What Do You Expect to Gain by Growing Older?
Last night, I woke up several times because the air conditioning wasn’t working properly and my bedroom was too damn hot.
It had nothing to do with aging and everything to do with an air conditioner that apparently had other plans for the night.
But every time I rolled over, a question moved through my mind:
What do I have to gain?
The question had come to me earlier during meditation. There was a little crack in my thinking where there was no resistance, no argument, and no lifetime of conditioning standing guard.
Into that crack came a simple thought:
Think in terms of what you are gaining.
I swear to God, it changed everything.
We have been taught to think about aging almost entirely through the language of loss. We expect to lose our strength, our health, our beauty, our mobility, our memory, our independence, our relevance, and eventually our lives.
Even the supposedly encouraging messages about aging are usually instructions for slowing down the losses. Do this so you don’t lose your mobility. Eat this so you don’t lose your mind. Take this so you don’t lose your health. Hurry up and do that thing before you die.
The entire aging conversation is built around loss, prevention, and fear.
Well, what if the whole damn story is backward?
What if we stopped approaching every new year wondering what might be taken from us and began asking what we expect to gain?
The age itself is irrelevant. This question belongs to the woman who is 61, the woman who is 71, the woman who is 86, and the woman who woke up this morning still treating her life as though its most expansive years are behind her.
Age is not just a number. We have heard that old trope so many times it has become almost meaningless.
I have a new one:
Age is an attitude coupled with expectation.
And expectation is the gatekeeper.
Expectation stands at the entrance of our lives deciding what evidence will be allowed through. If we expect decline, then every stiff morning becomes proof. Every forgotten name becomes proof. Every tired afternoon becomes proof. We begin watching our bodies for evidence that all the terrible things we have been told about aging are finally happening to us.
We treat our bodies like crime scenes and spend our lives looking for evidence of what might be going wrong.
What happens when we expect to gain?
Now we begin looking for strength. We notice healing. We expect our bodies to respond to the care we give them. We look for greater vitality, pleasure, emotional health, creativity, confidence, freedom, and self-trust.
We stop treating our bodies as though they are slowly abandoning us.
I am not denying that bodies change. I am questioning the expectations we attach to those changes.
Our culture has taught us that youth is the season of gaining and old age is the season of losing. What the hell? Who crfeated this damn rule, I want to me them and kick the ever lasting blazes out of' ‘em!
When we are young, we gain knowledge, experience, relationships, skills, confidence, and opportunities. Then, at some mysterious and completely arbitrary age, the direction is supposed to reverse. From that point forward, we are expected to measure our lives by what remains.
I no longer accept that. and I have proof or as the youngins like to say I have receipts.
Like these: I know myself better than I ever have. I hear my soul more clearly. I recover more quickly from the opinions of other people. I recognize what belongs to me and what never did. I understand that I am allowed to change my mind, change direction, begin again, and want something new.
I did not possess those things when I was younger.
I gained them by aging.
My purpose for living is not to cheat death. I am not interested in spending my life frantically trying to accomplish everything “before I die.” I have no authority over the date of my death, and avoiding death is not my purpose for being alive.
My purpose is to expand, grow, know, learn, create, and enjoy.
None of those possibilities has an expiration date.
The ultimate dream is not to outrun death. It is to live a happy life, no matter our age.
But it is damned difficult to live happily when we are surrounded by people telling us what to watch for, what might go wrong, what may already be deteriorating, and what terrible fate we must begin preventing immediately.
Recently, I found myself in a conversation with my eldest daughter and her dad, both urging me to start planning a move into a retirement community.
I stood there incredulous.
Why in God’s name were they having this conversation with me? I am living independently, writing, painting, running my own business, and creating an entirely new chapter of my life. Yet somehow we had skipped over the life I am actually living and gone straight to planning for my presumed decline.
A few hours later, it hit me.
Part of what makes a retirement community attractive to adult children is the promise that somebody else will be responsible for Mom. Her future needs can be anticipated, contained, and made less inconvenient before they ever exist.
Well, that is not happening. The move to a retirement community, I mean. Thank you very much.
But I began to understand where the conversation came from. My daughter has been exposed to the same brochures, commercials, social media warnings, and cultural expectations that surround all of us. She has been taught what growing old supposedly looks like. From a place of love mixed with fear, she is trying to prevent that predicted future before it arrives.
There is just one problem.
It is not her future to predict.
And it is not her life to arrange around expectations I do not share.
If we do not claim sovereignty and agency over our own lives, we become vulnerable to every assertion society makes about what growing older is supposed to mean.
We also need to understand something that nobody seems eager to say out loud:
Each one of us is a revenue stream.
There is money to be made from convincing us that we are losing. There is money to be made from our fear of becoming unattractive, unhealthy, irrelevant, dependent, or invisible.
The more frightened we become about aging, the more willing we are to buy whatever promises to delay it, disguise it, prevent it, or rescue us from it.
The loss narrative creates a customer.
That is why I have begun asking a question every time another warning arrives to tell me what age may eventually take from me:
Who benefits from my believing this?
