Lucky Number Seventy

There’s a magical age where society quietly lowers the bar, then hands you a lawn chair and says, “Sit. You’ve done enough.” That age, as I am in the process of discovering, seems to be seventy. Seventy is when the universe stops asking and starts excusing. You don’t quit things anymore — you are medically exempt.

Take lifting anything heavy, for instance. At seventy — as the late, great George Carlin observed in It’s Bad for Ya, his final HBO stand-up comedy special — you never have to lift a finger again. Ever. The rule is simple: if it has mass, it has someone else’s name on it.

The minute a box looks like it might contain books or your collection of 30 live albums from Dylan to Live at Leeds, you clutch your lower back and narrate your medical history like an audiobook. “I’d love to help, but in ’92 I bent the wrong way while pulling a tractor with my hair and now I’m basically a Fabergé egg.” People nod. They believe you. They might even apologize for asking. That’s power.

Carlin also mentioned social events — or rather, the joy of fleeing from them with glorious early exits. When you’re young, leaving a party early requires a reason, a strategy, maybe a fake phone call. At seventy, you just say, “I’m tired.” That’s it. No follow-ups. Nobody says, “But it’s only 9:30.” No one says, “Have another drink.”

Tired beats everything. Tired beats weddings. Tired beats birthdays. Tired beats the birth of Christ. You say you’re tired, people help you find your coat like you’re royalty being escorted from Trump’s glorious White House ballroom.

Then there’s memory. This is where it gets to be a gas, gas, gas. When you’re young, forgetting things is a flaw.

When you’re old, it’s a feature. You forget names, appointments, entire decades — and people lean in with concern instead of judgment. You can weaponize this. You can forget things on purpose. You can repeat the same story four times and watch your family do that polite smile that slowly turns into panic. “Dad, you told us that already.” “Did I?” Pause. That pause is priceless. That’s the sound of inheritance math crackling in their heads.

Carlin: “You can even make believe you have Alzheimer’s disease. That’s a lot of fun. You look around the dining room table and you say: “Who are you people and where is my horse?” Then you stare at your eldest son and you say: “Agnes! I haven’t seen you since First Communion!” … Takes them a week to get over that shit. And they start listening to you a lot more closely from then on.”

If you think about it, there are some additional bonuses the Hippy Dippy Weatherman neglected to mention in that special:

At seventy, you’re no longer required to keep up with anything. Technology? Optional. You don’t need to know how your phone works. You just need to know that it does something and that it’s probably spying on you. When it breaks, you don’t fix it — you blame it. “They changed something.” Who’s they? Doesn’t matter. They’re out there, changing things, ruining perfectly good buttons. The mysterious purpose of which you never bothered to ascertain anyway.

Who gives a crap? We liked it better the way things were (this is the official motto, by the by, of Victoria, British Columbia, where we are currently enjoying the cherry blossoms of spring).

Fashion stops completely. Comfort becomes your only designer. Shoes are now engineered like orthopaedic aircraft carriers. Sweat pants have elastic waistbands that say, “I’ve surrendered, and I’m proud.” If anyone makes a snide remark about your magnetic buttons or paisley prints, you simply reply, “My doctor recommended it.”

Listen. This one is a yellow-highlighter-worthy pro tip: At seventy or older, you should have a doctor for every sentence. You can end arguments with “my doctor says” and nobody asks which one. You could be talking about a podiatrist. Or some quack who repairs snowmobiles for a living while touting the benefits of reiki and persimmon juice. Doesn’t matter. Doctor wins. Slip in “oncologist” if you need to bring out the big guns.

Note: This doesn’t mean you can throw basic standards of plausibility completely to the wind. If you’re a male “old fuck” (Carlin’s soi-disant description of himself and others like him) with lumbago, don’t start droning on about your latest appointment with your OB-GYN.

At seventy, you also get to deploy radical honesty whenever you feel like it. Young people have to soften the truth. Old people can just drop it on the table like a dead fish. “What part of this Mexican chicken is edible?” “Are you the one I don’t like?” “Please tell me you at least know the correct way to hang a toilet roll.”

You’re not rude — you’re experienced. If anyone objects, you shrug. “What are they gonna do, fire me?”

You also get selective hearing as a lifestyle choice. You don’t ignore people — you can’t quite hear them. This is incredible. You can dodge small talk, sales pitches and potential arguments just by saying, “Pardon?” two or three times until the other person gives up and questions their own existence. This works especially well with telemarketers and relatives who want help lifting things.

Speaking of relatives, they gradually will come around to the realization that you have become un-movable. Not stubborn — rooted. At seventy, nobody expects you to change your opinion. Ever. You can say, “so-and-so is a nincompoop” or “I don’t like that restaurant,” and that person or place is dead to you until the sun burns out. New information does not matter.

You were there first. Reality arrived later.

Similarly, you also get free authority over everything and nothing in particular. You don’t need evidence — you have years. You can start sentences with “In my day …” and people brace themselves like a storm is coming.

It doesn’t matter whether your day actually existed. You can say, “Back then, gas was cheaper and people weren’t such a bunch of quavering snowflakes,” and everyone just nods. Nobody’s Googling you. They’re just afraid it’ll escalate.

You also get a new relationship with rules. Rules become suggestions. Highway lanes or parking lot striping? Guidelines. Nap times? Negotiable. When you’re young, a nap is laziness. At seventy, it’s maintenance. You’ve survived this long; clearly you know what you’re doing — you’ve outlived the people who wrote the rules.

There is one requirement you can’t escape, though: the obligation to have loud opinions about noise. Everything else is too loud, even if the voices all sound like they’re in slow motion and muffled underwater. Music, movies, appliances, children — hell’s bells, Muriel, especially children. You don’t whisper this; you announce it. “Why is everybody screaming?”

This is how you bond with other old people. No introductions needed. Just complain about volume and you’re family.

Say. Need any help with those Scratch & Wins? I brought a dime.

Here’s a biggie: you’ve already seen most of the moronic razzmatazz of human existence repeat itself. Trends, panics, miracle cures, end-of-the-world predictions — you’ve watched them come and go like bad sequels. So when someone says, “This time it’s different,” you smile. You’ve heard that before. From someone wearing love beads and bell bottoms.

“Far out, man.”

In short, getting old isn’t about decline — it’s about editing. You cut the heavy lifting, the fake enthusiasm, the waiting around to be polite. What’s left is comfort, honesty and the sweet privilege of saying, “Up your nose with a rubber hose,” without a reason … and then faking tiredness to celebrate.

The best advantage of all: expectations collapse. Nobody expects you to hustle, grind or reinvent yourself. Nobody says, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Five years? I see myself sitting. Or possibly lying down. With my hands folded over my chest.

Seventy is when life finally admits it was a little on the demanding side. It loosens the tie, pours you a drink, and says, “All right, you win. Do less.” And you do. You do less, you care less and, barring serious illness or other misfortune, somehow you enjoy more. Because when the pressure’s gone, all that’s left is the comedy — and at seventy, you finally get to laugh at all the jokes without lifting a thing.

It’s Bad for Ya was televised live on March 1, 2008, less than four months before Carlin’s death from cardiac failure.

He was three months short of 71 when he concocted an image that has amused me ever since. But now that I’m as old as he was, I think I finally understand what he was talking about: “I like 70. Not as much as I liked 69. Well, 69 was always my favourite number. Now I figure I’m 69 with one finger up my ass.”

So just to clarify, then:

Even though you don’t have to lift a finger at 70, that decision is entirely up to you.