Why Americans Are Uniquely Afraid to Grow Old

Life is arithmetic. There are only three certainties all of us face: you’re born, you live, and you die. How many years you get in that interval is something of a mortal crapshoot, but most people would agree on one thing: they’d like as many as possible. That fact is becoming more relevant than ever in the U.S., where aging Baby Boomers have now pushed the 65-and-over cohort to 56 million people, or 16.9% of the national population. By 2030, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 20% of the population will be of retirement age. By 2034, seniors will outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history. That’s an awful lot of old people confronting the physical, cognitive, and emotional frailties that come with age, not to mention the cold reality that the older you get the closer you come to, well, the end of the line. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] There is an entire branch of psychology built around the geriatric mind, dealing not just with such clinical conditions as dementia, but also the simple business of fear of—and resistance to—aging. That resistance often takes its form in all manner of youth-preserving strategies such as cosmetic surgery (with 15.5 million procedures performed in the U.S. in 2020 according to industry reports); extreme sports like septuagenarian marathons; and magical thinking (Sixty is the new fifty!). But apart from fear of death—which, admittedly, is hard to get around—why exactly do Americ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Psychology Source Type: news