Who benefits when I stop trusting my body?
Who benefits when I expect illness, weakness, and decline?
Who benefits when I surrender my judgment and accept that someone outside of me knows more about the possibilities of my life than I do?
Fear is profitable. Discontent is profitable. A population disconnected from its own judgment is profitable.
A woman who expects to gain is much harder to frighten.
And a woman who cannot be frightened into surrendering her authority is much harder to sell a diminished life.
This does not require me to declare that science is bad. Science can give me information. It does not get sovereignty over my consciousness.
I decide what information I need. I decide when I need it. I decide whether allowing it into my mind will support the life I am living or fill that life with fear about something that has not happened.
Just recently, I saw a video about all the things we should watch for to prevent dementia.
I refused to watch it.
I do not want the concept of dementia prevention occupying my thought pattern. I am not willing to spend a perfectly good day looking for signs of a disease I do not have. I will not rehearse a catastrophe in my mind and call it responsible living.
I am no longer willing to sacrifice my peace today in an attempt to control every possible version of tomorrow.
For more than 30 years, I have refused to watch movies filled with killing, war, horrific car wrecks, and human suffering. I know what emotionally charged images do inside my mind. The mind remembers the horror. It may not recreate the actual event, but it can continue recreating the emotion.
My mind does not need more horror to process.
It does not need another warning to store.
It does not need to be trained to search my body and my life for approaching disaster.
Fear does not always arrive looking like fear. Sometimes it arrives as helpful advice. Sometimes it calls itself prevention. Sometimes it arrives wearing a lab coat and carrying a list of everything that could go wrong.
I am allowed to say no.
That is what sovereignty looks like in my life. It means I decide what gets through the gate.
For the past week, I have been conducting a quiet experiment. I printed my favorite photograph of myself, the one in which I am standing on the sidewalk holding my dog’s leash. I placed it where I see it directly, or catch it in my peripheral vision, 10 or 12 times a day.
Every time I see that woman, I smile.
I am not looking at her and longing to go backward. I do not want to become the age I was when that photograph was taken. I am reconnecting with how alive I felt in that body and bringing that vitality forward into the body I have now.
I am giving my mind an image of gain.
I am choosing what I want the gatekeeper to admit.
That photograph reminds me that vitality is not trapped in the past. Strength is not reserved for the young. Pleasure has not packed its bags and left. My body is not my enemy, and time is not a thief standing outside my door.
Something is still being added to me.
Something is still becoming available.
Something within me is still ripening that could not have ripened sooner.
This is the unraveling and rewiring we must do. We must recognize how thoroughly we have been conditioned to experience aging as subtraction. Then we must stop granting every warning, prediction, advertisement, and cultural assumption unrestricted access to our minds.
The new question is not, “What must I hurry up and do before I die?”
It is not, “What will I lose next?”
It is not even, “How much of my younger self can I preserve?”
The question is:
What do I expect to gain?
I decide what enters my mind.
I decide what I expect from my body.
I decide whether growing older will be narrated to me as loss or lived by me as gain.
I guard the gate.
If you are tired of being warned, corrected, managed, and told what growing older is supposed to look like, become a paid subscriber.
This is where we question the conditioning, reclaim authority over our own lives, and expect far more than the world has taught women our age to expect.
We are not here to manage our decline.
We are here to live.
Before you go, take a minute to explore the Subscriber Perks. The first chapter, paired with my art and a favorite article, is already waiting for you, and I’ll be adding several more very soon. Plus additional rescources to use as you begin to choose the how , they why and the when of your own retirement years.
Such a fabulous writing to read this morning! Spot on for me as I ponder what I “should” do to prepare for my last decades of life. I’ve been exploring the retirement community options and been shocked at the high costs for all the services they say I will need eventually yet it doesn’t appeal to me now. The marketing efforts are SO apparent and clear that they want my money and they are selling based on fear and predictions they don’t control. Thank you for the reminder of keeping my agency. I will decide when I no longer want to live in my house and then choose what’s next for me. I want to be excited and feeling happy about my next home rather than falling victim to what these marketers think I should do now while I’m healthy and vigorous. I have no reason now to give away my resources and succumb to an environment that can provide care that I don’t need! At 72, I have learned that something that is promoted as the last great deal is never true. It is only a good deal if you need the product. There is always another opportunity. Even though you may pay more by waiting until you need it, you haven’t gambled your money earlier for a circumstance that might not ever happen. Every one’s circumstances are different…I remind myself daily that it is my choice and really appreciate your suggestion to shift my thinking to what I am gaining now in my retirement years rather than what I’ve lost and what society says I should expect to lose. As a single woman with no children, the pressures come from the “twenty something’s” who don’t really have a clue and get commissions for signing me up. Enough already.
Monica. Of all the writers on Substack I identify the most with you & your beliefs. I am my gatekeeper. I’m planning to live each day to the fullest. Some days present challenging circumstances but I have been able to conquer them. Here’s to all of us who have lived long but expect more.