You're Too Old to Believe the Stupid Sh*t Others Say About You

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Prince Beguin on Unsplash

Including that unkind voice in your noggin

First, let me set the stage:

Jinja, Uganda, 2015. I had just finished doing the Class V rapids at the headwaters of the Nile. Okay, truth: those Class V rapids had just finished doing ME.

The Nile’s actual headwaters location is disputed, but if you’re in Jinja, you’re required to say it’s there. Those churning, harsh, washing-machine rapids had just cracked a few more of my ribs.

I had my second concussion just that day from the heavy raft. It had landed squarely on my head when the waters upended it, spilling all twelve of us into the maelstrom. Repeatedly.

I’d previously broken a few ribs when riding in the Ugandan jungle, where a nearly invisible vine managed to wipe me clean off my horse. In the process I’d also cracked my coconut on the concrete-hard clay of our path.

Cross-eyed, I’d galloped to rejoin my group. A day later I was rafting in the adrenaline capital of Uganda.

By the time I was done rafting I had even more bruised ribs, had managed another mild concussion. I hurt. There was more adventure ahead in Tanzania and I needed to recover.

I was heading for a week-long solo camel ride (okay, with Maasai guides, to be fair) in the February heat.

I happily settled in to a cabin at a nearby youth hostel. Rock-taped my back, ribs and shoulders.

That’s probably what was holding me together.

I looked rough. Felt rough. Was on my way to a desperately-needed hot shower. Absolutely full of myself, the great (clumsy) adventure athlete. The female Bear Grylls.

Uh-huh.

As I passed by a German kid on the phone, he burst out laughing at me. To his phone friend, who apparently wanted to know what he was laughing at, he said,

“Just some old lady.”

Oh, my, was I offended.

Didn’t that guy understand who the hell I was?

Look. That’s just such a ridiculous thing to say EVER. But we think that, don’t we? Our self-importance, our need to matter, to be seen as having worth bubbles up in indignation.

Here I am thinking I’m All That. Truth, I am just some old lady.

Nobody appreciates being so summarily dismissed. Perhaps what hurt most is first, the reminder that we aren’t All That, not really.

Worse, that by being old or even older, we are reduced to humanity’s junk heap.

The author during a rest break on the Nile, Jinja, Uganda 2015. Lucky my dentures were still in my head.

Really, who cares, right?

Sometimes we do. Let’s talk about that.

To those who know and love us, of course we’re somebody. To everyone else, we’re expendable nobodies. Think about how you and I observe strangers, and the sometimes unkind things we say about old people we know nothing about.

Some little old lady running a marathon is just so cute. Some little old man is 90 years young and so sweet as he punches weights. The condescension in such language is poisonous to the soul.

You cannot imagine how insulting such infantilism or “elderspeak” is to people who have earned the right to age with DIGNITY.

Some of those people have led lives which would make us pale in wonder. We don’t often take the time to mine their stories.

We have no idea who those people are. No idea what they’ve suffered, what they have mastered, the people whose lives they transformed.

That German kid’s insult wasn’t important. We can’t police other people’s poor manners.

What matters is the permission we give others to cause us pain, simply because we are older.

Such remarks do damage because too often, they land on fertile ground.

Research proves that if we internalize negative stereotypes about aging, not only do we age faster, we get sick and depressed much more than those who refuse to buy in. We die sooner.

I was 62 in 2015. That’s when many of us feel the first pinpricks of ageism. The baited barbs hurled at us for committing the ultimate crime of getting older.

That can’t be ME they’re addressing. I’m not old.

As though it’s a horrible sickness.

Which is why, ridiculously, people have gained traction in calling aging a disease. If that’s the case, then every living thing on the planet is just as sick as we are. Not true.

We humans are far worse.

All living things age. Eventually they also die. They must.

We hate ourselves and each other for aging, at least in countries where it’s profitable to convince us that ageing is evil or worse, curable.

We’re Way Too Old to buy that snake oil.

