My neighbor’s three year old daughter told me that her brother, 8, said that I was old. This came as no surprise.
The age gap justifies a child’s shortsighted view on age, while they are non judgmental about it. When a car salesman, probably in his early thirties, asked my age, underlining the fact that I would not get the financing of my car as of eighty years old, I was taken aback. My exasperation mounted as I had to listen to this ignoramus, who was still wet behind the ears and had not yet learned to use a handkerchief. At seventy-three, 73 written as a number is more brutal, I had enough reason to wipe the nincompoops’ face. But then again, the age gap is sufficient to justify his lack of imagination, even though I was seated a mere sixty centimeters from him. But I would be inclined to say: “what if his awkward attitude had its source in the cultural shift that occurred in recent decades in rising crescendo?”
Our society is romanticizing and revering youth. This valorization of youth at the expense of old age is based on profound biological, economic, and philosophical mechanisms that have become more pronounced in modern societies. Fashion, extreme sports, and extreme diets are just a few indicators of the trend. Some « extremists » are ready to spend fortunes for over-the-top treatments. The longevity industry is in full gear. Pursuing eternal youth is indeed a lucrative business. Warning: to keep oneself young by every possible mean is not to be confused with keeping oneself healthy. We already know the damage that gene therapy injections inflict. We know about the abusive use of dietary supplement capsules or questionable products, especially for weight loss, muscle building or sexual enhancement, leading to serious risks like organ damage or worse. Brands value young people’s ability to understand and anticipate new consumer trends. I would be tempted to say that they are easily influenced and give up their objective choice.
However, in this fast-growth economy, the younger generation is perceived as maximum productive capital. Natural proficiency in new tools makes it a key asset. Beyond technical skills, young professionals are seen as having fresh energy, the ability to transform existing structures, a strong motivation to gain autonomy and responsibility, greater availability (fewer family commitments or health issues); whereas experience is sometimes perceived as a barrier to change.
My strong conviction, however, without refuting the above arguments, is that there is a psychological if not existential reason for the contempt for aging which has become a collective defense mechanism. Why not recognize the denial of death of which the elderly are a distressing reflection? The shadow, as Carl Jung noted, in which is relegated grief and death, is the repository of all the repressed and denied aspects of our lives. We send into the shadow the parts of ourselves that we deem unacceptable to ourselves and to others, hoping to disown them. In our Western world, the majority of people consider the strictly material aspect of life and the limited nature of human existence. By revering youth, society distracts itself through a fantasy of immortality and eternal vigor.
We can also deplore the sociological interruption in transmission when the elder is no longer considered as “wise”, as holding the knowledge in a stable world. There is an inversion as young people now need to teach the not so young in certain fields. This reversal undermines the natural authority inherent in age. That elderly people no longer are part of the social structure of a family as was the case fifty years ago or more, leads to their “invisibility” and marginalization. It is not easy to accept being clothed in a cloak of invisibility as life strips us of time.
Instead, re-calibrating the value metrics of the self seems like a good thing to do.
Jane Ellen Harrison wrote in her essay on youth and old age: “People ask: “would you or would you not like to be young again?” Of course, it is really one of those foolish questions that never should be asked, because they are impossible. You cannot be young again… When you have climbed the hill, and the view is just breaking, do you want to re-climb it? A thousand times no! Anyone who honestly wants to be young again has never lived, only imagined, only masqueraded…”
Making reference to the figure, could mean not having mastered real youthfulness, which is an internal state of well-being, of teachings, new learnings and gratitude. That is the only way to keep ourselves alive and young. Wisdom and peace are the gifts of graceful aging.
At the dawn of her sixties – that threshold moment when people, women especially, first begin to feel the cold shoulder of society, the small cruelties of daily dismissal, the subtle intimations of irrelevance – American writer Ursula K. Le Guin wrote: “for old people, beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with the bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies.” In her book what beauty really means as one grows older, she celebrates the most beautiful thing about growing older: how it anneals personhood, chiseling away the granite of personality to reveal the sculpture of the naked soul.
I must confess to a few advantages of being my age, snow-white hair for emphasis. This may be a paradox in this civilization as we have come to dread and devalue the triumph of having lived. We tend to forget that to grow old is not a punishment, but a privilege. Indeed. The way I see it is that whatever I do wrong or if I ask the wrong question, people might sigh or raise their shoulders, but inevitably will blame it on my age and give me a patient explanation. I might well feel their reaction to be positive discrimination, but so what? It gives me enormous freedom to be, well, just who I am: an imperfect being, an ignoramus in many fields, a naive person stuck in the not so recent past. And, as we all experience the acceleration of time, it might well have launched me back to the dinosaurs, a term people seem to use which means obsolescence. But I can be me, no longer wearing a mask or, as Harrison said, masquerading. Instead, I can value the many experiences I went through, positive or negative, having survived the loneliness of childhood, the brash insecurity of youth, the turmoil of middle age. We can all begin the continuous creative act of holding on while letting go.
“Bertrand Russel, the polymath, philosopher and mathematician wrote a short essay about how to grow old and gave us this life-magnifying advice: “Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”
A touch of optimism: we seem to be gaining ten years of longevity more or less every ten years. One of these days, old age will start at 90. Being ninety and getting old becomes an asset, a curiosity, because people might say: “if one can reach this amazing feat, one can approach 100 years old and still remain a human being!
I’ll conclude with what Ursula Le Guin wrote and that everybody can relate to: “Interestingly, there is something about me that doesn’t change, hasn’t changed, through all the remarkable, exciting, alarming, and disappointing transformations my body has gone through. There is a person there who isn’t only what she looks like, and to find her I have to look through, look in, look deep. Not only in space, but in time.”
