Our approach to aging is shaped by our culture, faith, and upbringing. How we visualize and live our twilight years depends on our ability to shed our fear of age.
While medicine’s blessings are universally acknowledged, it is also true that it spawns bogies which do not necessarily coincide with human experience. Phobia of aging is an example of science-generated hysteria that impacts our approach to aging both at the individual and the societal level.
Concerns about aging are rooted in facts. Drug discovery and improved health care have eliminated or mitigated the risk of dying from infectious diseases and other chronic killer ailments and pandemics that in earlier times wiped out entire populations and civilizations. Combined with healthy lifestyles and responsible patient behaviors, those medical achievements have prolonged human life span. Life expectancy globally has more than doubled from 34 years in 1913 to 72 years in 2022. Simultaneously, declining birthrates across the world have boosted the number of persons above the age of 60, estimated to rise from 1 billion in 2020 to 1.4 billion in 2030 and 2.1 billion in 2050.
Simply put, six years from now, one out of every six persons globally will be aged 60 or older. Between 2020 and 2050, the number of 80-year-olds is also predicted to triple reaching 426 million.
Those huge numbers form the writing on the wall for economists and planners entrusted with the well-being of economies, whose predictions of the dire consequences of aging in industrialized nations and the burden on economies have colored societal approaches to aging. Population aging, they have repeatedly warned, will severely challenge the welfare state. A greater dependency ratio when the elderly begin to outstrip young workers will cripple economies, overtax healthcare and social security systems, and disproportionately burden the young with the care of their seniors.
The predictions fortunately, are not entirely or necessarily validated by other research findings, which suggest that contrary to expectation, an increasing number of people 65 and older do not need care and are therefore not a burden on society. Healthier lifestyle along with better screening for medical conditions and efficient treatment and mitigation strategies are providing grounds for greater optimism about aging.
At the individual level, a similar transition towards realism and optimism occurs in understanding and approaching aging. “Fear,” as the saying goes, “is what one makes of it.” Like illness and death, age is how one perceives it. Some think of it as just a number. Others consider it terminal. Many go through life, taking each day and challenge as it comes, while others are dumbstruck and unable to even visualize, let alone prepare for the likelihood of being struck by illness and declining health, or to accept the unavoidability and certainty of death. Obviously, the former group has a better coping ability to handle the vicissitudes of age.
Whatever our individual limitations in understanding and handling aging, we are dependent on how society perceives age collectively.
Hinduism’s concept of four ‘ashrams’ exhorts a person to experience life at each stage with a mature understanding of the associated privileges, joys, and duties. While immersed in and giving one’s all to each stage, one must remain detached and be willing to move on to the next stage, eventually using the last phase as a preparation for after-life.
How faiths and cultures impact aging
Faith and culture play a pivotal role in viewing age positively or negatively. From primitive to contemporary times, traditional societies have venerated elders as the possessors, preservers, teachers, and conduits of generational transfer of human knowledge and experience. The frailty that comes with aging is considered natural, and the younger generation’s obligation to look after the frail elderly is a given.
Realistic acceptance of age-caused limitations on one’s physical and mental capacities promotes better adjustment and coping strategies. However, there are marked differences in attitude to “getting old” depending on the culture and faith into which one is born.
Hinduism’s concept of four ‘ashrams’ (brahmacharya, grihastha, vanaprastha, and sanyas), four 25-year stages of life, exhorts a person to experience life’s each stage with a mature understanding of the privileges, joys, and duties associated with the stage. While immersed in and giving one’s all to each stage, one must remain detached and be willing to move on to the next stage, eventually using the last phase as a preparation for after-life. Conditioned by the above approach, the senior years for Indians thus become as desirable as they are inevitable.
In contrast, Western cultures and faiths have approached and impacted aging differently. In America, for instance, competing religious beliefs have caused the pendulum to shift from viewing aging as a disease and the helplessness and decrepitude of old age as a divine curse to it being deemed a blessing from God. While Puritans reportedly viewed old age with veneration, Calvinists saw older adults in poorer health as disgusting, except for those who continued to be “useful” who were deemed to have received “distinguishing favor” from God.
The ugliness associated with age has persisted, fueling Americans’ obsession with staying and appearing young making them sacrificial lambs on the altar of an exploitative cosmetic industry. The ‘Ponds’ culture is now global in outreach selling false promises of youth and beauty. Many corporates are hawking dreams of physical fitness, mental acuity and virility with equal perversion and success.
