Why do we Age? *

by Madeleine Kando

According to Hemingway, getting older happens two ways: Slowly over a stretch of time and then all at once. He compared it to bankruptcy, but I like to compare it to falling asleep, since I am an insomniac.

The slow way is what gets you. There are no signs on the road of life marked ‘hazardous period ahead’ or ‘bumpy stretch of road’. Then, out of the blue, you find yourself on a road with a large ‘dead end’ sign looming in the distance.

You see, most life stages give you clear warning signs that changes are ahead. It is no longer acceptable to suck your thumb and you need to recluse yourself in a small room instead of staying put, when you have to pee. You start growing boobs and get your period, clear signs that things will be different. Pregnancy gives you 9 months to recover from the shocking realization that you are not the most important person in the world and although raising kids is too time consuming to worry about what comes next, just watching your kids grow is clear evidence that things are about to change.

Kids gone, free at last, you think. But that’s when the trouble starts, because once you are done reproducing, the road signs are few and far between. Who cares about those few wrinkles? It makes you look exotic. Prescription glasses? No problem. Don’t young kids have them too? Grey hair is in these days, isn’t it? Life is good! Until one day, it isn’t.

The accepted theory is that nature has no use for us once we pass our reproductive years. She becomes absentminded and forgets to replace damaged cells, omits coding your hair cells for color and skips on keeping your skin elastic. But why not be done with us altogether? Why does nature let us age at all? Even in Roman times, if you made it past the age of 10, you could expect to live into your fifties.

A century ago, life expectancy at birth in America was 49 years. In 2010, it was 78! In other words, we have added 30 years to our life span, which means that pretty much a third of our lives we spend being old.

The image of being old has not kept pace with this new medical miracle. People think of old age the way childhood was thought of before the Enlightenment: children were not "innocent" and in need of protection. They were unruly, bothersome miniature adults. The concept of ‘childhood’ did not even exist and children were often abandoned and neglected.

What we need is an old age culture. Childhood has no shortage of societal support: toys, clothes, stories, educational opportunities and above all adoring parents. The majority of our cultural resources is targeted at the ‘adult’ stage of our lives, with movies about sex, love and adventure. Technology and new inventions are usually targeted at people of reproductive years.

But old age? A third of our lives we spend without role models, no significant cultural support, no social recognition of our existence, other than what society thinks old people need, which is health care. But our medical needs do not define who we are. We do not define children by what they cannot do and neither should the elderly. Other than Senior Citizens’ centers and the AARP, what does our culture provide for the old?

There is strong social pressure to define what being old means. Once you are labeled with the ‘65+’ stamp, you might as well curl up in a corner and die. But with the change in age demographics, old age will have to be redefined, something else than bothersome, shrunken versions of adults. Old age represent a separate unique stage in life, with its own experiences, its own stories, its own raison d’etre.

This is what Joseph Coughlin, founder and director of the AgeLab at MIT has come to realize. At the Lab, you can be outfitted with an aging suit called AGNES (Age Gain Now Empathy System), to get a sense of what it’s like to be old. Although the AgeLab is designed to help entrepreneurs develop products for an ever-larger market of aging people, Coughlin is posing the crucial question of what we are going to do with those extra 30 years. ‘We’re talking about rethinking, redefining one-third of adult life!’ he says.’ The greatest achievement in the history of humankind—and all we can say is that it’s going to make Medicare go broke? Why don’t we take that one-third and create new stories, new rituals, new mythologies for people as they age?’

Part of being old means that you cannot do certain things any more. The Agnes suit brings this home with heartless clarity, once you take it off that is. But artificial knees, hearing aids and walkers, although part of an old person’s life, is not who they are.

One explanation for why nature allows humans to age past their useful reproductive stage, is that they hold the cultural memories of ‘the group’, be it family or tribe. That is what I like about old age, being able to reflect a past life, like the photographs that my mother used to develop in her dark room. It takes time for the image to appear and slowly, like magic, it settles into its final form. When you die before your time, the photograph does not have time to fully develop. Then again, when the image is over exposed, everything turns black and the image is lost. Is that what happens when you are too old?

Living a long life is great, but a long life needs to be lived well, to the end. Otherwise, what’s the point? And a change in how society perceives old age is long overdue. After all, the lucky ones among us are all going to be old one day. leave comment here

* Some ideas in this article were inspired by an article in the New Yorker: Can We Live Longer but Stay Younger? By Adam Gopnik