Aging is inevitable. We all know that—but you’d never be able to tell, based on the way we act.
Here in North America, we’re living longer than we ever have before. But the more we stretch our lifespans, the more we seem to fear the very idea of getting older. From wrinkle creams and botox injections to fad diets and workout regimens, there are entire cottage industries devoted to (allegedly) helping us stave off the aging process as long as we possibly can.
As we speak, scientists the world over are combing through the human genome in search of the keys to extending human lives. Mainstream media sources are stuck in a ceaseless flip-flop between heralding red wine as a life-extending miracle food and decrying it as a deadly carcinogen. And of course, Elon Musk continues to insist that we will soon have the technology to upload our entire consciousnesses to the cloud, a bridge to immortality.
These are the lengths we’re willing to go to in order to stay young. But why? Ageism is so ubiquitous in our culture, we often take it for granted that getting older is an inherently, inescapably bad thing. But recently, research has shown that these beliefs are often untrue. Not only that, but they might be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: old age feels like a curse because we already believe it to be one.
Clocking our own ageism
When you think of old age, what words and images come to mind? If you’re like most people, chances are you associate later life with frailty and weakness. You likely see older adults as being physically and mentally slower than their younger counterparts. You might picture your grandmother struggling to navigate her new computer, or your grandfather adjusting his hearing aid.
Even as our society has become steadily more inclusive over the last few decades, bias against older adults is still widespread. In fact, ageism is one of the most common and most normalized forms of discrimination. This translates into very real, material consequences for older people, impacting their prospects for employment, health care, and even housing.
Obviously, getting older does come with many physical and mental changes. But the negative changes that come with age may not be quite as “natural” as we once thought. Instead, researchers have suggested that our own ageist beliefs can put us on a path toward less healthy aging.
How ageism makes aging worse
In psychology, there’s something called the Pygmalion effect, which describes how the expectations we have can end up shaping our realities.
As it turns out, this is exactly what happens with aging. Becca Levy, a researcher at Yale University, spent twenty years researching how people’s beliefs about aging influenced their experiences of getting older. She found that people who held more negative attitudes about aging tended to suffer from more physical and mental health problems, took longer to recover from disability, and tended to die earlier than people who held positive beliefs.
Levy’s research basically suggests that everything we think we know about aging might be wrong. Memory loss, hearing impairment, heart disease—many of the things that we’ve long believed to be inevitable consequences of aging may actually be heavily influenced by our culture’s wider attitudes toward older people.
Unfortunately, as we’ve established, ageism is incredibly pervasive worldwide. According to the UN, about half of all people hold moderate to severe levels of prejudice against older adults.
On the flipside: if we’re able to start shifting our culture’s beliefs about older people, we could also make the aging process a lot more comfortable and empowering for everybody.
Treat aging like an adventure
Rejecting ageism is more easily said than done. But thankfully, there’s already a growing movement to challenge ageist attitudes and lean into the positive aspects of getting older.
For just one example, check out this TED Talk from journalist and author Carl Honoré (who also happens to be an upcoming guest on our Instagram Live series, Viive Values):
Old age is so often painted as an obstacle, a drawback. But as Carl highlights in his talk and his book Bolder: Making the Most of Our Longer Lives, aging can bring lots of positive changes: studies show, for example, that older adults are actually better at certain kinds of cognitive reasoning than younger adults. Their life experience lets them accomplish amazing feats of creativity. And of course, the wisdom of several decades lived on earth gives them an incredibly unique perspective on the world.
Ageism hurts everybody
Ageism doesn’t just hurt older adults. Challenging the so-called “cult of youth” is good for everybody, not just for older adults. By rejecting the idea that old age is supposed to be a time for slowing down and scaling back our activities, we’re also rejecting the idea that youth has to be all about hustling and working hard every single second. Giving older adults permission to have more adventures also means giving younger (and middle-aged) adults permission to take it easy.
By shedding our fears of getting older, we could all set ourselves up for a better Aging & End of Life process—no matter how old we happen to be today.
