I’ve gotten older
You may have noticed that the banner photo on the front of Bernoff.com has changed. I’m older.
The original photo was taken about 13 years ago. Since then my hair has gone grey and has begun thinning in front. I was also diagnosed with and successfully treated for prostate cancer.
My mind is also not the same as it once was. It’s still just as sharp, but not as fast. My memory for the right word takes a moment longer. I can’t work at full speed for eight hours a day. My memory for names and faces, always a bit sketchy, is worse than ever.
I’m still as creative as ever. I’m just as much of a smartass as ever. I’ve been exercising and I’m stronger and thinner than I was six months ago. I have more experience and have worked on a lot more books. I continue to learn about writing, ghostwriting, authoring, publishing, AI tools, and the topics of the books I write and edit, which range from startups to politics to management to statistics to marketing and customer experience.
I will never stop learning, expanding, and enjoying the process. But it’s no longer accurate to show that younger guy’s picture on my site. This is who I am.
And I’m still open for business.
Getting older sucks, in almost every aspect. The external aspects are the most annoying; age discrimination hits us hardest as we age.
Learning helps put off some of the effects, although I think we do fill up and have to relegate some information to the recesses or deleted all together.
Almost everyone I have met has an unrepresentative picture as part of their online, most are fantastic. Did you use any tools to make your photos?
The photos are unedited. The one on my home page had some gradients added for text visibility, but that’s not done to be deceptive.
I agree with Norman Umberger that old age sucks in almost every respect. The only redeeming feature that comes to mind is being old enough to qualify for Medicare.
It has never occurred to me that my use of a caricature – drawn as part of a fundraising exercise for my local hospital about a decade ago – means that online I never seem to age.
One of Australia’s most respected broadsheet newspapers still uses photos for its columnists that are decades-old.
My once-fine mind is no longer as sharp as it was – indeed, I have been bemoaning for decades its decay, its increasingly turning to mush.
And I am weaker and fatter than I was six months ago.
Otherwise, I can empathise!
And I have never had a single serious illness in my adult life (although I had every infectious disease known to mankind before I turned six), so I can’t blame the Big C for my grey hair and beard.
As for your thinning hair, I started losing my hair as a 19-year-old. I consulted the doctor at the university clinic, and he said it was caused by an excess of testosterone, something he could treat with a testosterone antagonist (probably oestrogen, but he didn’t nominate his choice of drug), but he warned me a likely side-effect would be impotence. I declined to be treated! Clever guy, that doctor. 😉
There is a certain comfort that a prospect (or a friend) may take in knowing that although one has changed, those changes are merely superficial. In the fundamentals, one hasn’t. Aging is an endless process during which one’s core values, character, and integrity are distilled into their purest essences. Constant learning is a vital part of this.
Aging isn’t always drudgery and decline – some of us are fortunate to have inherited good genes and to have been conscious of taking care of ourselves. I’m quite fit and physically and mentally active at age 71 (I’ll be marching and performing in three upcoming Fourth of July events, as usual), but my husband, with much less robust physical attributes, gets frustrated at the seemingly weekly onset of another ailment or disorder.
On a humorous note regarding thinning hair, I once saw a bald man wearing a tee shirt emblazoned with: “God made a few perfect heads. The rest he covered with hair.” Just think of the bald sex symbols in film: I can still swoon over Yul Brynner. (Yeah, I know, he wasn’t bald – he shaved his head for a movie role, and the look was so iconic that he kept it shaved thereafter.)