The dilemna of Aging

Jenny reflects on the problem of aging in a rather depressing article.

"One of the problems of ageing" she writes, " is knowing when to start complaining about being old."

And she continues in this veing. "It’s decidedly irritating, but also rather tragic, when head-turning young women, not content with being what they presently are, take the time to look at you in triumph, never doubting that they are going to stay young for ever – or perhaps they think the old and the young are born that way. The only defence against them is also a kindness: silence and knowledge. Even if we don’t take the Stoics to heart and live every moment as if it were our last, we should try to mitigate the awful shock that comes later on when we can’t fail to remember that the direction we live in goes only one way.

People are going to be cross with you for declaring agedness too soon as well as too late, but it’s not that easy to identify the right moment. According to Scientific American, we ought to be able to sniff out where we are at.  It confirms what we all know but hesitate to say: old people smell. Apparently it isn’t an unpleasant smell – like ‘cucumbers and aged beer’ or comparable to ‘old book smell’ – but it’s there. I am of the cohort which lived inside a gilded bubble when young, and made a proper song and dance about it. Now that group is clearly beginning to think of itself as old, and you can be sure this won’t happen quietly.

Back then, in the early 1970s, we baby boomers threatened our elders with radical change without thinking that we would ever change ourselves. But we have changed, in the ineluctable way, and not, as we assumed, as a result of personal choice. The irony of ‘I hope I die before I get old’ was that we didn’t believe for a second that we could become the old as we knew them. And we weren’t just young, but young in a way no previous generation had been young. We used ‘young’ and ‘old’ as time-free categories. ‘Young’ meant new and different, able to see what the old couldn’t (certain visionaries excepted): we had reinvented the terms to mean us and them. They, the old, would die out: we would change the world and remain forever ourselves, meaning forever young.

Without the constraints and necessities of war or strong memories of having had to manage austerity, we could believe that there was a single something that we purely were, and always would be. We made a fuss about being young, without understanding how much being young enabled us to make the fuss. Now, we’re going to make a fuss about being old and that’s going to be rather less straightforward. It’s certain that only a small fraction of my generation were doing any of the wild and wilful things people think (that we thought) we were all up to and that the same fraction are probably the ones who are going to write, talk, march and legislate about getting old in order to let the world – and ourselves – know what we think about it.

The young of our old age have expressed considerable resentment at the noise we have made about our activities in the 1960s and 1970s – just wait till we’ve all got our old age books out. By squinting slightly, I can see what a gloomy prospect that might be for you young ’uns, but given that you will be rid of us soon enough, you might just as well put up with it. Read, don’t read, it’s up to you. It’s our last shout. We will read one another, then notate, cross-reference and append our thoughts in our own books. When we’re dead I suspect it will be as if we had never been. The feminists, the radical left, the communards: all will dissolve into a trivial pop culture history called the Sixties, much slighter and less consequential than it thought itself to be. So bear with us. Those few of our parents, aunts and uncles who remain still disapprove of us. The young now disapprove of us too. Even some of our own demographic disapprove of us. So nothing, really, has changed for the self-loving unloved baby boomers.

One of our primary concerns is the war between the generations. The one in which, to our surprise, we are now the old and tiresome. But this time, there are worse accusations being chucked around. We are the baby boomers, the demographic catastrophe waiting to happen that is now happening. Baby boomers lived their youth in a golden time. Far from having to go into tens of thousands of pounds of debt, we had free tuition and decent grants to live on while we received a higher education. The generation that bore us and lived through the hardships of war and austerity, while disapproving of us, also provided us with welfare benefits that allowed us to take time off from earning a living, to play with ideas and new ways (we thought) of organising socially and politically, of exploring other cultures, drugs, craziness, clothes and music. Now, this free time seems mythic. If we wanted jobs, there were plenty of them. If we didn’t, we benefited in a way that would be called scrounging now (it was then, but no one stopped it).

We are costing a fortune as we age and we’ll go on to cost much more because medical science has promised us twenty more years of some sort of life than our parents expected. Our pensions, the medical expertise and equipment, the time and energy needed to care and cater for a disproportionately large aged population: all this, the young have been told, is coming out of their earnings and limiting their wellbeing. We got grants to do up houses we bought cheaply. They can’t get a mortgage. Workers to our queens, they are providing our good life, in suburbia, beside the sea, in sunny Spain, filling hospital beds, out of their taxes. We take our pensions, our cold weather payments, foreign holidays and cruises, while the young struggle to find jobs to pay for our needs, our strokes, our previously unhealthy lifestyles that caused the sicknesses which the impoverished NHS is obliged to cure. The one demographic group that has not seen its incomes fall since the recession is those over the age of sixty. Pensioner incomes have continued to rise on average, albeit very modestly.’ Beware of the albeits. A relatively small rise in income during the recession doesn’t mean a relatively high income level to start with....

