BioMed
Age is experienced through gender, class, work, desire, and historical expectation.
Where there are many old people, they get less respect than in societies where there are few. When only the powerful and well-off survived into old age, age itself borrowed their standing. Mass survival removed that link.
Blaming a whole generation for its supposed luck feeds a war between young and old. It ignores the many in that generation who have no good fortune at all to feel guilty about. The real problems, such as pensions, deserve serious attention rather than baiting the old.
Culture ages the sexes differently. Older women are cast as hags, witches and gorgons. Older men are pushed to keep desire visibly alive, seek help to hold on to youthful potency, and feel humiliated when they cannot.
Trying never to grow old is a rejection of life itself. It is also shallow and elitist, because it refuses to engage with the suffering and helplessness of others. Refusing to accept the tragic makes the imagination poorer.
The strength and beauty of youth never truly belong to the person who has them. They are best treated with indifference, so that losing them is not losing the self.
Older people often have a far stronger sense of their long past than of how to relate to their shorter future. Reflecting on age includes tracing how the past shaped the present and mourning the roads not taken.
Someone seen as dependent is easily ignored, patronized or pitied, and treated as if they had no inner life or secrets. They may also come to feel like a burden on the very people they love most.
Long-term monogamous relationships comfort us by removing the intense jealousy that always shadows desire. The price is that desire itself is moderated or sharply reduced along the way.
Very few old people think of themselves as old. A person carries inside them all the selves they have been, so the inner sense of who you are does not match the age others see.
How fast and how badly people age depends on their social class. Biologists find class differences even at the level of the body's cells, so old age is not one shared biological fate.