When you’re a teen, you think aging is the worst thing that could ever happen to you.

"Hope I die before I get old," was the cry of the youth movement in the ’60s — although as far as I know Pete Townsend (who wrote the song) and Roger Daltrey (who sang it) are well over 50 now and have not opted to commit suicide.

But I too subscribed to that philosophy for a time, shuddering at the thought of every candle on the cake beyond about No. 23. Even now, I sometimes wake in the night with a terrified start, thinking, I’m already halfway to another birthday! Aaaack! Or I perform tortuous feats of logic like this: I plan to live to 100, so 50 would be the middle of that, so I’m not even middle-aged!

CBS commentator Andy Rooney was asked recently what was the worst thing about growing old. "You’re going to die!" he snapped. "What a stupid question!"

But, beyond that unfortunate drawback of aging, there are a few real benefits. I used to think older people who talked about "greater understanding" were merely rationalizing their desire to cling to life as long as possible. After all, how could anyone be wiser than I, at age 20?

I’m not saying 16-year-olds don’t have insights or that senior citizens are always smarter than the young — far from it. But, in general, our natural abilities tend to be refined and, we hope, deepened as our years increase (just consider how much easier it becomes to win at Trivial Pursuit!). Now I realize that aging does bring with it some consolation prizes:

• You come to know and accept your own shortcomings. For instance, I have little ability to remember people’s faces, particularly when I see them out of their usual context. So if, say, an out-of-uniform Forest Service official says hello to me in the grocery store, my brain does flip-flops trying to figure out where I’ve seen the man before. Meanwhile, I smile and chat vaguely until it becomes painfully obvious that I have no idea who he is.

I used to think there must be some mental exercise I could perform to fix this, but now I know I’ll always be this way.

• You no longer care whether your tastes are "sophisticated." In college, it was terribly important to like the right music, read worldly authors and develop gourmet tastes. Now, I figure, if you’ve tried both and you prefer bubblegum songs to jazz, science fiction to James Joyce, and Wild Irish Rose to sauvignon, so what?

• You realize the elderly are not members of an alien species, but glimpses into your future. You become considerably more tolerant of slow-moving shoppers and people who need to have everything repeated.

• You no longer think the world will end if you wear the wrong clothes to a party. Likewise, you come to realize that, when you walk into a room, only 10 percent of the people actually will bother to look at you — unless you’re the President or you’re naked.

• You quit thinking you’re going to discover the Ultimate Truth. At some point you realize there is really only one way to know what God is like or what happens after we die, and you’re in no hurry to find out. As Carl Jung said, "The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble."

• You learn to simply avoid people who make you feel bad. I can recall feeling ashamed years ago, when I was grieving over the death of a much-loved pet cat, and some co-workers scoffed at me. Now I figure that people who’d make fun of someone for missing a pet have souls so mean and small, they aren’t worth bothering with.

A friend of mine once had a suitor who was perplexed by her sorrow over the death of her beautiful German Shepherd. "It’s only a dog," he told her. "Maybe so," she snapped, "but he meant more to me than you ever will!"

• You accept the fact that there will always be people who don’t like you. Except for movie stars and other celebrities, who seem to remain on an eternal quest for universal adoration, most of us start thinking, Hey, if I don’t like everybody else, why should everybody else like me?

• You come to appreciate how lucky you are. When you’re young, you think about things you don’t have: a sports car, a fancy mountain bike, a prestigious job. Later, it hits you that even the lower middle class in America lives in incredible wealth compared to the inhabitants of the Third World — and if you and and your loved ones have your health and a warm place to sleep, you’re better off than half the people on this planet.

A friend of mine put it this way: "My car broke down on the way to work this morning — and I had another one to drive. Most people in the world can’t say that."

• You gain perspective about which qualities truly matter. In high school, we flocked around kids with skinny bodies and beautiful faces; in college, our heroes were classmates with tortured poetic souls or a rakish, devil-may-care nihilism.

Those traits pall after a while, however, and honesty, humility, humor and optimism become a lot more important.

And, most of all, kindness. Eventually you come to realize, as some poet wrote, that "the simple act of being kind/ Is greater than all the wisdom of the wise."