Aging & Wisdom Quote by Mason Cooley

Aphorisms usually land like thrown darts; Cooley’s lands like a slow blink you can’t stop. “Old age: I fall asleep during the funerals of my friends” is funny in the way a hospital waiting room is funny: the laugh catches because the alternative is to stare too hard at the ending. The colon does heavy lifting. It turns “Old age” into a diagnosis and what follows into a symptom, as if grief were no longer a moral performance but a bodily malfunction.

The surface gag is brutal: the expected posture at a funeral is vigilance, respect, ritual attention. Cooley swaps in the oldest indignity - fatigue - and makes it collide with the most socially policed emotion. The subtext isn’t that the speaker doesn’t care; it’s that caring has been outpaced by duration. When you’ve outlived enough people, death stops being an event and becomes a calendar. The “friends” matter, but the plural matters more: this is recurrence, attrition, a life where goodbyes pile up faster than the body can keep the lights on.

There’s also a quiet indictment of how we imagine aging: as wisdom, as serenity, as graceful acceptance. Cooley offers something less marketable - a diminished capacity for ceremony. Falling asleep is the involuntary truth-teller; it exposes the gap between what society demands you feel and what your aging body can actually do. The line’s sting is that it makes mortality banal without making it harmless. It suggests old age isn’t only sorrow; it’s the exhaustion of sorrow, the embarrassing human limit that arrives before the metaphysical lesson does.