Got That Old Feeling, or Just Feeling Old?

A friend confided that he worried not about being old, but about becoming an embittered old man. Another friend said that before he met the woman he now lives with, he used to be a miserable old man, but now he is merely old.

A certain relative, a cultured and highly educated man, is the very epitome of embittered elder-hood, and none of his family has ever quite figured out why. Somehow it seems as if the self-loathing fomented in him by his father, a sarcastic and belittling person, having been staved off for decades, has come back at full gale force; since self-loathing is almost impossible to bear, it usually gets passed along as a kind of free-floating loathing directed at anything and everything. But it's a hell of a way to end up a life--not enjoying one's accomplishments, not cutting oneself some slack if they aren't up there in the super-hero category of feats, not able to just kick back and relish laziness and sloth, no, but sloshing through the acid streams of what one didn't do, didn't say, didn't finish. Or even worse, wondering where that feeling of unbearable disappointment is coming from, being unable to relieve it, watching it eat up the years you wanted for yourself.

What's the cure? For most, there is none.