Everything I Know About Growing Older, I Learned From ‘Jaws’

Would it have been easier to catch the great white with a bigger boat? Of course it would. (And if Quint hadn’t destroyed the boat’s radio before Brody could call for backup, they just might’ve gotten one.) But if you remember how the movie ends (spoiler alert), Brody kills the shark. Sure, Quint gets eaten and the ship is ripped apart and sinks in the process. But they did it. They pulled it off. They stopped the shark. And they did it without a bigger boat.

You don’t need bigger. Trust yourself to get the job done with whatever metaphorical boat you happen to be piloting. You’ll be fine. You may be paddling back to shore on shards, but you’ll find a way to pull it off. Stop waiting for a bigger boat, a bigger promotion, a bigger savings account, a bigger opportunity. Work with what you’ve got.

3. Trust the experts

When Hooper, the oceanographer with a shark obsession (played by Richard Dreyfuss, 77), shows up on the island at Brody’s behest, he immediately alienates pretty much everyone in town, including the mayor. When he explains that a dead swimmer could only have been killed by “an eating machine,” and even after a shark is caught insists that it’s “not the shark,” nobody wants to believe him. But he’s right about pretty much everything, except for going underwater in a shark cage — that was probably ill-advised.

The longer you’re on this planet, the more you understand that you should always listen to the smartest person in the room. Even if they’re giving you news you don’t want to hear. Sometimes, especially then. The wisdom that comes with age is realizing that you don’t always have to be right, and you’ll live a lot longer if you trust the advice of people who get their information from years of studying and research and not, say, an uncle’s Facebook post.

4. Learn when to relax

The first dozen times I saw Jaws, I wanted to be like Quint (played by the late Robert Shaw): brashly confident, smirking at the soft-handed landlubbers, possessing the swagger of someone who’s spent a lifetime scoffing in the face of danger. But then I got older, became a dad, and realized I’m really more like Brody: anxious about protecting his family, barely able to relax when his kids venture out alone. Granted, he had reason to freak out when his boys were in shark-infested waters. But that panicked look on his face should be instantly familiar to anyone who’s had to pretend they were fine with briefly losing sight of their kid in a crowd.

Brody’s kids don’t get eaten, but not because of his nervous hand-wringing or overprotectiveness. They were either on the beach, making sandcastles when the shark attacked, or managed to swim out in time. It’s a lesson that hasn’t come easy to me, and even now, as the parent of a teenager, I struggle with it. Your kids aren’t doomed the moment you avert your gaze. Let them swim, and loosen those shoulders, Dad.

5. Learn to find common ground

My favorite scene in Jaws is that moment on the Orca boat when Quint, Brody and Hooper — exhausted from a day of shark hunting, and well past getting on each other’s nerves — drink themselves into a stupor and share stories about their respective scars. Some of those scars come from the ocean, collateral damage from bull sharks and moray eels. Some come from bar fights or arm wrestling contests gone wrong. Hooper even rips open his shirt and taps his chest. “You see that?” he asks. “Mary Ellen Moffat. She broke my heart.” He then erupts into giggly laughter as the others join in.

It’s a scene I think about every time I meet somebody who rubs me the wrong way, who irritates me with every wrong opinion that comes out of their mouth. But just as those characters found common ground by sharing stories and showing off their respective scars — “OK, so we drink to our legs,” Quint says, raising a glass to their battered calves — every single person you disagree with has their own tale of hardship. If not scars, then at least a few calluses to mark the years they’ve lived through and the challenges they’ve met. Once you start to listen and see the whole person with their tapestry of beautiful scars, you realize we’re all basically the same.

6. Trust your instincts

It’s weird, the things you start to notice about a movie after you’ve lived with it for a few decades. Like the iconic opening scene of Jaws, where a young woman skinny-dips in the ocean and becomes the shark’s first victim. For most of my life, I thought the only lesson of the scene was “maybe you shouldn’t skinny-dip after dark.” But you know what? With the hindsight of age, the lesson is really this: Don’t let anyone bully you, even if they seem like the cool, fun ones.

Remember that dude who runs with her down to the beach and then decides against getting in the water, opting instead to take a nap on the sand? He lives to see the next morning. And remember when Quint mocks Hooper for his “city hands”? Yeah, guess which one makes it to the end of the movie without being chopped in half by a hungry shark? The guy with city hands, that’s who.

I’ve found that weirdly reassuring in my 50s. The characters who escaped a watery death were the ones who weren’t trying to be cool, who were fine skipping out on the action to take a snooze on the beach, or weren’t worried that their hands weren’t as manly as the grizzled shark hunter’s. As a kid, and even into my 20s and 30s, I desperately wanted to be the guy who crushes beer cans like paper, or the woman who gleefully takes a drunken swim at night. But Jaws taught me that it’s OK not to be that person, and to ignore the bullies who try to convince me I should be following in their (soon to be shark chum) footsteps.

In fact, being the un-fun one means you’re more likely to swim off into the sunset. If you ask me, that sounds like a much better third act.

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.