The shocking truth about getting old

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Sometimes, the fact that I’m almost 30 makes me want to freak out. I know 30 isn’t old, but it’s not really young, either. It’s entering that “in-between” period of life. My 40s are next.

Gulp.

Polling shows that most Americans wouldn’t opt to live longer than current life expectancy, even if they could.

Our culture prizes youth to the point of obsession. Perfectly healthy people are willing to endure knife and needle to look younger than they are.

People juice and cleanse and run ’til they drop to cling to that youthful energy that starts to wane as the years click by.

These new realities only exacerbate natural fears about age — fears about growing less attractive, illness and the body starting to fail, losing independence, loneliness, death.

So when a morsel of Wall Street Journal clickbait entitled “Why Everything You Think About Aging Might be Wrong” floated through my Facebook newsfeed, I clicked.

The gist of it is this: Most people ages 18-64 have a bunch of fears about old age ranging from “I won’t be able to pay my bills” to “I’ll never have sex again” to “I’ll be lonely.” But most people over 65 don’t confirm these anxieties to be based on reality.

In fact, the Pew study the article reports on suggests that many people find that their “moods and overall sense of well-being improve with age.”

Hollywood definitely contributes both to youth obsession and age anxiety. One Oscar-winner from last year, “Amour,” is about a man who loves his elderly, stroke-stricken wife so much that he euthanizes her (sarcasm intended).

Older celebrities like Helen Mirren are praised for their “hot bods,” not their sense of a life fulfilled.

But the Pew study paints a different picture of old age.

For example, while more than half of people under the age of 64 in the study expect to experience memory loss, only one in four over-65s actually do.

Nearly half of younger people think they’ll suffer a major illness; the reality is closer to one-fifth. And a third think they’ll be lonely, whereas 17 percent of adults over 65 experience loneliness, likely not that far off from what under-64s experience.

This is not to say that old age is a cakewalk. But it’s often not the gantlet we seem to think it will be.

This jibes with other recently released data that found that older Americans are actually the happiest segment of society.

Another fascinating study found that, on average, happiness increased 5 percent with every decade of one’s life, and that 88-year-olds reported significantly higher levels of happiness than youth in their early 20s.

The sociologist behind the study suggested that it may be contentment that is behind increased happiness with older age.

Or, as another sociologist said of the survey results, an older person is more likely to think along the lines of, “it’s fine that I was a schoolteacher and not a Nobel prize winner.”

Not long ago, I declared to myself that 2015 would be the year of gratitude.

That I would take 30 by the horns. That I would not get angsty about spending my entire morning changing diapers and alternating between feeding a toddler and nursing a newborn, or fall into the life-comparison trap that is so endemic along the Acela corridor.

I decided that I’d just focus on where I am and enjoy that.

I found that made me feel more happy and relaxed than I’d ever been. And I must be able to find the strength to flex that gratitude-and-contentedness muscle because, ironically, I am getting older.

And that’s the Catch-22 about aging. It seems we get happier and more relaxed with age, but it seems hard to accelerate that contentment. It seems one has to experience the thing one is afraid of to be less afraid of it.

So while we young folk pass the time, we can filter what we let the culture tell us about old age, starting with eschewing cinema about euthanasia or other films that mock elderly as mindless or sick or depressed.

The numbers make it clear that we’re never too young to practice being grateful for what we have, right here, right now.

From acculturated.com