What Old Age Is Really Like

May we all grow into our old age

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-old-age-is-really-like?mbid=social_twitter


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The conundrum of who has the authority to write about old age is that, unlike the subjective experience of most imagined Others, seniority is something that many of us will eventually experience for ourselves. By contrast, I can imagine what it might be like to be a man, for example, but won’t ever know for sure. As the literary scholar Sarah Falcus writes, building on the work of Sally Chivers, “We may all have a more mobile relationship to age than to other perspectives or subject positions … because we are all aging at any one moment.” Yet just because I may, one day, know if I got it right—perhaps, to my surprise, I will find the world of my own old age populated entirely by grumpy old men and old women who are either lost to dementia or sprightly and renegade—doesn’t mean that I should be cavalier about how I imagine my elderly characters now. Of course, like any fictional representation, old age can be done well or badly regardless of one’s own positioning as an author, but there’s less chance of being called out on hackneyed depictions of old age, in part because those in the know—the over-eighty-five-year-olds themselves—haven’t historically had any cultural power.

Stereotypes of old age, whether positive or negative, do real harm in the real world, argues Lynne Segal, the author of “Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing” (2013). She says that the biggest problem for many older people is “ageism, rather than the process of aging itself.” There is no possibility of diversified, personal approaches to aging if we are all reductively “aged by culture,” to use the age critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s iconic phrase, from her 2004 book, “Aged by Culture.” Gullette highlights the limitations of having only two socially accepted narratives of aging: stories of progress or stories of decline. Neither does justice to the “radical ambiguities” of old age, Segal says. We’re forced either to lament or to celebrate old age, rather than simply “affirm it as a significant part of life.”

Old age is perplexing to imagine in part because the definition of it is notoriously unstable. As people age, they tend to move the goalposts that mark out major life stages: a 2009 survey of American attitudes toward old age found that young adults (those between eighteen and twenty-nine) said that old age begins at sixty; middle-aged respondents said seventy; and those above the age of sixty-five put the threshold at seventy-four. We tend to feel younger as we get older: almost half the respondents aged fifty or more reported feeling at least ten years younger than their actual age, while a third of respondents aged sixty-five or more said that they felt up to nineteen years younger.

The researchers also found “a sizable gap between the expectations that young and middle-aged adults have about old age and the actual experiences reported by older Americans themselves.” Young and middle-aged adults anticipate the “negative benchmarks” associated with aging (such as memory loss, illness, or an end to sexual activity) at much higher levels than the old report experiencing them. However, the elderly also report experiencing fewer of the benefits that younger adults expect old age to bring (such as more time for travel, hobbies, or volunteer work).

These perceptual gaps between generations are large and persistent. Simone de Beauvoir, in her exhaustive study “The Coming of Age” (published in 1970, when she was sixty-two), wrote, “Old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species.” The anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, who made the documentary film “In Her Time,” about a community of elderly Californians, when she was in her forties, believed that “we are dehumanized and impoverished without our old people, for only by contact with them can we come to know ourselves.”

Even more confusingly, we don’t experience old age identically. As Germaine Greer puts it, “Nobody ages like anybody else.” The poet Fleur Adcock, who is eighty-one, says “this great range of abilities and states of health confuses the young: they can’t figure us out.” We age as individuals and as members of particular social contexts, yet the shared experience of old age continues to be overstated. The eighty-two-year-old British novelist Penelope Lively writes that her demographic has “nothing much in common except the accretion of years, a historical context, and a generous range of ailments.” At the same time, though, she warns that aging is such a “commonplace experience” that nobody should “behave as though … uniquely afflicted.”