Does getting older mean caring less?

The one where I almost win trivia night.

What’s the most interesting thing that happened to you this summer? Not to brag, but I got stuck behind a Wienermobile.

A few summers ago, I was sitting outside at a bar, drinking a seltzer alone and working on my laptop (yes, I am that person) when Trivia Night began.

I love Trivia Night. I am also terrible at Trivia Night. I don’t think I’ve ever won a single game of trivia. Never ask me to be on your team, because I am no help. I will either proclaim, YES, I SWEAR Vin Diesel’s real name is “Phil” (it isn’t), or I will confidently tell you “Bananas are botanically considered berries…the answer is C!” but then, when you ask if I’m sure, I’ll say, “uuuuh, no? Never mind. Forget everything I said.”

Basically, I will ruin your trivia night.

But that summer, sitting on a patio all by myself, I was killing it.

“On the hit sitcom Friends,” the host asked, “what song does Phoebe write that gets signed to a record label?”

Easy. Smelly cat. Pfft. Everyone knows that.

Next question.

“What was the make and model of O.J. Simpson’s getaway car?”

A white Ford Bronco XLT. Holy hell, I knew that one, too.

“In 1999, Lou Bega hit the charts. What was the name of the song?”

Mambo No. 5!!!

“Oh my god,” I thought, “I’m actually going to win this.”

I giggled as I scribbled down each answer with a tiny pencil, hunched over my scorecard. All around me, people scratched their heads and whispered desperately to their teammates. Meanwhile, I was nailing question after question after question. For a minute, I felt like a damn genius. Then I looked around a little more. That’s when it hit me.

I’m not smart. I’m old.

Or, at least, I was older than the twentysomethings at that bar, who probably watched Friends the same way I used to watch Three’s Company. Who probably have no memory of that car chase interrupting TGIF. It hit me that I only knew the answers because I’d lived through them.

I’ve never bought into the idea that age brings wisdom. Maybe because over the years, I’ve heard some questionable statements come out of middle aged mouths. Like the time my coworker insisted you can’t see the moon and the sun at the same time.

But I also grew up believing you should respect your elders because there’s value in aging. Which is true. As you age, you can’t help but accumulate experience and knowledge about things. Important things. Like who sang “Mambo No. 5,” apparently.

I kid, but it’s true that age does bring a certain kind of wisdom. An ego death, I guess you could call it. You stop caring so much about how you’re being perceived. You stop needing to prove yourself. You have less time and patience for performative nonsense.

Or, at least, I have noticed myself slowly inching toward that perspective as I show up to school drop-off in my pajamas, feel more emboldened to parallel park in front of strangers, and stop apologizing for my awkwardness—or stop apologizing for apologizing.

My elders said it would happen. “When you get older, you simply DO NOT have any f*cks to give,” an older friend used to say.

She was right. Something about approaching the middle of my life has given me a calm clarity about what matters. Psychologists call it “socioemotional selctivity theory.” It’s the idea that once you realize time is finite, you start spending that time—and your energy—more intentionally. As my friend put it, you run out of f*cks.

But is running out of f*cks always a good thing?

When I was a kid, I used to protest against injustices I would see around me, like animals being used in lab experiments, or the kid in class who always got away with cheating because he was on the football team. “It’s not fair!” I’d squeal. Which, of course, was always met with, “Welp, life’s not fair.” It irritated me how adults didn’t seem to give a f*ck about what was fair, how they seemed to selectively block it out.

Decades later, it still irritates me. And I wonder if the same mechanism that drives socioemotional selection also causes us focus so narrowly that we tune out everything else around us. Does it make us stop wanting to learn, grow, be curious, and acknowledge injustice?

I don’t know. I also don’t know if getting older automatically makes a person wiser. But I do think it gives you more context to work with. More life experiences to compare and contemplate and make meaning out of. More knowledge to dissect. Knowledge is supposed to be power—that’s what the grownups kept saying when I was a kid—but it turns out that knowledge without curiosity, empathy, and humility is just knowing random trivia facts.

I was so close to winning that night. As the host revealed each answer, people slapped their knees and sighed, and I wondered how it was possible these kids didn’t know about the Ford Bronco.

There were only a few more questions to go. Questions that were probably painfully obvious, too. Like, “These three animated characters lived in a water tower at Warner Brothers studio.” But I looked at the clock. It was 9:00 p.m. and my bedtime was fast approaching. That’s the other thing about getting older. No matter how much sleep I get, I’m always tired. So that night, I turned in my tiny pencil, went home, slathered retinol on my face, and fell asleep at a reasonable hour, still never having won a single game of trivia.

Someday, maybe.

Share-worthy

• Trader Joe’s Now Stocks Your Favorite Literary Classics, a piece I wrote for The Belladonna—with adorably fun illustrations from the one and only Katherine Bettis.

• Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain, a two-part episode over at Hidden Brain.

• Dust, an essay by Maya C. Popa at Guernica. “The Old English word dustsceawung means the acknowledgment of dust as once having been other things, living beings or civilizations past.”

• ‘Widow’s Bay’ and the Suffocation—and Liberation—of Small-Town Life over at the Ministry of Pop Culture, my new favorite Substack.