【英语生活】上年纪没什么了不起

When I read last week about Stephen Hester's £9.6m ($15.8m) pay packet, I felt a sting of moral outrage. That the chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland should be earning quite so much struck me as the most grotesquely excessive executive pay deal there has ever been.

It is not just that he is paying himself 600 times more than one of his bank's tellers or that he is getting considerably more than the heads of Lloyds or Citibank. The true outrage is this: at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where we were both students, Steve (as he was then) Hester was in the year below. When I was just starting my second year at university, Steve was a fresher and I viewed him as inferior in two ways. He was in the first intake of boys at the red-brick women's college, and these boys were mostly rejects from the ancient men's colleges and were, on the whole, pretty poor specimens. More damningly still, Steve was 18¾, whereas I was 20¼.

Fast forward 30 years and Stephen is still a year and a half younger than I am – he is now 48½ and, as of last Friday, I am 50. Therefore, for him to be paid that much is not only gross, it feels against the natural order.

This business of ranking people obsessively according to their age relative to my own is something I have been doing ever since I could count. As a child, I knew exactly who was older and who was younger than me in my class. I felt fine if those older did better than I did but took a very dim view of precocious outperformance by anyone younger, even if their birthday was a mere couple of days after my own.

I realise that being age-obsessed is not attractive. Apart from anything else, it is practically illegal and, in any case, should be irrelevant. But I don't see it that way. Age, surely, is an incontestable measuring stick against which our achievements, our appearance and our tastes can be measured. Yet over the past year or two, I have found my obsession increasingly unrewarding. Now that so many pesky people are younger than me, including the US president (two years, one month and nine days younger, if you must know), it is time to change the age comparison game.

So, I have tried to adapt it for players who are getting on. For a start, one must be careful about whom one compares oneself to. Last week, I conducted an experiment with the chief executives of FTSE 100 companies. Laboriously I checked their ages, starting with companies at the beginning of the alphabet. Of the first 10, the youngest was 41 and the average age was 48. This was not comforting, so I gave up.

Oddly, a better result is achieved if one compares oneself not to successful business people but to successful pop stars. To celebrate my birthday last weekend I went to Glastonbury, which was the perfect venue for an age-obsessed 50-year-old. Neil Young is 63, Bruce Springsteen is 59 and Francis Rossi of Status Quo is 60 – and they topped the bill on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights respectively.

Another way of limiting the pain is to narrow the field. I have long since stopped comparing myself to anyone who is much younger than I am and have decided that the success of anyone under 40 is unthreatening as it is so distant. Last week, I was sent an e-mail about someone who had retired from investment banking after a brilliantly successful career. He was 25. Whippersnapper, I thought, patronisingly.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a 50th birthday party given by a university friend who had invited almost everyone I have ever known. I found myself talking to a man who I had last seen at a 40th party 10 years earlier. He cast his eye round the room and declared that everyone looked better at 50 than they had at 40.

Nonsense, I said. I pointed out that the women's hair was looking luridly synthetic, their teeth longer and skin slacker. The men, meanwhile, had spent the previous decade losing hair and gaining chins.

He replied that we looked better because we were acquiring wisdom and it was showing on our faces. I wasn't sure about this either. All I could see on my friends' faces was alcohol; our immodest consumption that evening cast doubt on any idea that we were wiser than we had been 10 or even 30 years earlier.

Yet this man was on to something. We have acquired something – even if it isn't beauty or wisdom. Instead, it's ease. At 50, we are starting to stop minding about what others think of us and this is an enormous, fabulous improvement. Even better, we aren't so painfully on the make any more. There were a few very successful people at the party who were insufferable at 40 but now wear their triumphs more lightly. There were also people who have endured a string of failures but they too have recovered from the bitterness and chippiness of their 30s and 40s and are wearing their disappointments more lightly, too.

In other words, my contemporaries seem to have stopped playing the obsessive game of age comparison – which may mean it is time for me to join them. Therefore, I must try to forgive Steve Hester for being successful in spite of being younger than me (though not for being paid so much) and try to stop comparing other people's ages with my own. And as if to prove the point, I woke up on my 50th birthday to find out that Michael Jackson – born precisely 10 months earlier than me – was successful no more. He was dead.

