Celebrating Oldness

Recently, I encountered a Smithsonian article titled “What’s So Good about Growing Old?” This really was a question based on curiosity (“Let’s list the good things about growing old.”), not a snide commentary (“Hrumph. What could possibly be good about getting old?”). The tagline confirmed this: “Researchers are discovering some surprising advantages of aging.” My own surprise at this was telling. It made me realize how rarely I see or hear comments about how great aging is.

  

Thinking about this took me straight back to last fall, when a bunch of us, LGBT folks and allies, organized a daylong conference called “Celebrating Queer Identities.” The impetus for the event was some recent research on positive aspects of LGBT identity. Instead of asking queer people to talk about how hard their lives were, these researchers asked a different question: What’s good about your life as an LGBT person? This was really eye opening, mind altering: no one ever asked this question. Instead, most of what we hear about LGBTQ lives focuses on awful stereotypes and terrible risks. When queer folks were given an opportunity to reframe their lives in a positive way, they found lots of things to celebrate. (For more on this, check out the book that grew out of this research.) So we spent a day talking about these things. And it turned out there was a lot to talk about.

  

That event came to mind when I spotted this article on the good things about aging. The parallels seemed really rich. Old people are also subject to a whole flock of negative stereotypes: physical decline, cognitive deterioration, social isolation, inability to keep pace with a changing world—you know the list. We encounter these portrayals of us over and over—in the media, in the grocery store, and in our own heads. And it crossed my mind that we might be doing the same thing that queers so easily do. The content is different, but the process seems strikingly similar. We hear all this negative stuff about ourselves, and we take it in. We come to see ourselves as “they” portray us, as unidimensional: declining, loosing, disappearing, irrelevant, lonely, abandoned. In the process, we sell ourselves short.

I know it’s easy to dismiss the point I’m trying to make here. Aging does bring changes that seem like deficits when we compare our current selves with our younger selves. Among the folks I hang out with, the changes we most notice are physical changes, typically described in terms of decline and loss. The changes we most fear are mental or cognitive changes, especially cognitive decline and all that conjures up.

I’ve been caught in this single-minded view too, this framing of aging as loss and decline. So when I saw this article, I asked myself, Wait! What am I missing? Curious now, I took the plunge and read the article. “Even as certain mental skills decline with age,” it begins, “scientists are finding the mind gets sharper at a number of vitally important abilities.” Wow. Really? The article goes on to explore a whole litany of skills that seem to improve with age. The studies it mentions asked questions similar to the one asked of LGBTQ people in the research I mentioned earlier. Through interviews, experiments, surveys, and observations, these researchers ask the question, “What’s good about aging?” Here are a few answers they came up with.

First, in our personal lives (I’m borrowing liberally from the Smithsonian article here): 

·        Older people seemed to deal with social conflicts more effectively. They were better than younger folks at taking other people’s perspectives, thinking of a range of solutions, and suggesting compromises in situations of conflict.

·        When folks in their 60s lost at a gambling game designed to cause regret, they didn't dwell on their loss or try to recoup it by taking high-cost risks.

  

·        A telephone survey of hundreds of thousands of people found that those over 50 were happier overall, experienced less anger, and felt far less stressed than younger folks.

  

·        Another study followed people for a decade and found that they became happier overall, and their emotions became less erratic as they got older. In general, negative emotions seemed to become less pronounced with age.

  

Of course, these things aren’t true for all people—or for any of us all the time. But for many folks, most of the time, there is much to be appreciated about these years. As one sociologist who studies aging put it, “We have a seriously negative stereotype of the 70s and beyond, and that stereotype is typically incorrect.”


A similar—but maybe more surprising—picture is emerging in the area lots of us worry about most: cognitive ability. It is true that research consistently finds declines in some skills: memory, processing speed, multi-tasking. But there are also areas where older folks excel … although we don’t hear much about these. For instance, a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, "Aging Brains Create 'Scaffolds' to Shore Up Eroding Abilities," summarizes a bunch of studies that have explored ways in which our brains actually work better as we age. It looks like we older people use more parts of our brains to solve problems. Our aging brains seem to create a “scaffold” that accommodates for other losses. In the process, we also gain a broader and more flexible perspective on things. For example (again, borrowing liberally, this time from the Chronicle article):

·        Older people seem to call on more brain resources to solve problems, like using both sides of the brain to solve problems in situations where younger people mostly rely on one side.

·        Older folks are more socially adept, apparently because we can call on a stored history of social cues to navigate social situations.

·        World knowledge, the sort of thing measured by vocabulary and general knowledge, does not decrease with age. In fact, it sometimes improves. 

Maybe, this article concludes, this world knowledge gained over years explains why older people have long been respected (in some cultures more than others) for their wisdom.

All very hopeful and upbeat, you say. But what about the aches and pains? What about forgetting people’s names or my glasses, having trouble finding words when I need them? What about that sense that my thinking just isn’t as sharp? Sure, those things happen … they happen also. The risk is that we might believe that these things are all there is to say about our lives. 

Hearkening back to the queer identity event, two things really stood out for me that day. The first was how rare it is for us to think in positive terms about an identity that’s usually devalued. The parallel to aging is, again, pretty striking. How often do we hear really positive things about aging—from others or from ourselves. Is it possible that we have totally bought into the stereotypes, so much so that we can’t even believe that the good stuff is true—or that it matters? And do we contribute to the persistence of the “aging is all awful, all the time” message by not taking the time to notice when that message is flat-out wrong?

And the other thing that struck me at that earlier event was how hard it is to think in positive terms about these devalued identities. Many folks at that event could barely manage—or couldn’t manage—to stay with the positive theme of the day. Instead, they dropped with easy familiarity back into the view of their lives as framed by suffering. It seems to me that this happens with aging, too—it sure happens to me! Tell me something positive about getting older, and I’m quick with the “Yes, but …” response.

So I wonder, what would it look like if we could just stop a minute and focus on what’s good about our lives. The decreased angst. The reduced pressure and stress. The broad perspective on life that emerges from years and years on the planet. Wisdom. And, especially,  the reduced need to please everyone else. I’m reminded of Jenny Joseph’s great poem, Warning, which begins, “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple / With a red hat that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me …”

How can we not celebrate that?