Our Fear of Aging

And what we can do to stop it

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live the “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.

This month we’re exploring the question of existentialism.

One of the hardest things to accept in life is aging.

With each passing day, we get older—first as infants and young children, growing, our bodies being built to handle the world and life—but eventually we hit a point where we seem to stop growing and instead enter a decline.

Our hair begins to thin, our bodies begin to ache in ways that hadn’t before, and we begin to understand the tacit nature of life and its fragility.

“Our ultimate ends are often fragile in unpredictable ways,” writes Zena Hitz, “hence our youthful anxiety about the future, our midlife crises, and our regrets in old age.”

Yet for a good majority of us, we’re mentally not feeling our age. Many of us instead still mentally think we’re in our 20s. It is only through a struggle between the mind and body that these two collide and we’re reminded of reality—a slip in the grass, a race with your kid, a box that needs picking up.

It is in these moments that the body tries to reinforce to the mind that we’re not as young as we used to be—a protection mechanism of sorts.

But we can’t live in fear of aging.

Yes, aging is natural. It is going to happen. Each of us will at some point face the inevitable truth that we, like all those who came before us, will age and eventually be old.

But how we get there determines the life we will live.

“Those who lack within themselves the means for living a blessed and happy life,” wrote Cicero, “will find any age painful. But for those who seek good things within themselves, nothing imposed on them by nature will seem troublesome.”

It is through our wisdom, through our mentality, that we can relinquish aging’s hold over us.

The path to the happy life is to understand our mentality as we age. It’s to take the reins of control of our mind and to direct it how we need it. It is, as Cicero states, our pursuit of wisdom that will relinquish old age’s hold over us.

If we can shape our mentality, if we can bend it to our needs, we can proceed to a happy life with grace.

“Nothing should be more expected than old age,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote, and yet, “nothing is more unforeseen.”

Beauvoir struggled with this her whole life. She saw from an early age those around her aging and she feared for it.

The philosopher Skye Cleary summarizes Beauvoir’s main issue with aging, and specifically with old age, with the question of whether or not an individual can become a different being while remaining themselves.

Or to put another way, what we said above, how as we age, we tend to split in two—one of mind and one of body.

We see in the mirror’s reflection the aging process, yet our mind feels and continually reminds us of a vitality and vigor we once held—one we still mentally feel.

“There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life,” wrote Beauvoir, “and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning—devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.”

We must therefore pursue life for the meanings we can bring to it—the wisdom to pass to others, the joys and laughter, the memories and stories. These are ultimately what we need to cling to as we age, whatever meaning we have built for ourselves in life, we must cling to it because, as Beauvoir put it, “every movement toward death is life.”

But perhaps the only fear greater than old age then is that of death. Death is the unknown, and from that we hold no power over how to conquer it. Death takes and no matter how hard we struggle, we cannot escape its grasp.

Yet perhaps aging is our way of coping with this. Perhaps it is the aging process that prepares us for the end of life. We see our parents grow old before us and lose their hop in their step and their vibrancy. Reality sets in. We too will stand where they stand. We too will face the existential fears they face.

And so perhaps the aging process is meant to allow us time to cope, to come to terms with the fact that we are all mortal, we are not invincible to the laws of nature.

As Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, everyone in every profession and in every walk of life has succumbed to death, and we will not be any different.

“Fear of death is fear of what we may experience. Nothing at all, or something quite new. But if we experience nothing, we can experience nothing bad. And if our experience changes, then our existence will change with it - change, but not cease.”

We all go through the same aging process, one that can be metaphored by the grape.

“Unripe...ripened...then raisins. Constant transitions. Not the "not" but the "not yet.””

We all will go through the progression. We all will one day look in the mirror and wonder where it all went. When these emotions creep in, when we feel the dread of aging, we must wrestle with the thoughts, we must remind ourselves of the beauty of the pursuit of wisdom, of what we’re here for, and what we still have left to give the world.

Joy. Laughter. Stories.

And when the time comes, remember:

“You boarded, you set sail, you've made the passage,” wrote Marcus Aurelius. “Time to disembark.”

Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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