During my childhood, I constantly wanted to be older than I was. I tried to hang out with the kids in the older grades, I did everything I could to be considered older than I was as to gain aged prestige and cache, I tirelessly worked to turn the eye of many a high school girl while I was in middle school, I snuck out and drove without an adult when only having a learner’s permit. These examples seem to be the typical stuff kids do in a search for more independence and greater acceptance in the world of adults.
Of course what I was attempting to do, in hindsight, was to see myself as more independent and more accepted in a wider world even if merely on the surface.
As I consider the cultural influences that surrounded me in my youth, I see how I was repeatedly told that everything would be better by being older. In many ways that concept proved to be true, because there were many aspects of life I was unable to fully experience socially, emotionally or legally until I was older.
Yet now as I turn 50, I find myself ceaseless bombarded by messages of how I and the over 50 crowd should remain 21 …forever. We are repeatedly shown and told that nothing can be better than to look, feel and even act younger than we really are!*
Is such a materialistic approach to aging the one we really want to pursue as we grow older? I fear it is one that would keep us chasing after an illusion never to be realized.
I refuse to believe that I have lived half a century to reverse my field of vision now and idealize my youth in such a way as to attempt to re-live it!
Perhaps, my peers and I are ready to search for deeper and more revealing aspects of living life without tracing over our outgrown notions of who we wanted to be.
When we try to freeze a specific segment of our earlier years lived and replay it in a repeating loop, we deny ourselves the ability to look honestly at where we are, grow more fully into who we are and venture into the future with continued wonder.
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© Anthony Antoville 2014
Anthony Antoville is COO of Champion Advocates LLC in Portland, Oregon. He has been serving the psychosocial needs of seniors since 1991. Anthony is a published author with The Edwin Mellen Press.
*Forever Young: America’s Obsession With Never Growing Old
Why is America such a youth obsessed culture?
Dale Archer, MD in Reading Between the (Head)Lines, Psychology Today