Our society labels us as “elderly” in our sixties, a term which the medical community handily -and without cause- uses to describe anyone from 65 up to 100+.

Really now. Forty-plus years of “elderly?”

That’s like saying that from age ten to fifty is middle-aged.

It doesn’t matter that you and I can intellectualize our way through this minefield. The heart and the intellect often work at cross-purposes. The heart, being vulnerable and insecure, usually wins.

Putting up powerful emotional safeguards against the ageist tidal wave is some of the hardest work you and I will ever do. But it’s worth it.

One speaking coach of mine attacked me for my crepey neck.

He carved my heart out with a dull spoon by attacking the very thing I couldn’t do much about, shy of surgery. Of course that hurt. Of course that damaged my self-image, my ego. I gave him permission.

We’re the same age. He despises his own aging body. And, he’s fired. I prefer to be with people who have reached peace with what we can’t stop. That takes courage.

Attacking others for aging is cowardice.

We aren’t born to hate aging.

My parents despised their aging bodies. Unlearning that is taking a lot of hard work. Likely true for many of us, at least in America.

What does your inner voice say to you, as you watch your body change with time? I’ll bet our inner voices are kissing cousins. Mine is proving hard to redirect, but it’s valuable work. Why? This:

I read your comments on Substack.

I feel the grief. Where did we learn to denigrate ourselves? Who benefits? Or more accurately, who profits from age-hate?

More on that in a moment.

Those unkind comments, about the one thing we can’t stop, cause me real distress, the lies we’ve internalized, the attacks on our sacred selves. It hits home because I’ve done it, too. Still do it every so often.

Especially middle-aged women, right at the time when our bodies require our full and loving attention in order to shift into high gear as baby-making leaves the building. We need that self-love as the world views us differently.

We too often build on those unkind comments and turn them to bile, which does irreparable harm, should we let it.

We harm our beloved children by speaking those lies. We teach them to hate themselves as they age. Is that the legacy we want to leave?

You and I are WAY Too Old to listen to - or worse, believe- the stupid sh*t people say to us about our age.

We’re also Way Too Old to believe the lies we’ve learned to tell ourselves about our intrinsic value, or lack thereof, solely based on our age.

Of course I deal with this. Here is part of how I fight back. I read the research. Among the best resources:

Becca Levy, PhD has done considerable research on this topic, and produced a marvelous book which speaks to the damage that our negative beliefs about aging can wreak. I’ll be drawing from her work in future articles.

We start fearing age at thirty, forty, then FIFTY, as though that’s some horrific millstone instead of a milestone.

Tom Brady, that Tom Brady, is four years from fifty.

Would you call him an ancient old man?

Would you call Mick Jagger an ancient old man? Elderly? After all the guy is eighty. Would you call him decrepit?

How many of us can move like this at that age?

However you feel about Jagger, Google what he did after heart surgery. If you want to be delightfully shamed into dragging your ancient old bones out for a walk, please see this, which is just after he got his repairs.

Jagger’s eighty. In the 1960s, scything weeds on my father’s farm in Florida, Jagger’s voice, sounding like tin under a hard rain, first came out of a tiny turquoise AM radio I’d balanced on top of a fence post.

The man has ten times the energy of people a fourth his age.

Jagger’s face? He’s eighty.

You and I earned our faces. We have earned the valleys and rivulets which mark the passage of life, the prices we’ve paid, the joy we’ve felt.

I am not telling you to be like Mick Jagger.

I am telling you that many of us can be a lot more like him if we’d turn off the Old (Wo/) Man in our brains.

To that, in case you missed this, Clint Eastwood, still making movies in his nineties, inspired a song by Toby Keith: Don’t Let the Old Man In. `

The Western economy is predicated on shame and failure. Trillions are spent each year to fix our bodies, our faces, our poor clothing choices, every single aspect of who and what we are.

That same economy only makes money if we fail at weight loss, fitness, health, relationships, diets, looks, and aging. Quitting any of our bad habits, drugs, alcohol. They profit when we flop.

