It is accepted that getting older has to do with the unstoppable passage of time, but, at the same time, it shows us that the passage of time is not linear. For a child, an adolescent or a young person, the passage of time is associated with the development and growth of their cognitive, emotional, physical and social capacities. Let’s say that things are about to become interesting, it is exciting to be growing older and even to appear to be older than you are.

When maturity is reached, a certain plenitude is attained, a balance between physical vigour, the benefits of experience and the deployment of more consolidated capacities. Let’s say that things are at their zenith, on a level.

Hence, the question arises: when do we start to age? When do we start to go downhill? When do we start to feel the need to say we’re younger?

The synonyms that the RAE (Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary) gives us for ageing, envejecer in the Spanish voice, are surprising: to age, grow older, go grey, deteriorate, wither, degenerate, get worse, decline, wear out. All of them are associated with decline and loss. Seen in this light, who would want to grow old?

Apparently, from a biological perspective, one starts to age at 20! What a pity to be unable to convey my 16-year-old daughter’s facial expression when I told her this. She was like, ‘What are you saying, broh?’. So, at the age of 20, the levels of certain coenzymes and growth factors start to change, although we only realise this from around the age of 30 onwards. It’s hard to look at a 20-year-old and think they are entering the era of decline. No way, they are just growing up.

However, the rate at which we age depends not only on our genes, but also on our lifestyle. Nowadays we are offered all kinds of resources to keep us younger, or not as old, depending on how you look at it: therapies, nutrition, antioxidant diets, all kinds of exercise -physical and neuronal-, anti-ageing creams, anti-hair loss shampoos, etc. In other words, things can be done that affect not the passage of time, but how the passage of time affects us.

Additionally, there is also the discovery of the neuro-plasticity of the so-called elderly —their brains are still flexible! —, or the genetic manipulation of cells that promise to reduce the speed of telomere shortening, etc. All, each in their own way, trying to make possible a new version of the Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where the key is biological age and no longer chronological age. There are now molecular biologists who put forward the possibility that human beings could live for 200 to 300 years, which would undoubtedly imply a new social model. Can you imagine? We would no longer just be talking about “elderly people” but something greater.

James Dean’s motto of ‘live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse’ is a thing of the past. There are plenty of quotes to choose from. For instance, ‘youth is a disease that is cured with age’ from the Nobel Prize winner George Bernard Shaw, or ‘youth has no age’ from Pablo Picasso. Personally, I love what the great comedian Gila’s  grandfather said to him, ‘grandson, if you don’t get older, it’s a bad sign’; and this is so because when compared to the dead, we are always young, regardless of our age.

The human race may not have even reached the infancy stage, but the population is ageing in leaps and bounds. According to the WHO, between 2015 and 2050, the percentage of the world’s population over the age of 60 will almost double from 12% to 22%.

And so, the demographic pyramid is inverting, life expectancy is progressively increasing and the silver economy is logically emerging as a key driver of socio-economic growth. The elderly, around the age of sixty-five, are becoming desirable as a consumer market in their own right, due to their purchasing power, their free time, their desire for experiences, etc. In this sense, they are even aspirational, but didn’t we all agree that we don’t want to grow old? The programmed obsolescence of technology no longer works for humans, the elderly resist being vitally obsolete!

One day, I was listening to a programme in which children were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up and one of them answered, all smiley, that when he grew up, he wanted to be retired. We have gone from, ‘Mum, I want to be a performer’ to, ‘Mum, I want to be a civil servant! And maybe the next one will be, ‘Mum, I want to be an OAP!

And we want to be pensioners right now! Just in case there is not enough money for all of us to receive our pensions in the future. We want to be retired, but not old; we want to retire but avoid hair loss, escape from urinary incontinence, diabetes, hearing loss, arthritis or thin skin.

Perhaps in childhood, youth, maturity and old age, we are all in the same boat, trying to discover the life that exists in life. As the science communicator Eduard Punset liked to remind us, ‘there is life before death’, and that is true at any age!

 

David García

Strategic Research Consultant