Age is a number, not a personality

Why pathologizing a season is big business

It’s human nature to enter a new season of life, look around, and think, oh my goodness, this is so different from what I expected. Is it like this for other people? How do I navigate this?

In our hyperconnected world, we are just a few clicks away from other people who share or speak to our season of life, who invite us to huddle together and swap stories about this new/challenging/exciting time.

This impulse to community, deep wired within us, can be twisted, monetized. We understand that social media uses outrage and “us vs. them” narratives to drive revenue. But intergenerational divisions are also constructed and exploited, to the detriment of us all.

Pregnancy and parenthood are a good example. It’s such an epic change physically, emotionally, and psychologically to care for an infant. I remember that season in my life, looking at my new baby and thinking, how do I do this? I need more information.

Certainly, I got information from outside sources like books. But the internet didn’t exist when I had kids, so I turned to friends and family who had children. I asked the people around me what they did. Many of those people were older women. They weren’t influencers, they were moms, they didn’t have a profit motive in giving me information, they just gave me suggestions.

Not all of the suggestions were good – hard no to booze on the gums of a teething child, for example. But they were often useful. One I remember to this day is not to do for my child what they could do for themselves. As soon as they learn to tie their own shoes, stop tying their shoes. Same for getting dressed and breakfast and doing homework.

Back then, there was a model where in new stages of life you turned to people who were older than you, and they provided support and guidance because they had been there, and they were connected to you – family, neighbor. Not because they were selling something or looking for more exposure on social media.

To be clear, I spend plenty of time on social media and find interesting and compelling content there. I know many people don’t have elders they can turn to. My point is that we have a new model, one which, taken to the extreme, ends up isolating all of us.

The model isn’t ours; we didn’t invent it. It’s a cultural narrative driven by media as a way to generate revenue. My hope is that if we see it, we can make more skillful choices. Here’s how it works.

First, take a season of life and make it an identity. Make it a personality, complete with catch phrases, persecutions and merch. Pregnancy. Parenthood of young children. Parenthood of teens. Empty nester. Perimenopause. Menopause. Aging.

Second, once you have convinced people that their season of life is an identity, get them to construct a kind of psychological barrier between themselves and anyone else who might have ever gone through this. Reframe the narrative that people have been peopling for millennia, and insist this specific season you are going through is sui generis.

Imagine a 27-year-old new mom named Amy who is convinced her mother and aunts know nothing about parenting, even though they have six children between them and were working mothers, maybe schoolteachers or child therapists or nurses. They couldn’t possibly understand anything, Amy is told, because they were parents of infants in the days when people put babies on their stomachs to sleep, thereby disqualifying them in every way. But Amy is hungry for information and connects with dubious influencers on social media.

Which leads to point number three - create an industry of experts who will give advice and suggestions and instructions for a price, or loyalty, or allegiance. Some of them, especially in the parenting space, have other agendas, warning against vaccines and birth control with specious, dangerous “advice” meant to further divide.

Fourth, convince each one of those people in that season that not only are they are unique, but also that their success or failure is up to them. Tell those exhausted new parents that the reason they are stressed out is that they aren’t sleep training their child correctly, or they don’t have the right oscillating bassinet, or magnesium laced lotion, or parenting technique. It’s their responsibility to manage everything, the fate of their child is on them alone.

Whatever you do, don’t let them consider the larger system they live in in the United States; little to no paid parental leave, awful healthcare, terrible maternal mortality rates for Black mothers, ridiculously expensive childcare. There are real reasons parents are exhausted and overwhelmed, and it has nothing to do with whether they are following the latest trends in child rearing.

The Old

This same model impacts the cultural narratives around aging. A whole generation is walking into their fifties and sixties, seeing the full force of ageism, feeling the impact of the inevitable changes in our physical bodies. For many white men, ageism represents the first time they’ve been impacted by discrimination, and they are outraged! Outraged!

Here’s how the model works with ageing.

Stage One. Make aging an identity. I get it. I’m a 62-year-old grandmother. But we’re all aging very differently. It’s not about chronology. Just as marketing wants us neatly segregated into demographic bands like Boomer, Millennial, etc, for ease of targeting, the market posits that all of us have a similar experience of aging. Clearly, that’s not true, but it’s more effective for targeting. Start telling women in their thirties that they will be laid low by perimenopause and menopause for close to a decade and that fear will prime them for purchases for the next twenty years. Even though plenty of us sail through those hormonal transitions uneventfully.

Stage Two. Create a barrier between our experience of aging now and the experience of others who came before us. Why is it different for us? Why are we writing about it and posting about it and waving our hands in what feels like a solipsistic frenzy? Find an aunt or uncle or neighbor who is living well at an older age and take them out for coffee. See what they know. If there is no one in your community who is aging gracefully, could you expand your community?

Stage Three. Send in the “experts” with their products and unguents and exercise routines, the makeup and plastic surgery and diets. I’ve seen too many celebrities and influencers talking about their new book about aging out of faces entirely disfigured by extreme plastic surgery. There’s money in them there aging hills.

Our understanding of the older female body is so warped that people are shocked and disgusted by celebrities who age publicly, who gain weight or have wrinkles or gray hair.

It’s like we have a cultural filter over our collective gaze that expects women in their fifties and sixties to show up with smooth skin, full, round cheeks and puffy lips. We’re vaguely unsettled when we see loose neck skin. And in that uncanny valley, we’re told that with the right products or pelvic floor routine we, too, can filter out the manifestations of aging on our faces and bodies.

Stage Four. Obscure the systemic issues. There are so many with aging. Part of the grasping at the appearance of youth is that ageism is real, and many of us want and need to stay employed. It is really hard to get a job over 50. Many people in their fifties and sixties will not be able to retire. I’ve contributed to social security since I was thirteen years old, but I can’t be sure it will actually pay out in seven years when I’m old enough to qualify for my maximum benefit at 70. Many older Americans need Medicare and Social Security to avoid poverty, and some will be in poverty even with those programs. Programs which the current administration is threatening to axe. When France raised the retirement age to 65, people took to the streets in protest. We just keep doomscrolling and being served ads for wrinkle spackle.

So, what can we do? Reject the model. Think about Amy, the new mom, and imagine her mother, Jill. Jill, in her fifties, could focus on menopause as identity, and her anger about the ageism that limits her financial security. While at the same time complaining about new parents today, angry that her daughter Amy won’t take parenting advice from her own mother, a child psychologist. Or Jill could work on intergenerational compassion and remember that every season of life has its joys and struggles, if you are 5 or 15 or 25 or 65. We’re all muddling through.

If Jill turned to her daughter and learned and accepted every new parenting guideline without complaint and kept her unsolicited advice to herself, she might be able to bridge the walls on either side, and maybe even recruit some older women in the family to support them both.

I understand the appeal of thinking of myself as having a unique, never before experienced season in life that no one else could understand, railing against the specifics of this ageism, right now. I’ve written about that, bought the products, the lotions, the books. But it didn’t help me. It was connecting in community with real women who have interesting and fulfilling lives in their eighties and nineties that has taught me about aging, that has reframed my limiting narratives.

And, in the process, I am in community, supported by real human beings I can sit across the table from and hug or cry with. And what we talk about isn’t skin care or “those Millennials” but social justice. Because the issues that hurt us as older people are systemic, especially now, especially in America, especially for women. The solution to systemic issues is collective action, and to do that we need to reject the models that invite and monetize intergenerational division and conflict.