Fear of growing old?

“Old age has two advantages: you neither have toothache nor do you hear the rubbish which those around you are spouting .”

So said the writer George Bernard Shaw. However, despite these undoubted advantages, we all struggle against the process of growing old. We look for eternal youth in the form of creams which promise us the impossible, and fill up our supermarket trolleys with products prefixed by the magic words organic, diet or macrobiotic; and when we think that this is no longer enough, we pay a visit to the plastic surgeon’s. In Spain 800 plastic surgery operations are carried out every day, and it’s a business which generates a turnover of 900 million euros a year in Spain alone … which puts the country firmly in the number one spot in the European Union and third in the entire world (according to figures provided by the Spanish Organisation of Plastic Surgery). This desire for eternal youth is rooted in our own fears and insecurities; and possibly one of our deepest fears is not being accepted or loved. As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it:

“Man’s social instinct is not based on love of others but on fear of finding himself alone.”

The need to be accepted in modern-day society is bound up with notions of beauty and youth, the supreme values of today’s age. Looking middle-aged or old is definitely not the order of the day, especially in the case of women. A man with grey hair may be deemed to appear interesting; many women, on the other hand, try to hide the oncoming of greyness. This search for youth is at heart a striving for love and social recognition- but it comes, paradoxically, at a very high price to our happiness. Neither is it practical: trying to find satisfaction in something which, like it or not, has a sell-by date, is like betting on a horse that will lose the race, despite the forecasts of all the pundits to the contrary.

In a survey carried out in years ago in France, 89 per cent of the respondents thought that man needs to find meaning in his life. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl posited that modern society’s collective neurosis is grounded in a sensation of existential meaninglessness. It is precisely to paper over this sensation that we pursue things which we are afraid of losing, whether it be youth, good looks, a house which is the envy of our neighbours, or a prestigious job. Deep down, we have come to believe that our identity and our own personal worth depend on what we have and not on who we are. And this is the source of all our fears. Although we can hardly lose who we are, we most definitely can lose what we possess- including our youth. Perhaps we have been trying to seek happiness where it is not to be found. As Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at the University of Harvard, puts it:

“While we as individuals want to be happy, society wants us to spend and consume”

If we try to think about the people who have been most important to us in our own lives, we are hardly likely to single out those who were the best-looking, but those who have loved us just as we are, warts and all … those who have made us feel important and unique. Antoine de Saint-Exupèry, the author of The Little Prince, put it this way:

“The most important things in life are invisible to our eyes.”

How right he was! Real beauty cannot be seen, and we can all aspire to it, regardless of our looks. The more we can accept and love ourselves as we are, the happier we will be. And isn’t happiness what we’re all looking for?

Be Sociable, Share!

•