Positive versus prejudicial impact of ageism
Cultures, where filial loyalty and care are imbibed from childhood and reinforced by religious beliefs, enable elders to approach their senior years more gracefully and constructively, making their twilight years not only bearable but more meaningful. Conversely, Western societies generally have been more judgmental, leading to negative stereotypes about the aged and to ageism. Unfavorable perceptions of aging invariably spawn prejudice against older segments of a population, resulting in less health care and greater neglect of the elderly. Long-term health outcomes of seniors suffer, as seen in research which links negative perceptions to a 7.5 year reduction in life expectancy.
Like racism, ageism has been grossly unjust, discriminatory, and damaging, effectively turning the aged into victims. Worse, it has relegated aging from what it is – a natural evolutionary process – to a pathology.
Rising momentum in favor of aged
Luckily, a more favorable approach to aging is emerging in America and Western countries with a better appreciation of effective ways to manage the challenges posed by aging and heightened interest in extending life beyond the current estimates of lifespan.
With billionaires like Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg becoming interested in extending lifespan, aging has become a hot topic. This confluence of scientific progress, financial backing, and celebrity interest is a potential turning point in our battle against aging.
Indian scientist and Nobel award recipient Venki Ramakrishnan refers to the surge in scientific research in longevity with over 300,000 articles published in the last decade. This scientific push represents “a global effort to understand and potentially cheat death, resulting in tens of billions of dollars of investment in anti-aging startups”.
With billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and others interested in extending lifespan, aging has become a hot topic. This confluence of scientific progress, financial backing and celebrity interest, Ramakrishnan rightly suggests, is a potential turning point in our battle against aging.
Interest in seniors has also risen with growing recognition of their purchasing power by various corporations looking to improve their bottom line. While ‘customer is king’ remains a truism, there is no denying that the richer the customers, the greater their power to command the market. Businesses hotly pursuing senior dollars range from pharma and medical to dietary, fitness, recreational, travel, service, and other sectors.
Even faith is being harnessed to woo seniors by leveraging the tourism potential of holy sites. Yatras or pilgrimages to holy places are being promoted as the best way for seniors to spend their money on tourism that offers a path to enjoyment as well as redemption. Such hype is hardly novel as throughout history; religious sites have been used by all faiths, including Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Jain, and others, to boost economic growth and cultural cohesion. Mecca, Jerusalem, Vatican City, and Varanasi are a few examples of cities with proven wealth-generating potential.
Seniors’ spending ability is not only changing marketing trends and forces in their favor, but since economic clout is linked to enhanced social standing and political power, it is also convincing politicians to better serve the needs and aspirations of the aged, and societies to approach seniors with greater respect, acceptance, and fairness.
Positive self-imaging to regain power over aging
Seniors themselves are beginning to reexamine their self-image and discard the negative stereotypes that make them feel less human and less valuable. They are standing up to resist the tendency of cultures to treat them as objects of scorn, the butt of cruel jokes, the gullible and easy targets of fraudsters, the rejects of evolution, and the flotsam and jetsam of society.
Instead, increasingly, seniors are challenging themselves and calling on others to view the aged as productive members of society and as brave warriors who individually have managed to fight and win the battle of life and beat the odds on life expectancy. At the aggregate societal level, likewise, they have done no less to keep the human race going and to ensure the generations that succeed them remain both healthy and happy.
Embracing age
The evolutionary lesson they have imbibed and committed to advocating is that the sky is the limit for seniors who think of and tackle age as one more encounter in their life’s journey. Their life’s mission is to enlighten people, young and old, that age need not or ever be dreaded like a fast-killing cancer or an irreparable hole in the heart. Nor should aging be treated like an aberration or let-down. On the contrary, we need to embrace it as a normal part of life.
Lead photo courtesy Freepik
At Seventy
Instead of “old,”
Let us consider
“Older,”
Or maybe “oldish,”
Or something, anything,
That isn’t always dressed
In sensible shoes
And fading underwear.
Besides which,
Seventy isn’t old.
Ninety is old.
And though eighty
Is probably old,
We needn’t decide that
Until we get there.
In the meantime
Let us consider
Drinking wine,
Making love,
Laughing hard,
Caring hard,
And learning a new trick or two
As part of our job description
At seventy.
