Alex Netick wrote:To be honest, I'm looking forward to turning 40, and 50 and so forth, because getting old is actually pretty cool in some ways, even though it kind of sucks in others.
Me too. I'm not so excited to lose short-term memory capabilities and acquire creaky joints and stuff, but the whole experience/trip of growing old is something I really look forward to. It's just another stage of life, and has its ups and downs like all the others. "To everything there is a season..."
In terms of the history of our species, we are (relatively speaking) currently living (on average) much longer than our ancestors ever did. Our minds and bodies evolved under conditions of hunting/gathering/light farming at a time when life expectancy was probably an average of 38 or 42 or something like that. Back then, the rare individual who could actually live to 50 or 60 would have automatically become an elder to all the others.
Unfortunately for the contemporary 'elders', there are various problems preventing their age/wisdom from seeming valuable to the rest of us: 1. There are so many of them now compared to how it must have been in the Upper Paleolithic; 2. Our media conglomerates define the experience of aging for us and assign a great deal of fear to old age and idealize the teen years (although the current crop of baby boomers will help redefine meaningful existence in old age); 3. The world that today's septuagenarians grew up in, to say nothing of the centenarians, is completely different from today's world so their experiences seem significantly less valuable to us than the experiences of elders would have seemed to young people 500 years ago (or longer) when societies were preindustrial and much more static.
An ugly sight: old people trying to turn back the clock. What an insult to the elders who seek to age gracefully and use their twilight years for their intended purpose. As with most things, the key trick is to ignore the mass media version of aging and look for more intelligent takes on the topic.