Even the industries which have cropped up ostensibly to help us often don’t make money unless we fail. Here I’m addressing some-not all, some- of the psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors and questionable wellness coaches who only prosper if we cannot learn to take care of ourselves.

The Western economy succeeds by convincing us that we are flawed to begin with, and then further profits if we continue to fail. What a racket.

The worst? The whole ridiculous “anti-aging” theme. Currently weighing in at over $62 billion world-wide, the industry is expected to spread like a nasty virus to $93.1 billion by 2027.

Fear sells. What a horror to be so terrified of aging that we would spend this kind of dime to roll back time, when we can do nothing of the sort.

This article from Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper does a nice job of calling some of this out:

We have been trained to think aging is bad. Collectively, we spend a huge amount of money on cosmetics and surgeries—some $72 billion globally each year— to look younger than we are. I admit, I remember the upset I felt when wrinkles settled in around my mouth, and my naturally light brown hair became threaded with grey. Negative images of older people in the movies, on television, and online are alarmingly ubiquitous. A 2021 study focusing on media in the U.S. and U.K. shows that for every positive image of an older person there are six negative ones. (author bolded)

One of JennyB’s active clients. JennyB is a fitness expert based in Canada.

Some 75% of our quality of life as we age is solely up to us. Depending on the papers you read, genes barely account for about 7% of how we age.

Even when it comes to Alzheimer’s, you and I can make powerful lifestyle changes which shift the odds in our favor beginning with how we expect to be able to stave off disease, illness and decrepitude. Chris Hemsworth is working with that right now. He’s doing the same things that help all of us age better. From this Vanity Fair article:

“If you look at Alzheimer's prevention, the benefit of preventative steps is that it affects the rest of your life. When you have preposition to cardiovascular heart disease, cancer, anything—it's all about sleep management, stress management, nutrition, movement, fitness. It's all kind of the same tools that need to be applied in a consistent way.” (author bolded)

It’s also about community, social connections and purpose, all of which deserve our full attention. They are all acts of great self-love and regard. Kindness.

There are millions of examples of joyful older folks living in a house near you, the apartment next door, down the alley. We’re not trained to see them. Media shows us crippled, drooling, decrepit folks. Elderly…that’s what comes to mind when most of us hear that word.

We aren’t flawed because we age. What’s flawed is our thinking about age.

Research also shows that older people are happier- by far - than those in middle age, who are understandably struggling with realities around empty nests, dreams not lived, changing bodies and the like.

That joy rises with each successive decade. We don’t see oodles of articles about that because it doesn’t sell stupid sh*t.

I’ve spent a lifetime buying all kinds of products and services predicated on my shame and fear of being female, not looking like Twiggy (my era) or Bella Hadid, today’s so-called “most beautiful woman.” Not being ultra-thin and not being (whatever the crime I’d committed for not being). None of the fixes ever worked, because…

They aren’t designed to work.

Now the crime for anyone over thirty is Not Being Young Anymore. As if there were a fix. The threshold for old creeps further down every year, because the Western Industrial Marketing Complex hooks us younger and younger.

Predatory tobacco industry tactics 101.

To this I say, GO SPIT.

Instead, GO LIVE.

Let’s not let others’ terror of getting old steal our right to live at full volume. You are worth the investment you’ve already put in to getting this far.

You and I are WAY Too Old to allow other people’s ageist remarks rob us of our Best and Last Act. We’ve earned the right to live unapologetically.

Whatever that looks like for you…does it really matter? No.

Only that you allow yourself to live it, unencumbered by other’s fears.

Let’s play.

Photo by Cleyton Ewerton on Unsplash

I hope you are all revved up for your next chapter after reading this. If material like this is useful, first thank you for your precious time. Please consider

If you know people who are wallowing in the I’m So Old pity party and need a reminder about what’s possible, please also consider

Either way, you can’t reclaim this time. My intent is that you come away jazzed, energized and full of hope for your aging future. Thank you.