Growing Older in a World That is Telling You Not To

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Ageing has always been an emotionally loaded subject. Something has shifted in recent years where the tools for managing or reversing the visible signs of ageing have become more accessible, more socially normalised, and more casually discussed. And social media is playing a central role.

 

The cultural message about ageing

The cultural messages about ageing are fairly consistent: that it is something to be managed, delayed, and if possible reversed. The visible signs of getting older are often treated as problems to be solved rather than as an ordinary part of the human experience. The implication is that to age visibly is somehow to have failed to adequately maintain oneself.

This message is delivered through multiple channels simultaneously. The beauty industry commercially invested in ageing as a problem. Social media with heavily filtered and augmented images of people being held up as aspirational. Peer groups with new aesthetics positioned as a baseline against which unmodified ageing begins to look like the outlier.

 

Social comparison and the ageing body

Social comparison is built in to what it means for us to be human. We are relational beings and social comparison operates powerfully in the domain of appearance. It can produce a particular kind of self-consciousness in us about the natural ageing process, as though our bodies are doing something wrong by changing. Comparison may be against your peers, younger people, or a previous version of yourself, which can make the challenges feel more ubiquitous and disorienting.

 

The external gaze and the internal relationship with the self

The psychological cost of living in a society strongly focused on appearance tends to be high, especially in the context of ageing. A lowering of self-esteem and an unravelling of self-worth are not unusual, with low mood, anxiety and challenging relationships with food and/or exercise closely in tow.

When the primary measure of self focuses on how the body appears to others, our relationships with ourselves can become critical and fixated on a certain form of external evaluation. This can produce a chronic anxiety about appearance which can impact our daily lives, internal worlds, and our relationships.

 

The lasting effect of early messaging

The way that we approach ageing is shaped by more than just the culture around us. The messages that we receive throughout childhood, puberty, and early adulthood about our bodies, appearance, youth, and ageing itself leave a lasting impression. Whether those messages were celebratory or critical, affirming or undermining. Whether the adults around us modelled warm, comfortable, appreciative relationships with their changing bodies and the ageing process, or whether they pulled, prodded, mocked, and commented on their bodies in ways that taught us to view our own as objects to be monitored, managed, or ashamed of.

Coupled with a punitive social and media landscape which values a narrowly defined physical aesthetic, those early impressions can become the lasting lens through which our ageing bodies are later seen.

What therapy can offer

If you are navigating the territory of ageing within this challenging cultural landscape, therapy can offer you a space to examine the relationship between yourself and your experiences of the external gaze: what contributes to its power, how much importance it has been given and by whom, and what a different relationship with the ageing process might look and feel like.

Therapy can offer you the opportunity to explore the emotional messaging that you absorbed through childhood, puberty and adulthood about your body, appearance, youth, and ageing itself. This can help us to understand how much of your current relationship with the ageing self belongs to you, and how much was inherited.

Therapy acknowledges the realities of navigating a world and media context increasingly fixated on the physical self. Therapy can also offer you the opportunity to explore the ‘ageing as a problem to be solved’ narrative, examine social comparison, and turn the volume up on alternative measures of value.

If the pressure to look a certain way, or to conceal the visible signs of ageing, is producing more anxiety than you expected, and you would appreciate the opportunity to unpack your experiences, you are welcome to be in touch.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and  internationally, and 'Walk and Talk' therapy in Northwest London green spaces. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.