Should young people fear ageing?
Ageing is a natural, beautiful part of living. You can't stop it or slow it down. However, it is often viewed as something that needs to be fixed, solved, or changed. Young women don’t want to get old; they fear it, and society acts as if women must preserve their youth instead of embracing it. It should be embraced.
There has always been a divide between old and young; people want to be young forever and think that getting old is the end of the world. But is it really? I spoke to two women, one younger and one older, who opened up about ageing and their feelings surrounding it. Annabel, a 20-year-old student studying in Bournemouth and Anne, a 64-year-old retail worker.
I first spoke with Annabel . She invited me into her shared, slightly cluttered home, sat me down in her kitchen to speak about her future. She began by telling me she is a third-year student, mentioning that after this year she has to start full-time work, “The last year of freedom,” as she described it. I asked Annabel if she enjoys being 20 to ease into the interview, and she replied, “Yes… It's a really fun part of your life where you are, coming out of your teenage years, you're starting to have more independence and freedom, and it is a time of your life where you are physically able to do that.” Adding that she doesn’t have to take anything too seriously apart from university work, but even with that, she has a recent feeling of freedom from turning into an adult.
I followed up by asking Annabel how she feels about getting older. She hesitated, thinking before answering, “It's quite scary to think about getting older…you have a lot more responsibilities and the physical aspect of ageing, where you are not physically able as you once were. There's the emotional side to it, too, where you gain more emotional intelligence that holds more emotional weight against you at some points.” I asked what emotional weights she mentioned, and she said that you will think more deeply about things, and then that depth will affect you more. I asked her if she fears ageing, and she admitted she fears some parts, mostly because you don't know what the future has in store for you, you may not be as healthy as you once were.
I spoke with Anne, a week after Annabel, prepared to hear the worse, but it was incredibly pleasant. Anne gave me hope about the future. She invited me into her lovely, well-decorated flat with warmth and opened up about her life experiences. I started again, by asking “How do you feel about your age?” She quickly replied, “I feel pretty good actually, better now than I did when I was younger…I used to work full-time, and had a child as well, so that was really tiring. I used to do the food shopping, house cleaning and generally that's all gone now, so I have more spare time now.” Anne doesn’t let age stop her; she fills her time with many hobbies, including walking, swimming and working at a frozen food shop.
She describes ageing as a positive experience, “I would say I'm the happiest I've ever been.” Smiling as she expands on why, “I'm in a new relationship that’s happy, I've got really good friends here in Bournemouth.” I admired her joy and asked if she missed her youth at all, as I remembered Annabel had said something similar. She replied, “Not at all. I've learnt so much as I have gotten older, and I wish I would've been more careful with my youth. I think I squandered a lot of it by sleeping, drinking and working too hard. I didn't enjoy it, so I wish I had taken care of it.” This surprised me, as people usually refer to their youth as the golden days and aspire to go back.
She opened up about her favourite experiences from her youth, which included travelling to India alone for 6 weeks, explaining how it changed her outlook on life, from witnessing how people were living in poverty there, adding that she decided to sponsor a few people to provide them with food for a whole year. It opened her up to the freedom of travelling alone, something she has done since. This made me think back to Annabel and her uncertainty. She spoke to me about hoping to have a stable family, job, and to be overall comfortable by the time she is 60. All of these things, realistic and achievable aspirations that she described as “peaceful in some ways, but when I think that far ahead, it does seem frightening.” I wanted to understand more about her worries. I asked when she thinks the peak of her life would be, “I think maybe in the next 5 years, because around this period it is a journey of self-discovery and growing, and you keep realising things about yourself, you don't know where you are going to end up at that point, which sounds exciting.” This unsettled me because it seemed so soon, so I asked, “Does it not frighten you that you think the peak of life is in the next 5 years?” to which she responded, “Yes, because the fear with ageing is that your life is going to get really boring, I don't like that idea, I don't want a consistent, just comfortable life where nothing ever excites you anymore.”
This idea of Annabel thinking that life would get boring sat with me until I sat with Anne. I needed Annabel to know it wouldn’t be that way. I asked Anne the same question about when she thinks life will or has peaked. She laughed and answered, “I hope the best is yet to come. I'm an optimist, so I would like to think that. I'm enjoying life at the moment, it's really good. The best is here now.” Her life hasn’t become boring; she engages in lots of exciting activities, “I'm really enjoying myself at the moment, going to lots of concerts, lots of music, and it's been nice going out with someone my age with my interests. I thought I had to do everything by myself, but this is better.” The “someone of my age” Anne is referring to is a man she is seeing, whom she met on an online dating app. This inspired me to hear, as Annabel mentioned, she was nervous about the social side of ageing, concerned that younger people socialise and meet people more, adding that they are more ambitious.
I asked Annabel what age she thought old was. She responded, “50, I think, because when you are at that age, the physical side of it has already started to affect you, and also you will start to see a disconnect from younger people from the age differences.” I wanted to know more about the disconnect she introduced and if she was nervous about it. “In a way, I think you always want to have a connection easily with anyone, but it is a natural thing to fear.” It raised my concerns that you wouldn’t be able to connect to everyone you wanted to when older. So when sitting with Anne, I wondered if it was true, but she demolished it and told a story of young people being kind to her when she had difficulty going up a hill, when young people were blocking her way. She narrated the scene that followed as, “It was like walking through the Nile, separating and smiling, it was nice. If you give young people an inch, they give you a mile.”
Both women admitted that they feel that they are most free now, Annabel, as she has just become independent for the first time in her life, and is learning to navigate what she will do as she becomes older and more beautiful. Anne, as she says she has fewer responsibilities and more time to do what she wants to do and works on her physical self now, saying “I am much freer now.” She said, “I do yoga now, I would have never have done that when I was younger. I would rather have gone to the pub.” I left Anne feeling as optimistic as herself.
Ageing is inevitable, but the fear of it doesn’t have to be. Anne makes it seem exciting and constantly thrilling. Life only slows down if you let it. To conclude Anne’s interview, I asked if she could give some advice to young women who were scared to grow. She countered, “I was scared, but you just have to do it. The years just seem to go by so fast. If you're in a relationship, if you have a child, if you have a job, it just wizzes past, and it would be nice sometimes to step back, but you still enjoy it.” No woman should be scared of growing up; it should always be embraced.
