The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire in Review...

A look back at a handful of responses to our popular Q&A

Top row, L-R: Yvonne Liu, Dami Roesl, Deesha Philyaw. Second row, L-R: Ammi Kohn, Celeste Lecesne, Cheryl Strayed. Bottom L-R: Breena Clarke, Neko Case, Jerry Saltz.

Readers,

Instead of posting a new Oldster Magazine Questionnaire today (there’ll be a new one next Weds., as always), I wanted to pause for a moment and share a handful of questionnaires from earlier in Oldster’s almost three-year history. I’m doing this in part because there are so many new subscribers (we’re getting close to 50K!), and some of you have not seen so many of these.

Also, many of you new-comers have not yet been hipped to the idea that Oldster is not about “old people” per se, but about what getting older means to people at different phases of life, and I want to bring you up to speed.

Oldster’s tag line: “Exploring what it means to travel through time in a human body, at every phase of life.”

Yes, often I feature elders. Honestly, mostly I feature people in the broad swath of life called “middle age.” And every now and then, I feature people who are pretty young—like, in their 30s and 40s.

As I’ve written before: To my mind, everyone who is alive and aging is an “oldster.” I’m reappropriating a word that was once a borderline slur, and using it in a way that is both tongue-in-cheek and subversive. I’m trying to foster intergenerational conversation, and to normalize and destigmatize aging by showing that it’s happening to all of us all the time.

Above all, I’m curious about other people’s experiences of getting older, no matter where they stand on “the animal of a life,” as Oldster columnist

Laurie Stone

once put it. We are all literally the oldest we’ve ever been, and that naturally renders most of us startled by whatever new number reflects our chronological age, and the societal expectations that come along with it.

Think back to when you turned 60, 50, 40, 30, 20… I was so freaked out by my 30th birthday and what it signified, I threw myself three parties to distract myself. Now I see 60 up ahead in the distance, just a year-and-three-months from now, and it’s doing a number on me.

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It’s hard to choose which Oldster Questionnaires to show you today! I love them all. Since I launched Oldster in August of 2021, something like 150 people have taken it.

Bear in mind that some time has passed since these were published, so the respondents are now a bit older, and some aspects of their lives have changed. (*Note the date on each.)

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Here they are…

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Thanks, as always, and for reading and for all your support! 🙏 -Sari