In a developing story out of Cleveland, OH, 30-year-old Ari McMahon has just put the finishing touches on her new room in a retirement home – finally implementing the next step in her lifelong effort to make being young her entire personality.
“It’s so important to surround yourself with people who make you feel good,” Ari told reporters. “More specifically, old people who make you feel young.”
Ari said she came up with this idea after making a new friend who was one year younger than her.
“I love my friend dearly, but the age gap between us was just unbridgeable,” Ari said. “Not in terms of our interests or our connection or anything, but in the way that she made me feel a year her senior.”
Ari continued, saying, “She instantly became the youngest one in our friend group, which was, like, my whole thing! Obviously, I needed to make some changes.”
Ari added that the issue wasn’t necessarily being afraid of getting older, but rather being afraid of losing her self-imposed identity of “young.”
“There comes a time in every person’s life that you suddenly realize that you’re not the youngest person in the room,” she said. “For most people, it might take a minute to mentally adjust to this new reality and come to terms with the fact that they, like everyone else, are aging. However, that is not the approach that I took.”
Ari said that instead of accepting the fact that she was getting older, she preemptively moved into a retirement home so that she could feel young for the rest of her life.
“It has done wonders for my self-esteem,” Ari told reporters. “Now, instead of feeling ancient for being born earlier than some people in the world, I feel young because the only people I interact with are 80 years old or older.”
Ari says that constantly getting asked questions like, “Why do you live here?” and “Why don’t you understand the rules of shuffleboard?” make her feel practically supercharged with youth and vitality.
“This change has definitely been worth it,” she told reporters. “I finally feel like myself again: young and naive.”
However, as of press time, a CNA fresh out of college working at the retirement home had again challenged Ari’s perception of herself, forcing her to immediately move out of the retirement home and into her family’s grave plot, saying, “Okay, this should do the trick, I think.”
