Old: You are named John or Mary, got married in June and can still rhyme “honeymoon” with “Joon” without wincing.
Aging fast: You are named Dirk or Linda, have just decided that a divorce is more trouble than it’s worth and wish the Beatles would get together again.
Young: You are named Jason or Jennifer, are living together out of wedlock because you can’t afford the punitive income tax on working married couples and don’t think of sushi as raw fish.
Old: You miss the Queen Mary.
Aging fast: You treasure an old snapshot of yourself being tear-gassed the day the cops routed the SDS from the physics lab.
Young: You remember the good old days when “Charlie’s Angels” still had Farrah Fawcett.
Old: Wouldn’t trust a computer as far as you could throw one.
Aging fast: Never trust anyone over thirty—oops!—over forty-five.
Young: No nukes!
Old: You are shocked by evidence that Franklin D. Roosevelt was unfaithful to Eleanor.
Aging fast: You find it incredible that Theodore Roosevelt never engaged in premarital sex.
Young: You doubt that anyone engaged in sexual activity before 1975, except when fully clothed.
Old: “When I was a kid, you could buy an ice cream cone for a nickel.”
Aging fast: “Remember that summer we flew to Europe and hitchhiked all the way from London to Lake Como on just $50 a day?”
Young: “I’ll need $25,000 a year to start, but first let’s talk about the retirement plan.”
Old: You want your children to have a better life than you had.
Aging fast: You want your child to have it just as good as you had it, except for the really heavy drugs.
Young: You wouldn’t mind having children if you could afford a house to put them in and if the Government rewrote the law to make children a profitable tax shelter.
Old: You are watching another made-for-TV movie about World War II, and all the soldiers are wearing their hair in the thick, long-locks, Los Angeles style popularized by local TV news-show anchormen. You become intensely irritated because whoever made the movie was obviously too young to know that all GI’s in World War II wore crewcuts.
Aging fast: While watching the same movie, you are sickened by the tendency of American mass culture to glorify war instead of showing it like it is—namely, as an evil that can make a mess of the most expensive hair styling.
Young: You find the movie very boring if you are male, but continue watching to get some tips about how to shape your hair for a sexier look; if female, ditto.
Old: When you think of the great evils of the twentieth century, what you have in mind are the Great Depression, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.
Aging fast: What comes to your mind, on the other hand, are irrelevance, conformity, the Establishment, Lyndon Johnson and disco.
Young: And what comes to yours? Cholesterol, pollution, nuclear meltdown, the Ayatollah Khomeini and the skyrocketing Social Security tax.
Old: Until this moment, you haven’t thought about Warner Baxter in twenty years.
Aging fast: You think it quaint that anyone should ever have thought about Warner Baxter. This is because you have forgotten that you haven’t thought about Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs in ten years.
Young: You feel very smug in this department because you still think about Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious every now and then. But just you wait a few months, young-timers.