当我在上周读到史蒂芬•赫斯特(Stephen Hester)的薪酬高达960万英镑（合1580万美元）时，我感到一种道德义愤。这位苏格兰皇家银行(RBS)首席执行官居然能拿到如此高的薪酬，令我感到，这是有史以来高得最为离谱的高管薪酬。

这不仅是因为，他给自己支付的薪酬比他所在银行出纳员的薪酬高出600倍，或者大大超过劳埃德银行(Lloyds)或花旗银行(Citibank)负责人的薪酬。真正令人愤怒的是：我们都曾就读于牛津大学玛格莉特夫人学堂(Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford)，史蒂夫•赫斯特（Steve Hester，他当时的名字）还比我低一届。我开始上大学二年级时，史蒂夫还是个新生，由于两方面的原因，我当时觉得他是劣等生。他是那所红砖墙的女子学院所录取的首批男生之一，而那些男生大多是被古老的男校拒之门外的人，并且总的来说，是一群非常不怎么样的家伙。令我更加小看他的是，史蒂夫当时18¾岁，而我20¼岁。

一眨眼30年过去了，史蒂芬仍然比我小1岁半——截至上周五，他48½岁，我50岁。因此，他的薪酬如此之高，不仅令人反感，感觉上更是违反了自然顺序。

我从学会数数起，就一直着了魔地比较别人和我自己的年龄，并据此论资排辈。小时候，我清楚地知道，班里哪些人比我大，哪些比我小。如果比我大的孩子成绩比我好，我会觉得没什么，但如果被任何比我小的孩子超过，我会非常怀疑他们这种早熟的超常表现，就算他们的生日只比我早几天。

我意识到，执著于年龄并不能让人愉快。撇开别的不说，这么做不现实，无论如何也是毫无意义的。但我并不这么看。年龄肯定是一把无可争议的标尺，可以用来衡量我们的成就、外貌和品位。但近一两年来，我发现自己的这种执著已变得越来越不值得。既然眼下有那么多比我年轻、招我讨厌的人，包括美国总统（如果你非知道不可的话，他比我小2年1个月零9天），那么是时候改一改这个拿年龄做比较的游戏了。

因此，我试图改变这个游戏，使其适应那些岁数见长的参与者。首先，你必须谨慎选择拿谁与自己比较。上周，我进行了一项实验，把自己与富时100指数(FTSE 100)成份股公司的首席执行官们做了一番比较。我从首字母排在字母表最前面的公司开始，费劲地查出了他们的年龄。在前10家公司中，最年轻的首席执行官是41岁，平均年龄为48岁。这没有带来安慰，于是我放弃了。

奇怪的是，如果你不把自己与成功的商界人士比较，而是与成功的流行歌手比较，结果会好一些。为庆祝生日，我上周末去了Glastonbury，对于一个步入50岁又执着于年龄的人来说，那是个再好不过的庆生场地。尼尔•杨(Neil Young)63岁，布鲁斯•斯布林斯顿(Bruce Springsteen)59岁，现状乐队(Status Quo)的弗朗西斯•罗斯(Francis Rossi)60岁。周五、周六和周日晚上，他们分别领衔主唱。

减轻痛苦的另一个办法是缩小比较范围。我早就不把自己与比我年轻得多的人做比较了。我坚信，任何人在40岁之前取得成功，对我都构不成威胁，因为那种成功离我太遥远了。上周，我从一封电子邮件中得知，某位投行业人士在事业取得辉煌成就后退休了。他现年25岁。傲慢的家伙，我屈尊府就地想。

一两周前，我参加了一个大学朋友举办的50岁生日派对，派对邀请到了几乎所有我认识的人。我与一位男士闲聊起来，我上一次见到他还是在10年前的某个40岁生日派对上。他环顾了一圈在场的人，告诉我，所有人都是50岁的时候比40岁的时候好看。

瞎扯，我说。我指出，50岁女性的头发看上去很可怕，像是人造的；她们的牙齿好像比过去长了，皮肤更松弛了。而50岁的男性呢，过去10年尽用来掉头发和长下巴肉了。

他回答道，我们之所以比过去好看，是因为我们一直在增长智慧，而这种智慧也显露在脸上。这一点我也不敢认同。在我朋友们的脸上，我看到的只有酒精；那晚我们开怀畅饮，毫无节制，这令人怀疑，与10年前、哪怕30年前相比，我们有没有变得更加明智。

但这位男士的话值得思考。我们获得了某种东西——即使它并非美貌或智慧。它其实是一种坦然。步入50岁，我们开始不再在意别人对我们的看法，这是一种巨大且奇妙的进步。更不错的是，我们不再那么痛苦地追名逐利。派对上有少数相当成功的人士，他们在40岁时让人难以忍受，但现在，他们不再把成就那么浓墨重彩地写在脸上。派对上也有一些接连遭遇失败的人，他们也已摆脱三四十岁时的怨恨和暴躁，也不再把失望那么明显地写在脸上。

换言之，我的同龄人似乎已经不再玩那个强迫性的年龄比较游戏，对我来说这可能意味着，是时候加入他们的队伍了。因此，我必须试着原谅史蒂芬•赫斯特在比我年轻的时候获得成功（但我不会原谅他的高薪），并且不再拿别人的年龄与我自己的做比较。似乎是为了证明这一点，我在50岁生日那天醒来时听闻，迈克尔•杰克逊(Michael Jackson)——他正好比我小10个月——已经不再成功了。他去世了。

译者/章晴