Our Youth-Oriented Culture
"Fear of dying is human. Fear of aging is cultural.” —Ashton Applewhite
“Happy Birthday!” I said to my husband Marlo this morning as I hugged him.
“Thanks. You are now married to an old man,” he said.
“You’re only 75,” I said, attempting cheer. “You won’t officially be old until you turn 76. And then . . . then I will find a reason that 76 is not yet old either.”
I headed for the bedroom and rethought my response.
I turned back and said, “You said that as if being old is a bad thing. It could be a good thing. You are now mature and wise. Why do we look at being old as automatically bad?”
“Because it’s not being young,” he said, half serious.
I’ve been thinking about that the rest of the morning.
When I say, “I’m getting old,” I don’t say it with pride or satisfaction. I usually say it either as a half-joke that I don’t quite believe, or I say it with a touch of sadness, mourning a lost youth.
Doing that is accepting our culture’s youth-biased values. I value energy over wisdom and speed over steadiness.
In our culture, we try to preserve at least a façade of youth with hair dyes and Botox.
We fail.
We grow old, and feel an undercurrent of sadness. We mourn our lost youth. We don’t realize that in doing so, we are products of a culture which has a youth fetish.
Our culture is the ocean we swim in, and we assume all creatures live in this water. We don’t realize there are also land-based creatures.
Our culture values both the appearance and the productivity of youth—their work. UCLA professor Jared Diamond says, “If you’re no longer working, you’ve lost the main value that society places on you.” He also says we emphasize independence and self-reliance, which can be lost during the aging process.
Not all cultures have negative views of old age:
- Like many Native American tribes, members of Puget Sound’s Squaxin Island tribe value the wisdom that comes with age. Children and young adults serve food to the older adults, who always eat first.
- In South Korean culture, traditionally, a huge family party marks a person’s 60th birthday, celebrating their passage into old age. A similar event celebrates 70th birthdays. Older adults are treated with gentleness, respect, and reverence.
- In India, older adults are the head of the family. They provide advice on wedding rituals and family conflicts. Their advice is family law. Younger adults typically care for older family members.
- In China, the “Elderly Rights Law” states that children should never neglect or snub elderly people and adult children should visit their parents often. Chinese older adults can sue their children for lack of financial and emotional support. Some have already sued their children for not visiting them regularly.
- Japan holds a national holiday every year on the third Monday in September to honor older adults. It is a paid holiday in which grandparents receive gifts and share a meal with their families.
- In Greece, the terms “old man” and “old woman” are not negative words. On a trip to Greece, Arianna Huffington discovered that in Greeks address abbots as “Geronda” which means “old man.” They call abbesses “Gerondissa” or “old woman.” Huffington says, “The idea of honoring old age, indeed identifying it with wisdom and closeness to God, is in startling contrast to the way we treat aging in America.”
This afternoon our son Mark and his family came to celebrate Marlo’s birthday. Marlo provided them with a window to the past.
He shared with them his just-printed, 175-page autobiography, Looking Back. Nine-year-old Caleb studied a picture of Marlo’s Doodle Bug, the tiny scooter Marlo drove on the family farmyard when he himself was nine. Marlo read to Caleb the story of crashing unharmed into a building while learning to ride the scooter.
Mark looked at photos of the houses in which we lived as he was growing up and asked questions about them. Our daughter-in-law Elizabeth wept as she learned new details of our son Matt’s addiction and death.
Mark and Elizabeth left, leaving Caleb to visit us for the coming week. This evening the three of us played card games together.
Psychologist Erik Erikson, who specialized in studying the stages of life, said that in Western culture, our fear of aging keeps us from living fully. He wrote, “Lacking a culturally viable ideal of old age, our civilization does not really harbor a concept of the whole of life.”
Erikson is probably right about our culture in general. We may not have a culturally viable ideal of old age. This afternoon and evening, though, Marlo was living old age with pleasure. Our culture may not have a viable ideal of old age, but that can’t stop us totally. Defying the cult of youth, we can each find moments and hours to live our stage of life fully and with joy.
Adapted from Creative Aging by Carol Van Klompenburg, published 2023, available from Amazon and for Pella-area residents directly from Carol. Carol has an MA in theater arts and is available for reading performances of her writing on aging, moments in her gardens, and other topics.