complaining about getting older, I’m not embracing it with enthusiasm. I’m looking for workarounds.

I have an actress friend from India, a Bollywood starlet, and she tells me that over there, they have a concept called “Bollywood Age.”

Your “Bollywood Age” is any number less than 28, which is a complex and challenging fiction to maintain in a country as bureaucratic and document-mad as India, where your date of birth appears on dozens of forms and certificates.

The solution, she told me, was to make an annual trip to a major city in the United Arab Emirates, where a compliant local consular official will issue a new Indian passport embossed with a more graceful date of birth — for a charge, of course.

Of course, she told me all of this in an “aren’t we nuts” tone of voice, and I laughed along with her. But the truth is, things here aren’t that different.

I can think of at least three top-level media industry executives who I know for a fact are lying about their ages. All three graduated from college in the same year or the year before I did. They may be a year older or a year younger, but they’re not, as one of them tried to imply in a newspaper profile, five years younger. That would mean high school graduation at thirteen, implying a genius-level IQ, which is highly unlikely given the choices that particular executive made in managing his company.

The problem with the concept of the Bollywood age is that it requires a certain denial of the obvious. People get older. That’s what they do. They don’t look less old just because they’re wearing skinny jeans and Yeezy sneakers.

Still, I am always on the lookout for the perks of getting older. And my new reading glasses have delivered.

Reading glasses, I have found, can be peered over. Just looking at someone doesn’t instantly get them to shut up, but I’ve discovered that peering at them, head in a half-tilt down, eyes raised, sends the message that whatever that person is now saying, they’d better stop saying it soon.

Also, the glasses can be whipped off fast and tossed on the desk in theatrical frustration. That seems to indicate to everyone that either I’m about to say something useful or I’d really like someone else to say something useful.

Putting on the glasses, I’ve noticed, is also a kind of theatrical and meaningful gesture. Getting serious now. Thinking. Mind at work. Leave me alone.

What I’ve concluded is that all of this reading glasses drama, the peering and whipping and dropping and putting on, creates a kind of beehive of activity that looks to everyone to be actual work when, in fact, it’s just me manipulating a $6 piece of plastic with two magnifying glasses stuck to it, often while thinking about snacks.

And that, I’ve discovered, is the chief perk of getting older. You may not have spent the past 20-odd years getting better at your job or smarter at your craft, but if you can get good at reading glasses theatrics, at what actors call “prop work,” you can skate by doing very little, which is, as we all know, exactly what young people are doing.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.