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Key points
- The lived experience of aging can help explain distinctive and unexpected behaviors of older people.
- Aging brings about changes that can be both disruptive and delightfully surprising.
- Hearing and vision loss can sometimes be misinterpreted as cognitive impairment. But this loss of acuity also gives wisdom.
- An increase in life literacy helps one stay centered, especially while navigating the (overwhelming) complexity of contemporary culture.
This is not a review of the research literature on aging. It’s a report of one aging person about the experience of growing older. Often, elderly people don’t want to discuss the intimate details of what they’re going through or explain their behaviors, so this account from the inside may help clarify.
First, general categories of age provide a framework for the different lives elderly people lead, starting in their sixties and beyond. In the United States, age 65 traditionally marks the beginning of senior citizenship. After that, the age categories are the young-old, the middle-old, and the old-old. At 67, I am a senior citizen and in the young-old group, and it is from that perspective that I give the phenomenology of growing old.
Abrupt Physical Changes
Unexpected changes in one’s body happen more frequently as we grow older, and we never really know when they will occur. In July of last year, the hearing in my right ear suddenly became muffled, and it has stayed muffled to this day. The hearing loss did not develop suddenly, but I experienced it that way.
Older people are as surprised as anyone about the physical uncertainties of growing older. The experience of aging does not follow the smooth curves of calculus but the jagged lines of catastrophe theory. A phrase from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises applies to how ailments begin: “Gradually, then suddenly.”
Importantly, these abrupt changes should not be ignored. We should see our doctors when they occur.
Considering the Lives of Younger People
One assumption is that older people know what it’s like to be young, whereas younger people don’t know what it’s like to be old. But most older people do not know about being young today. Many aspects of daily life have changed, of course, but there is also a forgetting of youth—unless focused efforts are made to remember it. Although we are able to access vivid memories of our original experiences, we mostly rely on integrated memories, which are shaped by our present perspective.
Because our present selves change a lot more than we think, our integrated memories also change a lot more than we think. The youth we remember now differs in predictable ways from the youth we experienced.
Perceptual Decline
What looks like cognitive difficulty may actually be a decline in perceptual acuity. We don’t see as clearly or hear as precisely. Many people are aware of predictable physical changes—cataracts, increasingly rigid lenses in the eye that no longer accommodate near vision, hearing loss—but they can still be misinterpreted as an inability to understand. Sometimes we don't understand simply because we cannot see what we’re looking at or hear what people are saying.
In Wisdom and the Senses, Joan Erikson discusses how the loss of perceptual acuity contributes to a kind of wisdom. As our senses become less responsive, we learn humility, resilience, and interdependence.
Experience Matters
As we age, we gain life literacy. Our knowledge of concepts—semantic memory —continues to grow. In fact, our vocabulary can keep expanding throughout our lives.
We not only appreciate and apply expertise, we feel our knowledge. Our current 78-year-old president applies his life experiences to his political decisions—experiences with personal loss, with government, with family. Whether we agree with these decisions or not, the president is using his life literacy and feeling his knowledge.
Seemingly Eccentric Behaviors
Memories of individual events can strongly influence our specific attitudes and behaviors many years after the occurrence of these events. We accumulate lessons from these memories that then guide us in similar situations, so the older we get, the more of these memory-driven lessons we follow.
If we once ran out of gas many years ago, we may fill our tank every time it approaches half empty. One example that's closer to home: After a dinner gathering at my house, two friends helped clean up. I then witnessed one friend handing the other an heirloom crystal bowl and letting go before the recipient had a solid grasp. The bowl fell to the floor, smashing into little pieces. I now hold on to any dish a little longer than I need to when handing it to someone else.
Our Relationship to Popular Culture
I remain interested in movies, music, and fashion, but changes in popular culture seem to accelerate and subdivide with lightning speed. Consider music. In 1959, when I was 5 years old, the Grammy Awards began with 28 categories of music. Fifty years later, that number rose to 110 categories. The number of awards has now stabilized at 83 to 84, but that’s three times as many categories as when the awards began. (“Grammy” actually comes from "gramophone," a term that clearly dates its origins.) Keeping up with this increasing complexity often seems overwhelming to me.
Ease With Oneself
For many older people, life satisfaction increases even while ambition decreases. For me, the desire to distinguish myself has diminished, while my appreciation of the successes of friends and family has grown. Wendell Berry poetically describes this experience: “I am growing downward, smaller, one among the grasses.” We literally become shorter as we age, but we can also do so figuratively. Growing downward, smaller, among the grasses sounds comforting to me.
A Delightful Surprise
One of the lovely surprises of growing older is that older people truly look more attractive than ever. To us, aging creates more appealing versions of our younger selves. A news story trying to emphasize the agedness of a person with a phrase like “66-year-old grandmother” actually makes that person sound youthfully appealing to me.
Parting Words
Benefits from interactions between young and old flow in both directions. Younger people gain confidence and insight from good mentors, while mentors receive the gifts of enthusiasm, hopefulness, and an uplifting focus on the moment blended with plans for the future.
