How to Prepare for Old Age: You Can't. You Just Continue
Just like you, I have never been this age before. What's more, I'm probably less prepared for it than most people I know.
Though I should say what I mean by prepared, because I have taken it the same way everybody does. The finances in place. The retirement plan. All the things society agrees are the right way to get ready for getting old, and none of which I would tell you to skip.
What almost nobody covers is the other half. The emotional, spiritual and mental preparation for growing older.
There is no leaflet for that. Two industries have grown up around growing older, one selling you a plan for your money and the other selling you the appearance of it not happening, and between them they have the whole visible surface covered. What neither of them sells is an answer to what your days will be about, because there is no money in it.
So it is left to you, and you find yourself working it out from inside it, because ageing is not a thing you can properly meet in advance. You can only meet the idea of it. Most of us think we have it planned. What we have planned is the money and the face.
So let me say plainly what I think that other half is.
Preparing for old age emotionally means having something in your life that isn't your own ageing. We are told two stories about growing older and both of them are wrong, because both make your age the subject of your life. Decline does it by giving in. Denial does it by fighting. The alternative is not a better attitude to ageing. It is to put something else in that position, so that your age becomes a circumstance of your life rather than its topic.
The rest of this is how I got there, and what Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote six hundred pages on it in 1970, has to say about it.
Why do we hide old age?
To an extent the hiding of old people is a modern phenomenon, but the impulse behind it goes back a very long way.
I find it interesting that the three things that were hidden from the Buddha were old age, sickness and death. As the story is traditionally told, he was raised inside a palace and his father arranged things so that none of it could reach him. It was only when he went beyond the walls and saw, for the first time in his life, an old man, a sick man and a corpse, that everything changed for him.
Not gently. The story has him shaken and then sunk into despair, and he leaves his wife, his child and his inheritance in the middle of the night. That is what one look at an old man cost him.
Think about what that story assumes. It assumes the sight of an old person is so destabilising that a king would build architecture to prevent his only son from seeing it. Twenty-five centuries ago somebody already understood that we would rather not look.
We have not stopped. We have just got better at it, and our version comes dressed in two different outfits.
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The first story: decline
This is the older of the two and it is the one most of us think we have already rejected.
You get invited to fewer things. People start explaining things to you. Nobody asks what you think about anything they intend to act on. And the sensible response, we're told, is to lower your expectations early so the disappointment is smaller when it arrives. Make do. Don't be a nuisance about it.
Decline is easy to spot because nobody dresses it up as good news. It arrives as realism, which is how it gets past you.
The second story: denial
Denial is the correction that turned up to fix decline, and it is much harder to catch, because it usually arrives as a compliment. And often we take it as one. It makes us feel good.
Recently I heard my youngest granddaughter say to her cousins, "She looks good for her age," and they all agreed. I was, of course, pleased.
There is nothing wrong with being pleased. But it is worth noticing what has to be true for the sentence to work. It requires a way that a woman of my age is supposed to look, and it puts me on the right side of it, for now. You're so young at heart does the same thing, which is why nobody has ever said it to anyone under fifty.
And behind all of it sits the second of those two industries, selling anti-ageing, a phrase that describes a market rather than a possibility, since nothing has ever successfully anti-aged, has it?
There are two versions of it. In one we live in the fiction that this will go on indefinitely and the end is something that happens to other people. In the other we keep ageing at arm's length by not looking old, and take not looking old as evidence of not being old. Either way the attention stays on the outside. The holidays, the days with nothing much in them, and all of it held up as proof that we have aged well and played the game properly and here is the reward.
I know this story better than I would like, because I have told it myself, in public, on the most-read page on this website.
That article asks whether it is too late to start over after fifty, and the middle of it is the denial story in full. Attenborough. McCartney. Judi Dench. Founders at sixty. You are not old, you are seasoned, and that is a superpower.
I do not disown it. But I would write that part differently now. Those examples don't prove age is irrelevant. They prove that a small number of exceptional people stayed exceptional, and they get held up as the gold standard, so that anything less looks like a failure to age properly. What is actually most obvious about them is not that they have defied age. It is that they have carried on living their extraordinary lives, exactly as they always did, and deservedly so.
Which is the bit most of us miss. Ageing is not a shrinking, and it is not a disappearing act performed for the benefit of a world that would rather not be reminded where all of this is heading.
Why this became my subject
That idea has been on my mind since my fifties, when the life I had been living was pulled out from under me and I had to look at everything I had taken as solid.
I was lucky, though it took me a long time to see it that way. I was pushed onto a path that made me go inward and actually think about who I was without the roles I had been playing for thirty years. Most people don't get pushed. They arrive at the same questions later, on their own, without anything forcing the issue.
That is why I take the second half of life more seriously than the cheerful version of it allows for.
What did Simone de Beauvoir say about old age?
In 1970 Simone de Beauvoir published La Vieillesse, which came out in Britain as Old Age and in America as The Coming of Age. She was sixty-two. It runs to nearly six hundred pages, it is furious in places, and it is out of print in English, which tells you something on its own. Of everything she wrote, the book about growing old is the one you cannot buy new.
