How to Stop Turning Into Your Parents

Aging is inevitable. But becoming old isn’t

Joel Stein,

AARP

Comments

Published July 04, 2025

Matt Chase

Editor's note: This story ran previously in The Arrow, AARP's online magazine for Gen-X men

Every time we see those Progressive Insurance ads where Dr. Rick teaches people our age how not to become their parents, my 13-year-old son laughs. Meanwhile, I scowl, and then I think, Scowling is exactly what my parents would do.

The commercials are meant as a joke … I think. But I’m 54 years old, and the joke has at least a ring of truth.

So I called my friend Daniel Levitin, 67, a neuroscientist and author of Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives, to find out how (or if) we’re turning into our parents — and how to stop it.

These, he says, are our challenges:

Reduced social inhibitions

Our amygdala shrinks after age 60, Levitin says. “It’s the social salience center,” he says. When it gets smaller, it reduces our inhibitions. Which explains why at a recent concert I took my dad to at Lincoln Center, he hummed along to Cole Porter loud enough to wake me up.

I have no idea if my grandmother farted in public because of a weakened sphincter muscle or a shrunken amygdala, but I do know that she didn’t seem to care after she did. Which was nice for her, but less nice for everyone else at the Fort Lauderdale Walmart.

Not caring what other people think will be even more acute for Generation X than it was for our parents. After all, we started out not caring what people thought. At the most crucial point in our mating lives, this is how we chose to present ourselves:

Imagine what we’re going to wear out to dinner when we’re 70.

Resistance to change

Our neural development is slowing down. “In the first 20 years of life, our brains were hungrily soaking up all the information they could,” says Levitin. But by our 50s, learning slows down and becomes more deliberate.

Because new stuff can be hard to learn, we might avoid it. “My grandmother referred to Black people as ‘colored’ in the 1960s,” Levitin recalls; subsequent generations consider the word offensive and a slur. “I said, ‘Grandma, they have a right to be called whatever they want.’ And then she’d say, ‘They’re just fussy.’ A whole bunch of people my age are now saying this about the LGBTQ community. They just got used to gay people. Now, nonbinary? Trans? I’m not going to ask your pronouns. That’s just too far.’”

But it’s worth trying anyway. Both Levitin and I have begrudgingly adopted some new social rules. We text first to ask if we can call. We don’t leave voicemails.

“Emails have gotten to be an old people’s medium,” he says. “Like when I first went to college, my grandmother sent me a telegram.”

Entitlement

When we reach middle age, we yearn for the purpose-driven life that we had when our kids needed us and magazines still mattered. So we give unsolicited advice to anyone who’ll listen.

“We feel like they’d benefit from our advice and would be a fool not to listen,” Levitin says. “The problem is, no one learns anything unless they discover it for themselves. No one is going to be able to tell you how to divide a triangle. You have to get out your compass and your divider and do it.”

Not keeping up with technological changes

Students don’t use compasses and dividers anymore. Now it’s all ChatGPT, Siri and Alexa, and asking Grok, X’s (formerly Twitter) conversational chatbot, to explain what’s happening.

So welcome to the digital age! Don’t want to be left behind? Start by reading AARP tech writer Ed Baig’s regular column, Ask the Tech Guru, where he answers your questions on computers, smartphones and all things tech.

Living internally

One reason we get socially awkward is because we stop paying attention. “When you were 13 and you did something you’d never done before, everything was so sensory: the taste, the sights, the sounds, the smell. When you get older, you get more in your head,” says Levitin.

To combat this, we have to engage in activities that force us to interact with the outside world. Being with other people is key. Physical activities also help.

“I know a couple of people who fly private planes, and it keeps them young because you can’t be in your head while you’re flying,” Levitin says.

For legal reasons, I’m not suggesting you take up flying. I’m thinking more along the lines of pickleball.

Limiting ourselves to people our own age

In other countries, generations mingle, convening at neighborhood barbecues or eating tapas in the streets. Americans segregate by age in kindergarten and never stop. Which isn’t good when we get older. Being around young people is how we’re going to learn how much to tip.

If the goal is to be a member of society at large and not just of Margaritaville, we can’t solely live in a society of Gen Xers.

After hanging up with Levitin, I realized that he was using me. I’m 14 years younger than he is, thereby gifting him with my youthful insights and hip fashion trends. But in return, he taught me about the amygdala.

%{postComment}%