At a certain age, everyone you know starts going through things. That’s the phrase we use — “He’s going through something” — and I’ve noticed it’s deployed the same way regardless of what’s actually happening. We say a hushed, slightly ceremonial “She’s going through things,” which could mean anything from a divorce to a diagnosis to a second bankruptcy. It’s a euphemism built to cover a lot of ground, though most of my friends are up to or approaching 60, so there’s a lot of ground to cover.
Some of what my cohort is going through is genuinely hard: the illnesses, the divorces, the financial collapses that arrive, usually, with no warning and terrible timing. Some of it is just funny, in the way that late-middle age is filled with pratfalls: the sudden 40 pounds, the wardrobe that starts skewing dangerously younger, the Turkish hair-loss remedies, that sort of thing. Of course, these are funny to everyone but the “going-through-something” person, but that’s part of the fun. When two old pals in late middle age get together, you can be certain that what they’re talking about, mostly, is the ridiculous behavior of their mutual friends.
Sometimes, though, the late middle-aged “going-through stuff is neither tragic nor comic, but just plain eccentric. A lot of my friends, in other words, are becoming weird.
I have a friend — smart, successful, previously normal — who announced not long ago that he now drinks only unpasteurized milk. Not “unpasteurized milk in addition to regular milk,” not “unpasteurized milk when I can get it.” But unpasteurized milk, period, end of sentence, the only liquid he will permit into his body from this day forward. I did not ask why. He kept saying that I would not believe how great it is for the gastrointestinal tract, and I was worried that if I showed any interest, he would end up producing photographic evidence.
Another friend has become a genealogy obsessive. He has hired researchers — plural, paid, professional researchers — to comb through the amassed family archives. He now brings this up constantly, in every context, no matter how unrelated. Ask him how his flight was, and within four sentences, you are looking at a photograph of a deed from 1834. There is no small talk so small he cannot fold it into an update on his great-great-uncle’s land dispute, or an old menu from the Cunard Line that suggests a connection to the Romanovs.
A college friend of mine paints rocks now. Collects them, paints them, apparently has opinions about which rocks paint best, and sends them to people on her Christmas list. Another sleeps outside in the winter, on purpose, as a kind of stoic health-building practice. A third is self-publishing a book — a real book, with footnotes — about how the Roman emperor Constantine “invented” Jesus, a topic he has approached with the confident amateurism of a man who took one religious studies seminar on it in college in 1986 and never did the reading. I know this because I sat next to him and didn’t do it either.
LEARNING TO LOVE THOSE WHO MISUSE THE LANGUAGE
I keep asking myself whether this kind of thing happened to my parents’ generation. Did my father, at 60, suddenly announce that he was “going through something” and enact a strict new milk policy? I don’t remember if he did. But I think the honest answer is that he was too busy — paying for my college education, paying for everything — to go looking for something new to be obsessed with. He didn’t have the bandwidth for a hobby that required its own archivist. He was preoccupied with concerns about whether his English major son would ever get a real job.
This, I suspect, is the actual explanation: We are, for all the economic gloom you read about and the “we’re doomed” talk you hear, the richest and healthiest cohort of 60-year-olds ever to walk on Earth, with more time and fewer excuses than any generation before us. Given a little slack in the rope, people don’t relax. They go looking for something to be weird about.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.