Joe Biden’s age has people asking: What does it mean to be in your 80s? Let me tell you.

Old age is all the rage.

Of course, there is the contest between two senescent seniors looking to run the country. But the subject of seniority itself is also suddenly spawning best-selling books (mostly about how to live longer), TV series (gotta love Grace and Frankie), and, in Philly, a couple of recent shows that have played to sellout audiences.

Old people? Hey, you’re talking about me! (I’m 87.) Me and my dwindling cohort, that is.

Once the subject of endless study, speculation, and admiration, my generation has been out of the headlines for a while. But we’re back. And we love it.

» READ MORE: Yes, Democrats have an age problem. But it’s not Biden. | Opinion

Recently, a dozen or so residents of my Roxborough retirement community piled into a handicap-accessible van, bound for a matinee of Ladysitting, now at the Arden Theatre. Lorene Cary, Philadelphia’s favorite novelist-playwright-librettist-arts-impresario-Penn professor, had turned her acclaimed memoir of the same name into a play about one very old person: her centenarian grandmother. The play is about Nana at the end of her life, when she moved in with Cary — and her family. It wasn’t pretty. So Cary wrote about it.

In another recent world-premiere play, My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion (recently at the Wilma Theater), the playwright’s mother, Olga, is insisting on toughing out the current war in Kyiv, Ukraine, bombs be damned.

The two plays couldn’t be less alike; their protagonists’ nationality, class, history, and current situations are wildly different. Yet, I couldn’t help noticing similarities between the two old women at the center. Olga and Nana are at the ends of their tethers, but not too far gone to be stubborn — to whine, sulk, insult, and guilt-trip.

“My whole address book is dead,” moans Olga in Kyiv.

“You want me dead,” blurts Nana to her granddaughter, as the younger woman loses patience with her patient.

After seeing both, one thought came to mind: So that’s how they see us. Hmph.

On a purely personal level, those of us over the age of 75 are described by turns as pains in the butt and pitiable. On a deeper level, there is a begrudging respect for our sheer tenacity and courage in the face of pain, loss, and terror. And history.

When I see younger people talking about my cronies, they seem to give us credit for surviving war, scarcity, injustice, and pestilence. But what was our alternative?

To be sure, we had our share of misfortune — we grew up in the shadow of the Great Depression and World War II. We lived through the twilight of Jim Crow. These were not auspicious beginnings. (Anyone who thinks the world needs to be Made Great Again wasn’t born Black, LGBTQ, Jewish, Asian, disabled, or female in the 1930s.) But too many people forget about all the lucky breaks we got. Many of us have, in the end, benefited from relative plenty, liberating innovation, progress in medicine and science (I was 17 years old when the polio vaccine appeared), the arc of history’s bent toward justice, and, just in time, Wikipedia — what we have instead of brains.

I was 17 years old when the polio vaccine appeared.

From childhood on, we’ve been the most scrutinized, criticized, idealized, spied-upon, attention-grabbing group in history.

As teenagers, we scared the pants off our elders, including J. Edgar Hoover, who warned in 1953, “The nation can expect an appalling increase in the number of crimes that will be committed by teenagers in the years ahead.” On the heels of Alfred Kinsey’s report on our sex lives, scientists soon brought us the birth control pill in 1960. Next thing you know, along with having sex without getting pregnant, we were reading Betty Friedan’s Feminist Mystique (1963), reinventing pop music, heeding the calls of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, marching for civil rights and against the war, and making trouble — good and bad. Yet, they call us the Silent Generation. Are you kidding?

(Of course, baby boomers — the generation after mine — were there for some of that, too. But this isn’t about them; they get enough attention.)

It’s the job of each generation to challenge those who came before, but none of our uppity behavior sat well with our parents. I recall family dinner table conversations among veterans who’d landed on Normandy’s beaches and peaceniks protesting the Vietnam War. We called our elders sexist, racist, homophobic Neanderthals. They called us degenerate, unpatriotic, clueless jerks. In the end, we tolerated — and loved — each other, because, again, what was the alternative?

It is, in the end, the job of young people to misread their elders, and the job of elders to endure it and laugh. Now we’re the elders, and it’s our turn to be misread, and to endure it.

(For the sake of argument, I’d define my cohort as hardworking, skeptical, cautiously rebellious, and resilient.)

Recently, after the popular TV series The Golden Bachelor (featuring a 72-year-old bachelor), The Inquirer ran a story about the sex lives of local seniors. A professor of geriatrics at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine was quoted saying there are retirement homes in Philadelphia resembling “college dorms, with people hopping in and out of each other’s apartments at night.”

I haven’t polled my peers about that subject. If I had, they’d have likely answered, “None of your beeswax” — the schoolyard parlance of the 1940s. But we are your business, just as you — our children and grandchildren — once were ours.

In any case, I hope all the talk of 80-year-olds around the upcoming election doesn’t turn against our age group. Because while our ranks are thinning out along with our hair, a tsunami of old folks is approaching in the form of aging baby boomers. If you think we’re trouble, just you wait.

Rebecca Pepper Sinkler was an editor at The Inquirer in the 1970s and ‘80s. She lives in Roxborough.