THE IDIOTS GUIDE TO BEING OLD, Chapter 7

After I published The Idiot’s Guide to Being Old, a small but aggrieved delegation of Old Guys arrived with the same message: my rules were stupid, they didn’t apply to them, and who the hell was I to tell anyone how to be old?

They did not say this calmly or descend upon the conversation with the peaceful wisdom of men who had transcended earthly concerns. They came in hot, essentially saying, “How dare you tell ME how to act?” followed immediately by the old-guy escape clause: “And furthermore, I don’t give a FUCK what other people think.” Apparently, this is a position they urgently needed other people to hear.

Several of them even led with the acronym IDGAF and then translated it for me.

I found that thoughtful.

Which got me thinking: if you truly don’t give a fuck, why are you in the comments section making sure I know all about it?

A man telling me my rules are stupid is at least a man who read the rules. But these guys didn’t stop at reading. They found the comment box, built an argument, and posted the whole thing publicly so I—and everyone else—would know how little they cared.

For men with no fucks left to give, they arrived remarkably well stocked. True indifference does not clear its throat to provide notice before entering the room. Fake IDGAF kicks open the door, announces that it will not be staying, and then takes twenty minutes to explain why. These guys wanted recognition for their lack of recognition-seeking. And the harder they worked to establish their indifference, the clearer it became that this was GAF wearing Groucho glasses.

That is the problem with premature self-certification; the man making the claim is also the only judge of his own indifference.

At a certain point in Old Guy life, IDGAF stops being a phrase and becomes a rank—possibly the Lifetime Achievement Award of Old Guydom. The recipient would absolutely attend the dinner, accept the plaque, and then spend the ride home complaining that the whole thing was a waste of his time.

*****

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I may have been giving these guys too much credit. I was questioning the validity of their diplomas from a school that had never existed.

No man ever reaches zero GAF—not about what people think, how they react, whether he is respected, whether his family is okay, or whether the waiter forgot his drink.

A man can shed certain concerns. He can stop chasing approval, abandon anxieties that once consumed him, or simply become too tired to maintain the full inventory. But the GAF doesn’t disappear, it just changes its forwarding address. Total indifference is not an advanced state of Old Guy enlightenment. IDGAF is a made-up credential for a place no one has ever been.

So when these guys say IDGAF, they do not mean, “I have reached a state of serene indifference.” They mean, “Rules are for people still accepting feedback.” What offends them is less the correction itself than the presumption that anyone else has the standing to issue one. IDGAF men are willing to live among the rest of us, provided they receive diplomatic plates and immunity from our norms.

The self-certified IDGAF men did not read The Idiot’s Guide as comedy. They read it as a summons, then appeared in the comment section representing themselves and immediately challenged the court’s jurisdiction. The Guide insulted them by treating them as ordinary men subject to the same rules as everyone else. IDGAF, in this context, does not mean “nothing matters.” It means, “Nobody gets a vote but me, and I have already certified the results.”

*****

This is where healthy indifference gets carjacked and driven directly into oncoming traffic.

There is a perfectly legitimate kind of later-in-life not caring. A man should eventually stop caring about cool jeans, impressing strangers, keeping up with every cultural trend, or earning the approval of a 27-year-old with a podcast. Let that nonsense go out with the next garage-cleanout donation pickup.

The problem is that many men convert freedom from pointless social performance into immunity from being tolerable. “I do not need your approval” quietly becomes “I no longer have to take you into account.” Dress code? IDGAF. Basic courtesy? IDGAF. Reading the room? IDGAF. The fact that everyone at the table is silently begging you not to tell the waitress why tipping has gotten out of control? IDGAF, projected with the confidence of a man who believes every restaurant is his podcast.

And that, I think, is the tell.

This is not spiritual liberation. It is a man waving a license he printed for himself in the garage, while treating everyone else’s discomfort as another thing he no longer recognizes as his problem.

The reality is simpler: he did not age into IDGAF. He found a better excuse for behaving the way he always had.

This is the man who decided that reaching a certain age had promoted him—not to elder or sage, but to a position beyond reproach. Having paid his dues and seen enough, he concluded that age entitled him to say whatever he wanted and leave everyone else to deal with it.

The IDGAF man talks too long because his time appreciated and yours did not. He has opinions and distributes them unprompted to anyone trapped within range, especially employees whose job requires them to keep smiling until he is finished.

I wrote Assholes, Douchebags, and Dicks, Oh My and suggested the true asshole, as I described him, was never a man who cared about nothing. He cared about plenty—himself, his preferences, his grievances, his comfort, his version of events, and whether the world had arranged itself properly around him.

What he did not care about was other people.

He says the rude thing and calls it honesty. He refuses to adjust and calls it authenticity. When the room tightens, he takes the discomfort as proof that everyone else is too delicate to handle him without a filter. If people avoid him, he assumes they are intimidated rather than exhausted.

The discomfort is the point. To him, it proves he’s still got it. He can still say the unsayable and refuse to be managed, because—at his age—who is going to make him? That is the whole prize. Not freedom from caring. Freedom from consequence, which he has confused for the same thing.

The asshole has not evolved. He has issued himself a credential—and mistaken longevity for diplomatic immunity.

*****

I understand the fantasy. There is something deeply appealing about the idea of aging into a man who no longer auditions for civilization. I’d love to say what I think without first running it by my internal ethics committee. I would not hate spending less of my remaining life managing the feelings of people who may not have earned that much of me.

But even if true IDGAF existed, I would never want to get all the way there. That is less a state of enlightenment than the point where they start pulling the sheet over your face.

I have already let go of plenty. I don’t care about many things that once occupied entirely too much space in my head. I care less about being cool, being invited, or whether strangers find me impressive. I have also lost my ability to care whether professional athletes wearing matching pajamas defeat another set of athletes in a slightly different ensemble.

To be clear, that newly opened space has not stayed empty. As the old fucks have floated away, new ones move in and take up even more space. Now I care about sleep, back pain, restaurant acoustics, property taxes, and why buying a concert ticket now means they made their system cheaper by making my life more annoying.

This is not transcendence, just simple redistribution. My old fucks have mostly withered on the vine, but nature abhors a fuck vacuum, so now I have a new, hardier crop to tend.

So no, I have not achieved IDGAF, because I have always cared, and I still care. A lot. The difference is that I’m not pretending otherwise. I am not doing a Captain Renault1 denouncing gambling.

Until now, we have been dealing only with ground-level IDGAF. Some men also make the more advanced claim that they have achieved IDGAFF, which presumably means they have reached a level of indifference unavailable to those of us still subject to the laws of gravity.

Which raises more questions. What exactly makes a fuck airborne? Who certifies that it has achieved sufficient altitude? And why do the men claiming not to give one seem especially determined that the rest of us recognize the distinction?

These matters may eventually require formal review by the Order of the Flying Fuckless. But that is an investigation for another day.