Everyone wants to live long… but no one wants to grow old.
Since conscious ageing and shifting the narrative of ageing became my life mission and my main professional occupation 8 years ago (at the age of 42), I have never had any problems with starting a conversation with people I didn’t know. People of all ages, and with various backgrounds jump into the topic immediately and start to share their own experiences of ageing or stories about their older relatives.
I recently attended a gathering where I introduced myself to someone as the co-founder of Hekate Conscious Ageing Foundation. In the blink of an eye I found myself in a deep conversation with this person about the biases and the negative social status that she experienced daily as a recently retired, widowed woman, despite her physically active, socially and professionally vivid life. She struggled with the image that society continuously imposed on her. She felt tired of trying to remove the stigma of “retired widowed woman” that she felt was attached to her.
In our societies in Europe (and in the Global North) ageing has an almost repugnant connotation that can inspire fear. Some people suffer from ageing anxiety (or FOGO, fear of getting old) as early as in their 20’s or 30’s but it becomes almost inevitable in our 40s and/or 50s when going through midlife changes. At the latest around retirement age, almost everyone faces the (mostly) negative consequences of ageing.
“Useless, invisible, dependent, put away, burdensome, loneliness, pain, sickness, decline”. These are the words that popped up first in the minds of the UnfOlding (Conscious Ageing-Conscious Living) program’s participants when thinking of “ageing”.
Seriously? Any laxative has a better marketing slogan than that! For sure, this doesn’t seem an appealing journey to anyone. Yet this is the dominant narrative of ageing we are told today. And let’s be honest, this is also – more often than not – the reality.
I’m a Gestalt Therapist and facilitator of trainings and programs around the topic of conscious ageing and conscious living. Thanks to my work, I gain day after day a deeper, more intimate understanding of how different the journey of one’s ageing can be.
The stories, the sentences we hear from our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles strongly and often unconsciously shape the way we can or can’t visualise ourselves as an Elder.
One of my clients (late 50s) considered ageing as the worst thing that can happen to someone and had great difficulties in accepting the changes coming with it. Growing up in a household in which “life has nothing to offer after 65” was a commonly shared and accepted idea, he had no model of how to age well and live a meaningful long life. This client found ageing so frightening that he struggled to enjoy his, in other ways, rich and meaningful life.
Family stories are not the only ones shaping our way of thinking and feeling about getting old.
The culture, the society we are living in also has a tremendous impact. I do acknowledge the differences between cultures and countries and yet I would dare to say that the current consideration of ageing and Elderhood in Europe is outdated and toxic.
Outdated, because it doesn’t take into account that people live longer, healthier and happier lives and they stay active and independent for much longer than just a couple of decades ago. It’s toxic because it creates fear by projecting the image of the worst potential scenarios (strong physical or mental decline, full dependency, loss of self-awareness,…) on the whole journey of getting older while completely ignoring the gains that come with it.
I’m not trying to say that getting older is all fun and joy. It isn’t. The longer we live, the more chances we have to encounter loss. Loss of our physical abilities, loss of friends, ideas, identities just to name a few. My point is that we, as individuals and as society, tend to focus exclusively on the losses and decline (just think about the products and services targeting ageing people) yet with longer life comes also more connections, more skills, wider experience, numerous identities, various life stages and more opportunity to contribute. We just don’t talk about them. Why? Why not?
I’m certainly not the first one to talk about negativity bias . Negativity bias means that things of a more negative nature (unpleasant thoughts, emotions, social interactions, harmful events) have a greater effect on our behavior and cognition than something neutral or positive.
To put it simply: when we think of someone old, we tend to visualize our physically and mentally declined neighbor rather than our energetic and fit uncle or our long retired, brilliantly sharp minded Dutch teacher.
When thinking about old age and our own older years our mind activates (unconsciously) these negative images. Sadly this bias also applies when we interact with ageing or older people and we project these images onto them (and here we are just a few steps away from ageism).
One important aspect of Conscious Ageing is to become aware of our personal and cultural beliefs, our conscious and unconscious biases, our fears and anxieties related to ageing. Once we are aware of them we can consciously decide to keep them if they support us, or let them go if they hinder us (or at least tame them).
For the first time in human history the people in today’s generations in Europe who are living up to 80 years or more are no longer an exception but the average. If we want to make the most out of our longer, healthier, happier life ahead of us we need to change the fear based, burden focused and toxic narrative of ageing.
Now is the time to (re)design a meaningful, appealing yet realistic journey of ageing and becoming an Elder. Now is the time to (re)build communities where all members at all ages can contribute by sharing their skills, knowledge, experience and capacities.
Not just for ourselves but also for the generations coming after us.
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UnfOlding is a project funded by the European Union.
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