Here’s a utopian ideal: a world in which the “old” are permitted and encouraged to learn new things, to fall in love, to make mistakes, to feel beautiful; in short, to believe life is that myriad of possibilities we consider the prerogative of the “young.”
We’ve seen that feeling young can be the key to being young, so let’s encourage it. There would no longer be a reason to fear aging, at least not in the sense that it closes us off to possibility.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could normalize a second or third round of education — or a first, for those who didn’t have one? We could bring the workforce up to date, address skills gaps, and allow people to switch to more fulfilling careers. Automation could almost definitely plug the gap in the workforce left by those in education. More romantically, what about those who discover later on in life that they want to be painters rather than accountants? Should they be penalized for their youthful prudence?
Exposure to new ideas could curb the reactionary bent we associate with age. Certainly, education in later life has been found to have mental health and cognitive benefits. It can also help us feel fulfilled.
Anne Sadler, a former receptionist and telephonist, completed a degree in social sciences from the UK’s Open University at the age of 70. “Later life should always be about doing things you want and not things you need to do,” she says. “For some, that means relaxing and following leisure pursuits — for me, it was about proving to myself I could still do it and that I always could have.”
If our stereotypes of older people are misleading, what about those for young people? Adolescence, argues Nancy Lesko, PhD, a professor of education at Columbia University, is also a construct (apologies to Holden Caulfield). Younger people can actually make better managers, according to leadership consultancy firm Zenger Folkman. Millennials in the U.K. would rather bake a cake than work out at the gym, found a survey by supermarket Aldi.
Your author here is luxuriating somewhere between youth and middle age. It is supposed to be the “settling age,” though I’m not really sure I have any interest in that. I’m probably more likely to go backpacking than put down a deposit for a house. Maybe this is all a reaction to dozens of my friends having babies.
Ultimately, this is about a world where people live the lives they want to live, in whatever order. A world in which we don’t think of people as young, old, or middle-aged, but simply as people.
Maybe we ought to take a leaf from Virginia Woolf’s book: “I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.”
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This article was originally posted at https://medium.com/s/youthnow/we-need-to-rethink-our-ideas-about-aging-1d080dd9b3a8
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