DREAMS OF TOMORROW

Listen here, folks. Let me tell you… The more you age, the more you see.

Leading up to and in the wake of my most recent birthday, I have been giving much thought to the topic of aging, in all aspects -biological, physical, psychological, and spiritual. We live at a time when Botox and facelifts are getting increasingly popular and even normalized. Older celebrities are now opting to ‘fix’ their wrinkles with cosmetic treatments that make them seem artificially younger. Moreover, the glorification of youth is now an ingrained thing. Everybody is scrambling for the next big serum, fashion trend, or face cream that will preserve their youthful countenance. Whether we know it or not, we’ve lost the meaning of beauty and isolated it to mean a youthful and perfect glow. For that reason, age is no longer a mark of wisdom, experience, and long discernment, but solely a hallmark of the end of youth. And when the only perspective of aging one has is ‘the end of youth’, society may end up sending a horrible message to its young ones… Let’s dig deeper:

The Problem with ‘The End of Youth’ Perspective

I know. I get it. I used to dread every birthday because I knew that every consecutive ‘Happy Birthday!’ was a herald of my aging self -and I’m not even yet thirty years old.

Three to four years back, my past self saw aging as a bad thing. I did not like to think of an older version of myself; I dreaded every New Year because I knew my birthday would be coming up; unfortunately, I even dared to wonder what it would be like to die young rather than grow old. Yes, that was how vehemently averse I was to the natural cycle of aging.

But, thankfully, God pulled me out of that unfortunate ditch. This year, with the addition of another (grateful) year to my life, I thought about aging differently. Up until this year, I’d been looking at getting older as ‘the end of youth’, which, in a natural sense, would be a bad thing. Aging and death are evil. Humans were never made to die. Death was a punishment given to the human race after Adam and Eve had disobeyed God and ate the fruit. So, the natural aversion to this concept is normal, but again, taking it too far can be detrimental to an individual and society at large.

God writes straight with crooked lines. If aging and death now form our natural cycle in fallen nature, the keys for us to be Saints have been woven into that cycle by God. With the very same fingers He used to pronounce our judgment for disobedience, He blesses us. Contrary to popular sentiments, aging is a molder of virtue. It is a process that allows you to grow from the instability and discovery mode of youth into the steadiness of an adult person. We all know that we make more life-altering mistakes when we’re younger -which is normal, because it is by those mistakes that we learn and grow into better persons. By shaping out of youth, we become more virtuous. Like a block of marble that is carved until perfection, youth should be used to discover, repent, encourage, and learn, until with time, the individual becomes a better version of him or herself. Get it? Sounds pretty, doesn’t it?

But the sad story is that this process can be bypassed. Or worse, the process can be mistaken for being the goal itself. That is, the time, sentiments, and immaturity of youth can be taken as an achievement, and not a learning curve. For instance, I see older people nowadays trying to imitate the fashion, thinking, and conduct of younger people -as if they would earn a medal of participation by doing so. Don’t get me wrong, however: There is nothing amiss with being open, communicating with the youth, or trying to naturally preserve outward beauty as you age. I actually think we need more of that. But this becomes a problem when the learning and imitating go only one way, rickety wisdom from youth to adults.

Of course, when aging is seen as a predicament, this is the sentiment you get in society. In a world where the younger are wiser, getting old will be an occasion for shame, as opposed to one for responsibility. As you age, the development of virtue and experience is supposed to equip you to pass down knowledge to younger generations, in order to save them from the same mistakes you made. That is an act of charity which, in my opinion, ranks next to the love of a mother for her child. So, it’s quite baffling how we often miss this. I used to miss it. That’s why my reason for writing this piece is to pass down that nugget of wisdom to whoever might be reading.

The first problem of fearing aging is ‘the end of youth’ worldview. One must banish it if one wants to grow in virtue.

The Problem with the Current Cycle of Youth.

So, growing in virtue… that’s getting a little heavy. It’s getting more difficult to be virtuous because the system of adulting has itself been broken.

Virtue is formed through years of trial-and-error. The normal cycle goes like this: You think something is the way it is; you do it like so; you fail; you learn; you grow. That is virtue-forming, shaped mainly by our experiences as life goes on and gets tougher. However, somewhere within that cycle, the nuts have been screwed out. Now, we have “adults” who have bypassed this process and ended up as childish grown-ups. And why? Because nobody encourages virtue any longer. Everything is affirming, loving, kind, etc. If you don’t happen to have parents or guardians who really love you and let you know when you’ve committed a mistake, you end up as one of these childish grown-ups. Do you get my meaning?

