Conscious Aging: Why Outrunning Old Age Doesn't Work

From Botox to four-hour beach volleyball sessions, we're working overtime to deny we're getting older. New research points to a different path—one that might lead to more peace, and more life.

Photo by Anastasia Shuraeva on Pexels

A few months ago I had a conversation with a man who recently retired after a long career as an investment banker. He’d spent most of his adult working life in the greater Boston area and wanted an active lifestyle, so relocated to San Diego. He described his life now, one where he no longer had to work every day. Instead, he was working out every day—and I don’t mean hitting the gym for an hour. This man, at 62, was weightlifting, biking, surfing and playing beach volleyball for hours—I mean literally four hours sometimes each day—with men and women 20-40 years younger than him. He was also seeing a physical therapist several times a week due to pain in his hips and knees and when he walked, I saw he was stiff and slow. He seemed far older than his 62 years, and that was probably because he was beating the crap out of his body.

“What are you running away from?” I asked him. “Aging?”

He laughed. “Yes,” he said. “I’m not going down without a fight.”

There’s certainly nothing wrong with being active and staying fit as we get older but trying to outrun the aging process seems misguided. In 2011 Catherine Mayer coined the term “amortaility” to describe people living “agelessly” by behaving in about the same way and wanting largely the same things from their 30s into their 70s. That might seem appealing—and in some ways it does seem appealing—but it’s also a form of denial. About 25% of all cosmetic procedure patients are between 55 and 70 years old. And there is a growing market for high-end preventive care and AI-driven biological age testing, where a host of biological data from different tests are put into an AI model trained to come up with a number that represents a person’s “biological age” or rate of aging. It’s a way (for those with means, the testing’s not cheap) to to gauge if you really are beating aging.

But of course none of us will ever, truly, beat aging.

Conscious aging encourages us to accept the limitations that inevitably will come from an aging body and mind.

Conscious aging offers an entirely different narrative, a way of looking at getting older that asks “How do you want to live this part of your life?” rather than focusing on the more superficial aspects. It espouses self-awareness, an acceptance of mortality and deep reflection on past experiences and present circumstances as a way of finding both a coherence to one’s life, and purpose. It doesn’t treat aging as a passive state of decline but instead a time to pursue spiritual, emotional and psychological growth. In a recent interview with Krista Tippet, host of the On Being podcast, author Michael Pollan talked about how being older – he’s 71 now and started researching his recent book about consciousness, A World Appears, in 2019—allowed him a freedom he didn’t have before.

“This book started out with no destination in mind. I really didn’t know where it was going. It was genuinely like, let’s follow the thread of your curiosity and see what you learned,” Pollan told Tippet.

“I don’t think I could have or would have attempted this book at an earlier age. I think that there is more space to think about big questions, more space to question the self that’s been so much at the center of establishing myself and putting my name out there and doing ego-y things. I think that there’s space to kind of step back and reconsider some of those values.”

Photo by Lluis Bazan on Unsplash

That’s the kind of reconsideration – or consideration – inherent in conscious aging.

In a recent study of the use of contemplative practices and training to change how people think about and navigate age-related changes, participants reported a “notable shift toward greater kindness, openness and curiosity toward themselves and others.” They also reported improvements in physical and mental health. Among the key elements of the 8-week contemplative training was teaching participants to be able to sit with emotionally challenging experiences and normalizing (instead of pathologizing) the changes and vulnerability that come with aging. The study took place at the Iris Center for Mindfulness, Peace and Healing in Frederickton, New Brunswick, Canada and it was small and qualitative. But the results are meaningful, especially when juxtaposed against what has come to be thought of as the “successful aging” model, which is largely focused on physical health, with the goal of having us move through the last stage of our lives without disease and/or disability.

The study’s authors write that the successful aging model has been criticized as being ageist because its focus is on “maintaining youthfulness and it reinforces a fear of growing old, of loss, vulnerability and dependency more generally.”

Psychologist Deborah Serani wrote about conscious aging for the magazine Psychology Today last June. She says that it encourages us to accept the limitations that inevitably will come from an aging body and mind. Serani also writes that contemplating death is a vital aspect of conscious aging. Yet it is something that, as a society, we rarely do. Even in the hospital where I work, a place where life and death collide many times a day, it’s incredibly difficult to get a patient’s family to talk about the prospect of a loved one not pulling through. We’d rather talk about anything other than death. And I get it—I’ve come to understand that one of the reasons I chose to work in an ER is because I wanted and needed to confront my own existential angst.

In that same piece, Serani writes that “conscious aging reminds you that death means different things. Biologically, it is the permanent ending of all vital functions. But it can mean other spiritual, cultural, or psychological things to you personally. Remember,” she writes, “everyone dies, but not everyone lives.”

.