Fear Of Old Age ( No One Wants to Get Old and Search for a Magic Cure )

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The Vedanta Kesary, p. 49-52, February 2002

No One Wants To Get Old

Even though we all know that old age is inescapable yet we refuse to accept it. We do not want to think of it. We try to forget it or ignore it. We resort to cliches and illusions to escape it. Our industrial age has created and promoted a youth culture that denies old age. In olden times, life was divided into four stages—childhood, youth, middle age, and old age; but our modern culture has downsized the categories to three—childhood, youth, and 'you are looking fine.' Coffeehouses put up signs saying, 'Don't blame our coffee. You too will one day be old and moldy.' Psychologists teach us to deny old age, saying: 'Age is mind over matter. If you don't mind, it does not matter.' Old people never call themselves old. A person who is 80 years old says 'I am 80 years young.'

Expressing disgust and dislike of old age, talk-show hosts have coined phrases, such as the 'Four Bs of old age: bunions, bulges, bifocals, and baldness.' Promoters of youth culture have invented terms like senior citizen and citizen of longer living to identify the old. For them, an old person is not old but biologically challenged; and a dead person is never dead but metabolically challenged. Yet old age refuses to reverse its course. Saying that 'old age is gracious,' or 'it is the greatest time to be old,' or 'old age is the best time of life—the golden years' does not make old age
different.

Search For A Magic Cure

We are constantly searching for a magic cure for the malady of old age. Haunted by the spectre of old age, millions are taking recourse to drug therapy, diet therapy, gene therapy, various physical exercises, stress management, hair colouring, hair implantation, and a hundred other ways to maintain their youthful appearance. Billions of dollars are being spent by the cosmetics industry in search of products and ways to hide at least the outward signs of aging. The vast dependence on plastic surgery in the United States to hide the signs of aging is the sharpest index of our anxiety.

According to Jere Daniel, the author of an article entitled 'Society Fears Aging' in the book An Aging Population, 'In just two decades, from the 1960s to the 1980s, the number of wrinkle-removing face-lifts rose from 60,000 to an estimated 2 million a year at an annual cost of $ 10 billion.'2 But all our efforts to stop the advance of old age by material and psychological means prove futile. Eventually the lifted face falls again, implanted hairs do not grow, stress becomes unmanageable, the body refuses to exercise, drug therapy fails, and cosmetic make-up cannot hide any more the signs of old age. At last old age finds us out and catches hold of us. We grudgingly accept the inevitable. We moan, cry, and curse our fate. We never stop to think that having a longer old age is not living longer. It is dying longer.Test

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About the author

Swami Adiswarananda

Swami Adiswarananda, the Minister-in-charge of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Centre, New York, USA, is a senior monk of the Ramakrishna Order. He is a well-known thinker and contributes articles to various journals.

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