Getting Over Getting Older

The fear of aging and why baby boomers are the victims of the anti-aging epidemic.

By Susan Scarf Merrell, published on November 01, 1996 - last reviewed on October 01, 2009

Forget about trying to reverse the process. It's never been a better timeto face up to aging. In fact, getting older truly does mean getting better.

Baby boomers: We were supposed to be the generation that turned aging into a bedroom act, making it sexy to grow old and gray, and get laugh lines. If 76 million of us wrinkled into middle age with style and verve, well, wow, the entire Western World might rethink the need to search for a fountain of youth. Most of us, however, don't seem to have found that sense of contentment with our aging bodies that we expected to. Instead, baby boomers have both masterminded--and fallen victim to--an anti-aging epidemic far more virulent than the average case of mass hysteria. It isn't simply that we're trying to exercise and eat our way to longer, healthier lives. Sales are up dramatically across the gamut of age-fighting weaponry, from wrinkle creams to collagen injections to cosmetic surgery. Nor are the warriors only women. According to a recent Roper Starch Worldwide survey, six percent of men nationwide actually use such traditionally feminine products as bronzers and foundation to create the illusion of a more youthful appearance.

What is it about aging that makes our sagging skin crawl? Are we frightened of looking and feeling old because it reminds us that we're mortal? That we might become infirm? What, in fact, does older age bring and how will it be different for us boomers than for the generations that came before?

The first surprise is that those of us entering the middle years en masse are truly lucky to be hitting our thirties, forties, and fifties now, in the 1990s. Because the state of a civilization has a very real impact on the inevitable path to getting older, every generation experiences aging differently According to aging expert Helen Kivnick, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, the experience of later life is determined partly by biology, partly by history, and partly by society and culture. Never before in history has the phase of later life had the potential to be so long and fruitful. "Old age as we now know it is very new, and doesn't look at all like it used to," Kivnick says. "Because people live longer and with greater independence, they can plan their futures more actively Elders today [those over 65] are breaking new ground."

OLD AINT WHAT IT USED TO BE

If those who are old today are stepping onto untrodden ground, we boomers are about to create a stampede. And chances are we'll be extremely skilled at making old age into an interesting and fruitful time of life. We know how to explore and plumb possibility. We have already been enjoying far fewer societal constraints in our middle years than has ever previously been the norm. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D., a psychologist and aging expert from Silver Springs, Maryland, says across the board we have fewer age-based limitations to hinder us. "It's not simply that we tend to keep our health longer; it's that we also aren't subject to generational restrictions on behavior, career choices, or clothing." If you decide to go to medical school--or rollerblading--tomorrow, you might just do so. If I pick out similar dresses for my five-year-old daughter and me, neither one of us will seem out of place: She won't be dressed "old," and I won't be dressed "young." Our tastes are actually fairly alike. In blue jeans and sweaters--particularly from the back--one often can't tell a fit 55-year-old from his or her fit adolescent kid.

As recently as twenty or thirty years ago, society was much more hierarchical. When a woman's children left home, she struggled to make sense of a future in which her life's task was done, even though she herself remained healthy and alert and capable of making further--and even greater--contributions. In the 1970s, when women in their thirties and forties ventured out to colleges and universities in large numbers, they were breaking norms and redefining their roles. Certainly, I myself would have been extremely aware of the oddity of an older man or woman--even a person so aged as to be in his or her late twenties--sitting in a lecture hall back when I was in college. Nowadays, that's almost laughable: The student in the next chair in the lecture hall could just as easily be a grandparent as an 18-year-old. In fact, if those "non-traditional" students weren't filling seats, many institutions of higher learning would be struggling to keep their doors open.

Middle age doesn't mean what it used to. Mid-lifers aren't ossified and set in their ways; they tend to be open to new ideas and new experiences; the tastes of childhood have matured but the sense of potential and of discovery is still deep and real. A former newspaper editor, who had her first child at the age of forty and recently completed her doctoral dissertation at the age of forty-five, says, "I know how old I am. I'm not in denial about the fact of the years. I simply reject the fears, stereotypes, and caricatures of aging. If you ask me my age, I'll tell you, but I don't think it's the most relevant fact about me."

"I think young," says a globe-trotting artist in his early eighties. "I won't allow myself to feel old, or act old, until they cart me out in a box." Does attitude make a difference? Are we truly only as old as we feel?