I hate when people say "age is just a number," whether said by those too young to know, or old enough to know better. It's an adage that speaks to vanity, not experience, and it says a lot about our popular values. The older you get the more you hear, consolingly: "well, you don't look your age. Have you had work done?"

What young people are saying when they say with that sententiousness that comes with lack of experience that "age is just a number," is that your having made it through fifteen or twenty years more than them means essentially nothing. They're saying: innocence trumps experience. And you would expect nothing less from those without the experience to know better.

Been there, done that.

There was a young fellow—twenty-something—who crossed my path briefly a year or so ago, who reminded me a little of me at a tenderer age. He was not particularly handsome or clever, and particularly not clever enough to know he was neither handsome nor clever (I have learned as much about myself in the meantime). None of which was a problem for him, for he was young.

Initially it was not a problem for me, either, although in addition to not being handsome or clever he was a lousy lay (which is where our paths diverge).

Now, people. If you are going to be young and neither handsome nor clever, the least you can do is be phenomenal in bed.

Sadly, even in this youth is too often wasted on the young.

To compound the problem, this particular young fellow fancied himself a guru of sorts, and though he hadn't been anywhere in the world, he had read about a good many places, and people, and things, which there's certainly no harm in. He had, in fact, counted the number of books he had read (something I'd done with my lovers in my youth—being more a Goldmund than a Narcissus, myself), and would tell it to you proudly at the drop of a hat, as if it meant something. (In this he reminded me a little of Sartre's "Self-Taught Man" in La Nausée, reading everything in his local library starting with the A’s and on down the line.)

He was fond of giving sage advice, and more than once mistook his inability to offer a cohesive or intelligible argument for someone else's inability to understand it, looking at you piteously when you said WTF? and saying things like, "maybe someday you'll understand. You'll get there."

Now, you'll no doubt object (especially if you are twenty-something): look at Einstein, who was 26 when he discovered special relativity. And I don't deny that the young can be brilliant. But IQ and experience are different—in the best case scenario they complement each other, of course. but there are things experience alone can teach, particularly in the moral realm. And they are things worth learning at least as much as special relativity, but they take more time.

Moral philosophers like Buddha and Jesus got their bearings in their thirties. My sagacious young friend reminded me a bit of a pre-enlightened Siddhartha, a little prince shielded from knowledge of human suffering by his father.  It was not until he turned twenty-nine that he struck out on his own and saw for himself the world as it was. Siddhartha did not attain Enlightenment until the age of 35. Christ was thirty when he was baptized.

So when some doe-eyed twenty-something declares that "age is just a number," smile and nod. Experience can't argue with innocence. And if you're lucky they'll be a good lay.  If you're not, you'll get lots and lots of useful "advice."

It's infinitely more irritating when an actual adult says it, because they don't have that glow of innocence that makes their ignorance tolerable. A young fool at least has his youth. But an old fool is a fool full-stop. Experience has taught him nothing.

So when I hear "age is just a number" from my peers, I don't object openly—experience has taught me it's not worth the trouble—but it does make me wonder where they've been and what they've been doing with themselves all these years. And how much work they've had done, of course.

My mother, God bless her, recently turned sixty, and looked on her fifties with fondness. She told me, "that's the best decade of your life." This may seem a little bewildering coming from a woman who lost her husband, and then both of her breasts to cancer in that decade of her life. But you can bet when she turns seventy, she will have the same assessment of her sixties as she had at sixty of her fifties.

And I would not say my mother's an optimist.

So why does life get better with age when you will likely experience more pain, not less? When you will likely have more disappointments, more heartbreak, more loss, more reasons to grieve, not less, with each passing year? When you add it all up it seems to come out one step forward, two steps back, dunnit? So why does it seem so much better on the good days the older you get?

Maybe because the more you lose the more you appreciate what you've gained in the process.

Or because we're creatures of habit, and life is a habit, and habit becomes ritual with the passage of time, and ritual is the root of transcendence. (BMs jump to mind in this context.)

Maybe because in time you lose count of the books you've read or the lovers you've laid. You confuse plotlines and faces and names, but still find the thread.

Or could be that if you live long enough you overcome the hubris of youth, in its busy-ness and boasting, and arrive at that point where you don't need to quantify, explain, or defend the use of your time.

Honestly, I don't know. But at least I know that I don't. And knowing how little you know—that, as Socrates had it, is the beginning of wisdom.

Heck, maybe age is just a number after all.