Aging Anxiety

The fear of growing old doesn’t come from nowhere. So, where does it come from?

Vogue Philippines, Artu Nepomuceno

What makes us afraid of getting old? The obvious answer is our innate fear of death. In an era where more and more people choose not to follow any religion meaningfully, they no longer find respite from this existential trepidation in the knowledge that they possess an immortal soul, or that they are a part of a larger plan. For those disillusioned with faith, it’s hard not to look at aging as the process of walking closer and closer to the edge of their very existence.

But what other tangible facets of civilization today contribute to our day-to-day discomfort surrounding aging?

Commercialism: The Root of Age-Related Anxiety?

One reason why the fear of aging thrives in modern society might be because of the rise of the personal care industry. For any company to thrive, it must supply something that is in demand. Advertising works to create that demand by convincing us that we not only want but need something that we don’t have.

Historically, marketing campaigns have fueled our feelings of uneasiness and shame regarding our own visible, physical evidence of aging. Countless commercials depicting young men and women exalting the anti-aging powers of different products train consumers to dread the arrival of wrinkles, frown lines, sun spots, hair loss, yellowing teeth, sagging skin, and many other natural ‘tells’ of a person’s age. Viewers begin to wonder if they, too, should address the “shortcomings” of their own looks like the actors on their TV, cultivating within them a subconscious urge to prevent signs of their own aging.

That’s where the very brands behind the advertisements come in to save the day; their serums, lotions, specialized treatments, and so on serve the purpose of slowing or concealing the onset of certain bodily manifestations of aging, and present us with preventative measures we can take to help us rally against our existential anxiety by preserving our facades of youth.

And who can blame us for wanting to look young? Beyond advertising, our culture gives us plenty of reasons to desire an unweathered appearance.

Youth = Beauty = Value

The prioritization of youthfulness over agedness is baked into every corner of Western civilization. This particularly applies to conventional occidental beauty standards. Due to harmful narratives continuously reiterated in mass media and toxic marketing campaigns, youthfulness, beauty, and social worth, three entirely distinct concepts, are consistently conflated with one another. The preservation of one of these traits is often confused with the preservation of the others. As a result, many young people are terrified of growing old because they believe it correlates with the deterioration of certain physical traits that constitute how attractive they are found by others, a characteristic that corporations want us to believe determines our worth as individuals.

Aging and related changes in one’s appearance can negatively impact a person’s social standing beyond their ability to meet idealized standards of physical attractiveness, though. There’s a pervasive fear of how the loss of the youthful beauty glorified in advertisements and marketing campaigns can impact one’s relationship with the rest of the world, a world which is also conditioned to romanticize that kind of physique. As one forum user indicates in their comment on a Reddit post about age-related anxiety, “I am so scared of how the world is going to treat me once I stop being pretty.” This user embodies a crisis of self-esteem that stems from the confounding of beauty, youth, and our own value as individuals.

Social Fear

Perhaps people aren’t afraid of the loss of their physical youthful traits as much as they are afraid of getting old itself. Setting appearances aside, the infrastructure of Western society doesn’t make life easy for seniors. Many older people face discrimination in the job market based on their age and their perceived resulting inadequacies. ZipRecruiter data reveals that 25% of employers would choose to hire a 30-year-old over a 60-year-old if the two candidates were equally qualified for the position. This discrimination occurs in spite of the fact that the percentage of the workforce over 60 increases 1 to 2% each year, with this number predicted to rise in the coming decade as scientific advancements continue to allow people to live longer.

Not only that, but elders find it more difficult to receive adequate medical care due to certain biases regarding the aging process. Their complaints regarding symptoms of certain diseases, disorders, and mental health conditions are frequently taken less seriously by healthcare professionals because they ascribe to the preconceived notion that pain and unhappiness are inherent parts of growing old. This leads to undiagnosed illnesses in elderly people and contributes, ironically, to normalizing the belief that aging needs to be an uncomfortable and bleak process. Of course, we cower at our own aging; we have cause to believe it must be a difficult experience.

Going Forward

It’s no wonder that 55% of people ages 18 to 40 fear the aging process, according to the Statista Research Department. Age eventually catches up to us all, though, no matter what we do. The sooner we can make getting old a more enjoyable period of life and dispel cultural anxieties surrounding this natural occurrence in the lifespan of every human being, the sooner we can stop letting our inevitable futures control our wallets and dictate our mental wellness.