This thread is amazing. I'm used to feeling like the old one on most forums, and here are a bunch of lovely folks with a couple of decades on me
and I never would have guessed. I almost want to accuse most of you of lying.
Age is one of those things that matters less the more you have of it.
Ourselves as "old people" will most likely be the same yet different from the "old people" we knew when we group up, because of how the world has changed. When I was a kid, the old people had been born in houses without electricity, and were young when womens' suffrage came about. My parents had the space age and the civil rights movement in their youth. Hopefully the young this decade will see many victories for LGBT rights and ever more freedom for people to be themselves.
We maybe have this image of old people sitting around in rocking chairs listening to Benny Goodman LPs or sitting around a piano singing dull tunes. My dad, who I suppose is "old", was thrilled to get a Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirt for Christmas. I imagine I'll be listening to the same weird eclectic blend of stuff the internet has made easily available: industrial music, powernoise, dubstep, glitch, chiptunes, Finnish folk, Celtic rock, Swedish metal, Japanese taiko, and the occasional Vivaldi concerto. And I'll probably be doing it while playing an MMO, wearing a geeky t-shirt and pagan jewelry.
It's funny; I thought of my grandpa as just old, stoic Navy veteran; I think of my dad as an aging almost-hippie, and I plan to be an old geek.
