My recent blog about lifespan, healthspan, and joyspan seemed to resonate with many of you (thank you for the texts, emails, and comments!). I love talking about how to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” but I also want to address how our culture talks about aging. There’s a difference between taking care of ourselves as we age and looking at the future with fear and doom.
In a previous blog about age being subjective, I shared Mo Rocca’s story about realizing, at forty-six, that he’d already started to see life as a series of closing doors. Dr. Louise Aronson shares a similarly revealing conversation with UC Berkeley Clinical Professor Guy Micco in Elderhood. Micco showed her a graph depicting how most people see old age. She asked what people thought dropped so relentlessly from youth through old age. Micco stared at her. “Anything,” he said. “Everything.” 
Aging is portrayed as an unyielding march toward an ending. We’ve become so afraid of aging that there’s now an entire anti-aging industry —a massive commercial juggernaut valued at tens of billions of dollars and expected to grow to hundreds of billions in the next 5 years. Then there’s treating older people as “others.” When we see older folks out enjoying themselves, why do we call them “cute”? Or do we notice them at all? The elderly in our society are frequently made invisible. As Dr. Aronson writes, othering and stereotypes soothe our anxieties by turning people into types we can look at instead of noticing them in an intimate, particular way. Looking is about acquisition: trying to capture, to grasp, to take. Noticing is about receptiveness and becoming open to what is there. When we stop looking and start noticing, layers emerge.
Aronson traces this shift to the industrial revolution of the late 19th century, when Americans began to view the body as a machine. Where elders had once been seen as closer to the sacred, they were recast through an industrial lens—valued for function and efficiency. Old age came to mean “less than” youth, and aging became synonymous with decline and obsolescence.
We’ve made being old in public an act of bravery: It takes courage to walk into a room when your body doesn’t move like it used to. To smile when you can’t catch every word. To sit at a table when you’re afraid you might not understand, keep up, or belong. To risk feeling invisible. And still…to show up.
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When we’re seen as obsolete, it does take courage to keep living in a world that sees us as already having lived our best days. It can be especially hard for women. When was the last time you heard a man described as “aging gracefully”? That phrase, so often directed at women, is usually a backhanded compliment for embracing wrinkles or going grey. The dominant cultural narrative is that a woman’s value is tied to her youth and size. This is not only exhausting and impossible, but it also harms our long-term quality of life, setting us up to become increasingly frail as we age.
I refuse to accept the idea that aging is only loss. You can be annoyed that your knees make noise and find fulfillment in aging. Yes, our bodies change, but every life stage has trade‑offs. What if, instead of fearing aging, we look for and celebrate the upsides?
Writer, psychologist, and mythologist Sharon Blackie offers an antidote: hagitude. In her book of the same name, Blackie argues that the last decades of a woman’s life aren’t a slow fade — they might be the most dynamic of all. She draws on Celtic mythology and folklore to recover a very different archetype of older womanhood: not the invisible woman past her prime, but the wise elder, the storyteller, the keeper of hard-won knowledge. Evolution, Blackie points out, would never have given human females a post-fertile third of their lives if it had no value. There’s a reason cultures used to revere their elders. We might want to revisit that.
Micco also asked his medical students for the first words that came to mind when they heard “old.” They responded with “wrinkled,” “bent over,” and “bald.” But when he substituted the word “elder,” their responses transformed into “respect,” “leader,” “power,” and “knowledge.”
What if we focus on that version of aging?
Aging is accompanied by some genuinely profound positive changes. I made a list for you 🙂:
- The “Happiness Curve”: Globally, life satisfaction tends to follow a U‑shaped curve, rising significantly after about age 50.
- Crystallized Intelligence: While processing speed slows down, your accumulated knowledge, vocabulary, and language skills actually continue to grow and peak later in life.
- Wisdom: Decades of navigating real-life situations yield superior pattern recognition, empathy, and conflict-resolution skills. You’ve simply seen more, which makes you a better decision-maker.
Emotional Resilience: Older adults show steadier emotional regulation. Neurological studies suggest the brain’s amygdala (the fear and panic center) reacts less intensely to negative images and stressors as we age.
Emotional Resilience:- Relational Clarity: With the pressure of peer competition lifted, aging naturally filters out superficial relationships, allowing you to focus on the connections that bring genuine joy.
- Time & Agency: Retirement or career shifts can free up time to pursue hobbies, volunteering, and relationships on your own terms—especially when you have a strong social network.
So let’s stop dismissing people as cute or obsolete and start practicing noticing. Begin with your autopilot thoughts about aging, then notice what’s being said around you. What we notice — and how we talk about aging — shapes how we live it. There’s so much worth noticing.
In my next blog, we’ll explore the concept of aging purposefully—how to embrace this stage of life not just as a continuation, but as a vibrant, dynamic chapter filled with possibilities. Stay tuned!
