Time Goes By - What it's really like to get older

About Ronni Bennett

Ronni age 63

Although I did not know it at the time, the seed for this blog was planted in 1996. I looked up from my computer screen one day, searching for a writer I needed to speak with and was struck by how young everyone in the room looked. I was shocked to realize that I was the oldest person there – by decades.

Somehow I had arrived at the ripe old age of 55 without noticing the years flying by, and now found myself working entirely with 20-somethings. From my teen years, I had been the youngest kid in my crowd, but could see, suddenly, that I’d left behind that position a long time ago. I was getting old and I had no idea, had never thought about, what to expect from life in the coming years of old age.

So for the next decade, and continuing still, I spent my free time researching what it’s like to get old.

There wasn’t much good news. From the popular press - magazines and newspapers - to scholarly and medical journals, books, government and non-profit agencies there was just one message: aging equals decline, disease and debility. No one had anything good to say about getting old.

If that were true, I joked, I might as well shoot myself. Instead, since no one else was doing it, I decided to write about “what it’s really like to get old” myself.

Time Goes By began as a place to put the thousands of pages of research and thoughts I’d pulled together about aging. I had no further ambitions for it and no illusions, with such a loser topic, that many people would want to read it. Happily, I was wrong. And along the way, while I wasn’t paying attention, the goal changed.

Now, I’ve taken on the role of evangelist for old people, intent on challenging the status quo in regard to elders, and to show what’s out of whack with our cultural attitudes toward aging.

Today, TGB is a complex mix of reporting on every aspect of aging: health and medical issues, ageism and age discrimination, media, technology, politics and public policy, culture, marketing to elders, the importance of language, love and sex, friendship, post-career careers, retirement, family, the prospect of death and, certainly, humor.

A large community of elderbloggers has developed over these five years, old people writing on their blogs about their past and present lives, interests and passions, and I’m most grateful for the growing number of TGB readers whose comments, conversation and argument here are creating a remarkable record of what it’s really like to get old.

Ronni Bennett
Portland, Maine
Updated 5 October 2008