Many people assume that the worst part about growing old is the loneliness that comes with being alone, such as living a solitary life after divorce or widowhood, and when the kids are no longer at home.
In reality, the toughest aspects of advancing age often have little to do with being alone and instead center around the realizations that only happen once you reach a certain age. The epiphanies listed here only become crystal clear once you’ve lived them firsthand, but they can be terribly poignant lessons indeed.
1. Everything around you is going more quickly than you can keep up with.
When we were young, it felt like we had forever to do all the things we wanted in life. Unfortunately, the longer we live, the more we realize that time goes by much more quickly than we’d like. In fact, the speed at which it flies by can be downright dizzying.
Meanwhile, we have less energy to navigate the lightspeed at which everything around us is moving. It’s almost impossible to keep up with new trends, technology, and even terminology that makes its way into the common vernacular. (No cap? Yeet? Snatched!?!). It’s difficult enough to understand these things, let alone keep track of them.
2. Chronic pain, illness, and loss of mobility hinder you a lot.
It’s difficult to live life to the fullest when you hurt everywhere, or when it takes ages to recover from the slightest injury. Our bodies break down gradually as we get older and take much longer to repair, if repair is possible at all. When chronic illnesses or lasting damage kick in, mobility can be significantly impaired, and being in pain all the time is as exhausting as it is disheartening.
Things we took for granted in our youth now take much more time and effort to do, and the independence we got accustomed to may have given way to needing to lean quite heavily on others to help us get through our days. This results in a disheartening combination of dependence and incremental deterioration, preventing us from doing many of the things that used to bring us great joy and fulfillment.
3. Younger people rarely see you as a complex person: just an “old” one.
Many people have preconceptions about age groups other than their own. For example, a lot of middle-aged people assume that teenagers are irresponsible troublemakers instead of acknowledging that young people are not a monolith. In that same vein, younger people tend to forget that older people are just as complex and multifaceted as they are: they just see us as “old.”
Furthermore, they sometimes view older people with contempt — as though they recognize on a soul-deep level that they’re going to reach our age eventually, and that reality scares them. As such, they project that fear and loathing onto the elders around them, assuming that life is essentially over after age 50, and they try to push that inevitable experience as far away from themselves as possible.
4. Many expect you to adhere to their expectations of elder behavior.
Earlier today, I read a one-star book review about how horrible it was to read about old people having bedroom antics. Apparently, the young reader was utterly traumatized by the mere thought, since the oldies in question — who were in their mid forties, by the way — should have been “way over that” by now, and should be content to bake, collect stamps, or pursue similarly acceptable, celibate geriatric interests.
In many people’s eyes, humans only have value as long as they’re sufficiently physically attractive to others, and that attraction has a limited shelf life. Once that expiry date has passed, there’s an expectation that elders should deny the fact that they ever experienced intimacy, let alone continue to have it. Furthermore, they should dress like extras from the Golden Girls or Matlock, and leave high fashion to those whose bodies are taut and unlined.
5. Having people assume that you’re incompetent or ignorant.
It’s a terrible misconception that advanced age equals incompetence. Many younger people who think that they’re amazingly skilled in particular areas forget that those who came before them set the very standards they hold themselves to. Just because someone is over 50, that doesn’t mean that they’re ignorant about something like STEM subjects: in fact, they may have decades of experience under their belts.
Similarly, older people tend to be ignored or dismissed by professionals who seem to think we all go senile the moment we turn 50. When we offer advice about a skill we’ve honed with decades of experience, for example, we often receive the verbal equivalent of a pat on the hand — as if we have anything of value to offer them.
6. Being informed that things that bring you joy aren’t “for” you.
A few years ago, a friend of mine who’s in her seventies was devastated when her granddaughter, “C”, mocked her for her own musical interests. Said granddaughter was fourteen or fifteen at the time, and had a newfound appreciation for classic rock music like Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, and early Aerosmith.
When my friend started to sing along joyfully to the music that “C” was playing in the car — i.e., the music from her own youth — she was chastised for “trying too hard to act like a young person”, and informed that cool music wasn’t for old people.
The irony that the musicians she was listening to are her grandmother’s age was completely lost on her.
There’s a strange disconnect in a lot of individuals in which they can’t seem to acknowledge that those they summarily dismiss for being old, out of touch, and boring may be as passionate about things as they are. Instead, they see anything they perceive as cool, fun, or exciting as being solely created for the thirty-and-under crowd. Older folks who show up at concerts and such are often viewed with contempt, since they should obviously be at home watching Antiques Roadshow instead.
7. Sensory and cognitive decline dims the world around you a little more each day.
It’s a sad truth that all of our faculties diminish incrementally as we age, and we have to work harder to remain sharp. Our glasses prescription gets stronger as our vision fades, we need to turn the music up a bit more (or put subtitles on our streaming video services) as hearing dulls, and we dump more salt or spice onto foods that seem increasingly bland.
Meanwhile, our cognitive functions also decline, so we find ourselves at a loss for words when trying to express how we feel. We forget what words mean and have to look them up, forget how to do tasks we’ve been doing for decades, or blank on our own pet’s names. We know how much we love them, but that’s it. Suddenly, we have a lot more compassion for when our grandparents called us by every name but our own.
8. Cumulative loss never gets any easier.
Younger people who spend a lot of time with those they love rarely think about losing everyone around them. As they age, however, death and dementia claim everyone they care about one at a time. Family members, lovers, friends, neighbors, and pets leave their lives one at a time, leaving profound loss and grief in their wake.
That grief never gets any easier, but instead compounds with each new loss. It’s like emptying a tank one bucket at a time, without it ever being refilled. It can be replenished slightly when new friends are made, new pets adopted, and so on, but these actions are like light sutures holding old, aching wounds together.
9. Being invisible is as depressing as it is dehumanizing.
The invisibility that many of us experience in our advancing years isn’t literal transparency, but rather refers to being ignored, overlooked, and treated as annoying and irrelevant by others.
Doctors roll their eyes at us (particularly women) and assume we’re seeking attention instead of taking us seriously, servers prioritize younger customers ahead of us, and we’re generally expected to stop taking up space.
It’s like society tells us that we’ve had our time in the sun, and now we should retreat to the shadows to be unobtrusive and stop inconveniencing others with our existence. This is tremendously disheartening, especially for those who connected easily with others in their youth.
Final thoughts…
Experiencing these things firsthand puts a lot of past situations into perspective. I remember feeling annoyed when groups of older women took what I thought was too long at a big cafe table that my friends and I wanted to sit at, or when a pensioner took forever to pack up groceries or count out coins to pay with. It’s humbling to come to this realization, but awareness of the greatest difficulties faced by older people can go a long way towards alleviating them, in oneself, as well as others.
