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Aging Beats the Alternative
On my 30th birthday nearly a decade ago, I paraphrased this old saying in response to a typical joke from someone about me getting older. The other person looked at me quizzically: “What do you mean it beats the alternative? Isn’t the alternative to getting older, getting younger?”
“Uh, no. The alternative would be dying.” I said to my birthday well-wisher.
She might have thought I was morbid. I thought she was an example of our culture’s warped ideas on aging. Let’s not, under any circumstance, consider that we have only two realistic options — to age or to die. Let’s instead pretend it’s not happening or jokingly resign to the aging process and everything that supposedly goes with it — invisibility, irrelevance, decline. Or let’s pretend we can stop or “reverse” aging — cue ads by every cosmetic brand in the world.
Anti-ageism advocate Ashton Applewhite explains: “When aging is framed as a problem, we can be persuaded to buy things to ‘fix’ or ‘stop’ it. And when we can be persuaded that aging is a disease, and natural transitions are pathologized, we can be persuaded to buy things to ‘cure’ it. The driving force here is capitalism: no one makes money off satisfaction, but shame and fear create markets.” Applewhite reminds me of my former midwife who told me “you’re not sick, you’re just pregnant.” Just like most women have uneventful…