Opposition between the generations is a perfect shield for a government under fire for cutting welfare while destroying the NHS, privatising education and doing nothing about the depletion of reasonably priced housing.  We are told to take our wellbeing and our ageing process into our own hands. The idea of ageing badly looms over us: those who become ill or develop age-related conditions are to blame for failing to keep themselves bright and sparky. They have grown wilfully old and expect the world to take care of them. It all plays into the neoliberal notion that the old are demanding welfare and medical aid which the young have to pay for. Dependency, more or less inevitable with increasing age, becomes something about which the old should apologise.

What we had then was a ‘kind of hopefulness, the energy that buoyed one up in those days [that] nobody with any kind of sophistication can really entertain now. You can’t believe there is something to be done that can be done by you.’ Maybe we were so high on our intentions that we failed to see the fog of Thatcherism creeping up around our ankles. As for costing the young money, it’s a marvellous distortion of the point of a welfare state. Perhaps we should apologise for being alive at a time when medical science is advanced enough and will do its best to keep us alive. But that’s also going to be true of the next generation. It was our generation that came up with the phrase ‘the personal is the political’.

If it never occurred to us that we would grow old, it also never crossed our minds that we would baulk at growing old. Being desirable, and staying desirable for longer, is the main thrust of marketing for clothes, cosmetics, medication and food.

It turns out to be harder than we thought it would be. The ageing flesh is not so fascinating, erotic or irrelevant to our sense of ourselves as we had planned to make it. Everywhere culture still teaches us shame and disgust at our ageing reflections, and makes it seem reasonable that men see older women in that way too. The older woman becomes invisible in public, just part of a crowd, while recalling how when young she was catcalled and handled by strangers as soon as she stepped out on the street. Like young women now, we were spectacle whether we wanted it or not. We were always visible, even when alone. It is almost impossible to be a young woman and not imagine yourself being looked at. Some of us tell ourselves that invisibility is an improvement, and so it can be, but the release comes with, it’s accepted, a loss of our sexual selves. Visibility and our sexuality are relegated to the past, youthful self, and it’s not surprising if those selves grown older breathe a sigh of relief at being free from the incessant gaze, the time-consuming achings of desire and the desire to be desired.

Another definitive non-sexual way of knowing you’re old is the moment when your doctor tells you that ‘you’ll have to learn to live with it,’ or that whatever ails or pains you is ‘the result of wear and tear’. You wait for the suggestion of a procedure, the next appointment, and then realise that you aren’t going to be considered for it. You see a virtual shrug that says you are no longer young enough for a resource-strapped institution to be overly concerned with getting you back to full health. There are higher priorities, and they are higher because the patients are younger. It comes to you that whatever ailment you’ve got at this point is decay inflected by decay, in one form or another, and, to people who aren’t you, only to be expected. It is, to put it simply, which they won’t, a recognition of the beginnings of the approach of death. And it can come to you in many ways, none of them alone necessarily recognisable. 

Things happens, this and that, which don’t in themselves mean anything, until the incremental signs pile up to the fact that there’s nothing to be done that’s worth doing. You are old, getting older, you won’t get younger, you are physically wearing out. You will die, sooner rather than later. Some things about ageing, such as whether we mind showing our wrinkled arms or living alone, are perhaps a matter of choice and decision, but then there comes the ordinary decay and breakdown of the old body. Eventually it’s out of our control and even our social and economic situation will affect only the conditions not the way in which we die. None of the gung-ho books on ageing has more than a brief mention of the proximity of death as one of the symptoms of old age to be dealt with. ‘Acceptance’, they say, without much elaboration, and then move rapidly on. Even if it won’t kill you imminently, the degeneration of the body will alter and limit how you can live, whether you can get out, continue to work and travel. I can’t think of anything about the reality of ageing which improves a person’s life. The wisdom people speak of that is supposed to come to us in old age seems to be in much shorter supply than I imagined, and apart from that, it’s a matter of how self-deceptively, or stoically, you are able or prepared to put up with the depletions, dependency and indignities of getting old....

Beauvoir’s solution of decent ageing was : ‘One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.’ A sense of love and community, a life vested in equality and the rights of women, certainly adds up to a proper life, even a good one, but I’m not sure that a good life, even the best life, is enough compensation for the multiple ills of ageing and what seems the single piece of wisdom I’ve learned from my past – the fact that the world is immune to benign liberal longings.

John Berger writing in his eighties said: ‘One protests because not to protest would be too humiliating, too diminishing, too deadly. One protests … in order to save the present moment, whatever the future holds.’ 

The advice seems to be to do what will prevent you from despairing, because being old and having been young, we are very well aware of the world’s capacity to remain utterly unchanged by our efforts. And that awareness alone is enough to make the end of life grim and disappointing unless you have the capacity to grin and bear it.