Why are we afraid to grow old?
As I am writing this, I know, that given ten years I might be regretting every single word of it but I owe it to myself as a writer to tap into how I feel right now. We are caught up in an age which celebrates youth and youthful looks to the extent that we air-brush pictures on magazines and websites, spend hours upon endless hours having ourselves made up and are willing to inject poison under our skins and go under the knife in order to erase the marks of time. And it’s all wrong.
There, I said it. Writing as a writer who once modeled I have the direct benefit of the experience of feeling the pressure to look good for professional reasons and I fully understand the pressure we are all under as we are bombarded in our daily life with images, ideas and beliefs which state that young is good and we should be young forever.
There are here, as you might expect, more issues than casually meet the eye. In times past youth used to be associated with inexperience, crassness and a certain sense of irresponsibility which was, in retrospect, perhaps society’s way of coping with the fact that time passed and the virility of youth waned.
Then the web came along, technology and tech advance became the province of the young and youth began to be celebrated again not least because it allowed us to once again venerate virility, zest and enthusiasm. This way we came full circle, prizing youth because it stands for qualities we want and thinking that by keeping ourselves looking young we also hold onto those qualities.
Being young is cool. Beauty comes effortlessly. Energy is a standard part of the package. And the freshness youth brings into the world is priceless in terms of finding new ways to do old things. But we also need to understand that there are limits. Youth is cool only when it is lived to the max and then we can use what we’ve learnt to move on and do even more. Seen like this the progression from young to not so young to, someday, ‘old’ is one which takes the inevitability and milks it to the max for what each stage can give us.
The fear we face when faced with age comes from the fact that psychologically we associate it with a loss of stamina, drive and virility. In that respect, at least, modern living and modern medicine have been almost as successful as Photoshop at helping us battle age. Let’s get clear in one thing. None of what I have written is about ‘giving up’ or even growing old ‘gracefully’. I fully believe that we have a right to push the envelope of our existence to the max and this includes every stage of our lives. But we should also keep it real in order to not lose track of the fact that an obsession with artificiality often leads to a total loss of substance.
We should worry about losing our drive, our ability to enjoy life, our sense ability to connect with others and our sense of fun. We have every right to worry about not being able to understand our place in the world or why we should be in it any longer. We should, quite rightly, struggle to do as much as we can in the space of our lifetime. We should seek happiness in our relationships and try to find ways to make them better. All these things take time, thought and energy and because of that it’s wrong to agonize over the passage of time and what it does.