One observation in it made me stop to think more deeply.
For many people, she says, growing old provokes more aversion than dying does. Not more fear. Aversion. We would rather think about not existing at all than think about being old. Sit with that for a moment, because it is a very strange preference and an extremely common one.
Then she does something useful with it. Her name for the flight from ageing is bad faith, and it explains why the two outfits are the same garment underneath.
Your situation always has two halves. There are the facts you didn't choose: your age, your body, your money, your circumstances. And there is what you can still do inside them. Bad faith, in Beauvoir's sense, is taking one half and pretending the other isn't there. Denial takes the freedom and pretends the facts aren't there. Decline takes the facts and pretends there is nothing left to decide.
They look like opposites because one is cheerful and one is resigned. The mistake is the same shape. And both of them call what's left being realistic.
What does it actually mean to prepare?
On page 541 she gets to the thing I had been circling for weeks without knowing she had already written it.
People are often advised to prepare for old age, she says. But if that only means setting money aside, choosing where to retire, and, in her phrase, "laying on hobbies," we shall not be much the better for it when the day comes.
Hobbies. She names them and dismisses them, more than fifty years before every retirement supplement in the country started recommending them.
And then she says something I did not expect at all. It is far better, she argues, not to think about it too much, but to live a committed and justified life now, so that you can carry on down the same path later, even after the illusions have gone and the appetite for life has died away.
So the missing half of the preparation isn't a plan you draw up for later. There is no leaflet because a leaflet is the wrong shape entirely. This is her answering the thing I said at the start, that most of us believe we have it planned. She agrees that we cannot, and then says that this is not the problem we take it for.
What she is describing instead is continuity. What carries you through your seventies is whatever you were already doing in your fifties and sixties that was worth doing.
You don't prepare for later life. You live one that can be continued.
Which is where those examples come back. Attenborough and Dench are not defying anything. They are carrying on, and what they are carrying on with is what they were already doing at fifty, at forty, and possibly before. The lesson was never that age is irrelevant. It is that a life worth continuing is one you have to already be living.
Continued as what, though
Her answer comes at the very end of the book, and it is essentially one sentence long:
There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work. [...]
One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion
- Simone de Beauvoir, Old Age, trans. Patrick O'Brian, pp. 540–41
Notice what she doesn't say. Not stay busy. Not stay young. Not make peace with less.
What she says is: find something to care about that isn't yourself. Something you would defend. Work you haven't finished. People whose lives matter to you as much as your own. A cause that makes you angry.
Which brings me to the word I keep going back to in that sentence. Indignation. It is a peculiar thing to find in a list of what makes a life worth living, and nobody in the business of teaching us how to age well would ever put it there. It isn't serene and it isn't grateful. It means caring about something outside yourself enough to be angry on its behalf.
Attenborough is not calm about the natural world. He has been angry on its behalf for most of a century, and that is why there is still something for him to be doing in his nineties.
Mine is this. It makes me angry that people arrive at sixty with two stories to choose from and neither of them any good. That is what I am doing with my sixties.
You cannot be angry on something else's behalf and preoccupied with your own ageing at the same time. There isn't room for both.
One honest difficulty
Beauvoir herself pulls the rug a paragraph later. Those possibilities, she says, are granted only to a handful of privileged people, and the gap between them and everybody else is at its widest in the last years of life.
Beauvoir is right, and it hasn't gone away. Having a subject takes room. Time that isn't already sold, health that holds up, a mind not entirely occupied with the rent. A woman working two jobs at sixty-three has little of any of it, and telling her that meaning is a matter of choosing better would just be the denial story wearing a different coat.
But Beauvoir's own sentence is wider than her doubt about it. She does not say a life has value so long as you do things. She says it has value so long as you attribute value to the lives of others, through love, friendship, indignation, compassion. None of those four costs anything. The doing is one expression of it. It was never the thing itself.
Where this leaves us
Richard Rohr, in his book Falling Upward, makes an observation that sits right next to Beauvoir's, and he arrives at it from an entirely different direction. Death, he says, is largely a threat to those who have not yet lived their lives.
A French atheist and an American Franciscan friar, agreeing. What frightens us about the end is not mostly the end. It's the suspicion that we postponed the middle.
Rohr goes to Homer for it. Odysseus is told he will sink under the comfortable burden of years, and that death will come to him gently from the sea. A good death, and good because of everything that came before it, not because it was prepared for financially.
So: you were told to prepare, and you were handed half the instructions.
The other half was never instructions. It is a life with something in it that isn't you, lived now, in ordinary weeks, so that there is something to carry on with when the structure goes.
You are still ageing. That was never in question. The only question was what you would be doing while it happened.
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The questions this article raises are the ones we work on in the community. Not once, and not to a tidy conclusion, but week after week, alongside other people asking the same things. A note from me every Sunday, and a journal where I write about all this before I have worked out what I think.
