Did you realise that those of us older than 50 are in the midst of a seismic shift in how we view age? It shouldn’t come as a surprise as the pressure has been mounting for years to get rid of outdated stereotypes that lost meaning as we live happier, healthier, and longer lives.
When we were first born, the cult of youth was still exploding, the culmination of decades of social change. The fascination with looking young and the fear of ageing were ingrained at an early age. But the cult of youth, it turns out, is just another phase of human history, which we can understand better if we go back in time.
Noted U.S. historian David Hackett Fischer wrote about attitudes toward ageing in Growing Old in America, where he traces society’s path has from revering the elderly to a glorification of youth.
In the 1600s and 1700s, very few people lived beyond age 50, and those who did were highly respected. Fischer wrote:
“It was a Puritan belief that old age was a sign of God’s favour. Respect for the old was viewed as an innate instinct, a natural law which any young person would obey instinctively.”
People in the 17th and 18th centuries tried to look old, not young, by wearing white wigs or powdering their hair to gain the prestige of age.
Fischer says that the revolutionary spirit of a newly independent nation marked the beginning of a shift away from honouring the elderly. By the early 1800s, powdered hair and wigs went out of style as clothing was tailored to create a youthful appearance.
Terms of respect for older people changed their meaning. Gaffer, a term of endearment meaning grandfather or godfather, became a term of contempt. Fogy, which had referred to a wounded military veteran, became a disrespectful term for an elderly man. Negative terms surfaced like old goat, codger, fuddy-duddy, geezer, galoot and baldly.
During the 19th-century and into the 20th-century, advertisements and mass media helped spread fear of aging while promoting the cult of youth.
Advertisement from a 1902 edition of the Washington Times.
Age discrimination led to a widespread practice of mandatory retirement and increasing poverty for many older workers. The old system of family responsibility for the aged began to break down. Middle-class families could send an elderly person to “old-age homes,” which first appeared in the early 1900s. Older characters disappeared from literature and when they did, they often were treated as objects of pity or contempt.
“When you’re too old to work and too young to die.
Who will take care of you? How’ll you get by,
When you’re too old to work and too young to die?” Song by Joe Glazer
By the mid-1950s, however, a new population trend emerged, the Baby Boom, that combined with longer life expectancy to have a big impact on how society viewed aging. The high birth rate of the 1940s and 50s meant that the number of people over 65 would mushroom after 2010 and the sheer magnitude of this shift was bound to force us to revisit how we view “old age.”
In the 1970s, scholars like Fran Pratt, who founded the Massachusetts Intergenerational Network, began speaking out against the ageist attitudes people held about themselves and others. He looked for social cues in how we interacted daily, noting that some older people diminished their value by lying about their age or using self-deprecatory comments, like “age before beauty,” which implies that age is ugly, and beauty is young.
Pratt could see the seismic shift coming with a booming population of seniors and he called for educators to begin teaching high school students to foster more positive attitudes towards older people and prepare for a life in an older society.
The work of Pratt and others expanded the field of gerontology and led to a growing number of studies about aging. Thought leaders like those at the Stanford Centre for Longevity are part of this seismic shift in how we view life as we age.
The longevity centre reports that as many as half of today’s 5-year-olds can expect to live to the age of 100 and has designed a New Map of Life to extend people’s meaningful development over ten decades instead of the traditional seven. The map envisions a system where people will stay in careers longer, their wisdom integrated with the high-energy of younger people, all working a more flexible work schedule, a practice that is taking hold as an unexpected consequence of the pandemic.
Today, 11 years after the first baby boomer turned 65, the chorus of voices exposing age discrimination and re-imagining how we want to live the last decades of life, has grown louder. We are telling our stories and making policymakers, architects and doctors take notice that the world is changing for people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and yes, 100s.
