Fear of Aging

• Published: 11 May 2025 • • Last updated: 11 May 2025 • • Written: 11 May 2025 •

Why are we, especially in the modern industrialized west, so afraid of growing old?

There is some rationality in a fear of lessened mobility and of greater weakness and dependency, but I see these as symptoms of a culture, not inherent to the process of aging. In other words, growing old isn't the travesty; it's how we treat the process and react to it.

Old age should be a time of support, a time when the kind of value that an individual adds society shifts from being predominantly physical and rote, to being predominantly intellectual focused on wisdom, experience, and reflection. Instead, have collectively decided that the elderly are outdated, like a 2007 iPhone or, at best, endearing and quaint, but woefully limited and underequipped, like a vintage automobile.

With the rise of the Mass Web, awareness and care along a temporal axis has been traded for awareness and care across spatial axes. We exist in a isolated, perpetual present, where adolescents and young adults in North American suburbs stress day and night about wars raging in Europe and the Middle East, with almost no thought given to the actual events or conditions that created those developments in the first place. History and precedent take almost no priority in the way that people vote, just as past experiences within an individual's lifetime take vanishingly less priority in the way that people act.

Why worry about the history of Kyivan Rus' and the Crimean vote to leave the Soviet Union, when you can listen to podcasters hounding you day-in and day-out about the rather exciting threat of "nuclear annihilation" and "WWIII"? Why bother understanding the Battle of Khaybar, or the 1929 Hebron Massacre, when your TikTok mutuals are posting much more interesting videos, chanting through lecture halls? Returning to the question that sparked this rant, my takeaway is that as a society, we have collectively decided that knowledge of, and firsthand experience with the past is irrelevant, because the past itself is irrelevant. Thus, we are afraid of aging, because we are afraid of our own irrelevance.

But there's a certain stillness, a certain finality about the lessons of old age, that all of us will have to wake up and embrace someday. And how the generations of depressed, anxious hyperconsumers who spend their days listening to podcasts and endlessly scrolling TikTok will come to square that circle, is a sight waiting to be beheld.