Cozy resources

a 73-year-old typically feels about 60. But the study also finds that this gap closes with age, as your body insists, ever-more loudly, on the harsh truth. I should imagine there is a lot of variation here. On announcing his retirement from Berkshire Hathaway, at the age of 94, Warren Buffett told an interviewer he had never felt old until he passed 90. Then, all of a sudden, he did.

In your twenties, you say “about three years ago” of memories you can only hazily locate on the timeline. Then at some point you suddenly hear yourself say “ about twenty years ago”. And you hear yourself saying it again and again. About things that feel like three years ago.

The physicist Michael Nielsen tells us that the Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam perceived his life as sharply divided into two halves: “In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group. In the second half, he was always the oldest. There was no transitional period.” There was no transitional period.

The American poet George Oppen said my favourite thing about growing old: “What a strange thing to happen to a little boy.”

Let’s be honest: after a certain point - 35? 40? - growing older is psychologically punishing. How could it not be? It involves getting a little bit weaker, stupider and uglier every year.

“To get born, your body makes a pact with death, and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat.” Louise Glück. I am not certain what she meant but this reads optimistically to me. All our biological processes - healing wounds, fighting infection, repairing cellular damage, maintaining homeostasis - are essentially the body attempting to beat the system. I sometimes hear people criticise fitness fanatics by saying they’re trying to deny mortality. Well, no shit - that’s the whole game. We’re cheating entropy from the moment we’re born. Every organism, including the one which is you, is a revolt - an organised rebellion - against the universe’s fundamental drive towards disorder. When you’re up against an enemy this implacable, I say it’s OK to cheat. In fact it’s heroic. The universe wants us to be dust and will eventually get the job done. Staying vital for as long as we can is a magnificently perverse act of resistance.

Age is time divided by achievement.

Like root canal treatment and democracy, ageing is the least bad option.