When I was in my thirties, I remember some of the forty-year-olds at work talking about getting older.  They would talk about how their metabolism had slowed, how their hair was thinning, how youth was wasted on the young.  And they would sort of give each other those knowing looks that seemed to say “Hang in there” or “It’ll be alright.”  I chalked up this overheard confiding to a kind of bonding over Prufrockian misery.

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