![]() Others center “staying young,” or “still sexy,” or doing better than those women. Some of these conversations are ageism-aware. We created the group to take advantage of two things: the launch of Ageist? Sexist? Who Me?, Old School’s guide to starting a consciousness-raising group around the intersection of ageism and sexism and the fact that so many conversations have emerged in recent years around women and aging-whether about bringing menopause out in the open, or going gray, or refusing to become invisible and shuffle offstage. It turned out to be not just our first meeting, but our last. Last fall, as I wrote about here, the Old School Clearinghouse hosted the inaugural meet-up of a women’s group called Biddies, a name I came up with and thought was hilarious. Posted in Blog Leave a comment no format! The mainstream women’s movement has centered whiteness. Age marks when we encounter them, but no more. Myriad factors shape our lives-benefactors and tormentors, hardships and windfalls. Baars, on the other hand, nails it again. Being young is different from being old, and age is a key component of identity. “Chronological age is not the cause of anything.”Ĭhronological age tells us far less about a person than we think it does, and the older the person the less the number reveals. It tells us nothing about a person, says the contemporary philosopher of aging Jan Baars. What do we mean by “old”? Chronological age misses the mark. I take issue, though, with another point Wiener makes: You are aging right now as you read these words - and not any faster or slower than an infant or a grandfather.Īgreed, and beautifully put. Old age is a continuum, and everyone is on it. I already knew of Baars, whom Cole describes as “the premier philosopher of aging.“ Possibly my favorite quote in my book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, is his: “Autonomy requires collaborators.” What brought him back to mind was a wonderful essay by “philosophical traveler” Eric Weiner called Old Age Is Not a Pathology, which contains another passage well worth quoting: Our culture produces them because it suppresses and tries to control finitude and our increasing vulnerability over time-those things that in Baars’s view are the condition of our “spontaneity, discovery, creativity and uniqueness.” (p. These paradoxes result from the contradictory desires of long life and infinite youth. When this acceleration meets chronometric time, Baars notes, two paradoxes emerge: (a) “premature cultural senescing” in which individuals live longer but are called old at earlier ages and (b) the desire to stay young but grow older, which is the cultural creation of a huge antiageing industry in medicine and in commercial products that promise to maintain youth. We live in an era when ever-faster, ever-larger flows of information and images fly around the globe, leading to a cultural acceleration of everyday life. It’s from a review by eminent gerontologist Thomas Cole of Aging and the Art of Living, by Jan Baars. I recently came across a passage about contemporary aging so concise and insightful that I had to post it. ![]()
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