Now, let me clear up my thoughts again. By childish adult, I do not mean people who express childlike simplicity. That’s called childlikeness, and is in fact, a very praiseworthy attribute. Childishness is a fake substitute for it, where full-grown adults express behaviour that is typical of a child. Just think: Lack of responsibility or commitment; immature manner of speech, thinking, dress and/or comportment; limited outlook on life, etc. All these behaviours and like can be seen, forgiven, and even adored in children because we know that they are in a process and that they will grow out of it. But when children grow up still exhibiting those characteristics and maybe even glorifying them, something has broken. And it’s not just within that person, but in society itself.

Popular case study:

I have heard many complaints about members of Generation Z being the most irresponsible and unresponsive set of modern-day adults. We have shorter attention spans; are less able to interact normally in social situations; have high technology and social media usage; for the most part, are emotionally detached; seem quite unlettered in our academic and social life, even as college graduates; engage in risky behaviour; own few resources and can manage even less… I could go on, but I’m a Gen-Z. Listing this is physically painful, sorry.

While I can understand where those complaints come from, let me state that no generation does right or goes wrong out of the blue. The current cycle of youth is broken, but it didn’t break overnight. Generational behaviour is formed long before members of that generation are born (i.e., in their parents, predecessors, past societal norms, and so on). Therefore, Gen-Z is only displaying the behavioural symptoms of a disease that has been infecting modern society for the last 60-70 years. I could go further back, but for the sake of this article, I’m linking this discussion to the technological revolution. Modern adults’ lack of responsibility and responsiveness not only depicts the epidemic of meaninglessness that I spoke of in my other piece, but it also tells of the unique financial, socioeconomic, and frankly, spiritual ditch that members of Generation Z find themselves in. How can one become a mature adult when one doesn’t know the essence of his/her life? How can one grow up if current economic inflation is incompatible with home ownership, marriage, and/or starting a family, all of which have been traditional hallmarks of adulthood? How is it possible to be a socially functioning adult when, while growing up, one has been solely surrounded by screens and technological stimulation? Yes, Gen Z may not be the most amiable group of people, but they’ve had a lot of issues going for them, and again, it’s just a symptom of a metastasized cancer in society.

Using the Gen Z case as an example, one can see that the current cycle of youth needs fixing, irrespective of whose fault the damage is. Until this is fixed, people will continue to grow without ever learning; to live while striving to remain children; to glorify extended youth and ridicule maturity in others, because it shows their own failed adulthood.

Are you one like that? I certainly do have problems up that alley. But it’s never too late to re-examine.

Next:

The Problem with Hyper-attention to Youth

This is a perennial problem for humans. That we pay too much attention to youth. Not just youth as in the youth, but in youth as a mindset. We focus a lot on the idea that ‘New is good. Old is bad’, ‘Out with the old, and in the shiny new’. While that may be true in many cases, if the only thing we focus on is youth, new, trendy, fashion-of-the-day, etc., not only will we burn out trying to follow every generation, but we will also end up becoming painfully superficial.

Personally, I think that there can be a balance between recognizing new things and understanding old customs as well. Neither infringing upon the other’s boundaries, but enriching each other in a virtuous way. The new thing builds on what the old has accomplished, slowly and naturally -like the making of a massive cathedral over four hundred years of sweat and hard work.

Sometimes, new is good. If you have a rusty car, you change it. If you have a country grandma who keeps squinting her eyes and has never heard of cataract surgery, it would be nice for her to learn something new and thereby improve her quality of life. But at other times, old is needed too. Most things we do to live have been tried and tested (e.g., studying, raising a family, working hard, etc.), and the comfort in those is knowing that you can never go wrong, because these old customs have time and time again made humans flourish. Old gives you advice where new leaves you blank. Grandma offers you wisdom where your young peer might give you youthful folly. Both old and new are good and can be intertwined together in a beautiful tapestry. However, if we as a society are hyper-focused on the new, we become ignorant, prideful, and miserable, making the same mistakes that our ancestors have made and repented of.

That’s why people shrink at the idea of aging and why people are trying all they can to preserve the cosmetic features of youth in their faces and figures. Now, the more you age, the more irrelevant you become. I have never seen anything more superficial.

All the while, this discussion had been on the broken cycle of current adulting, but that will never be fixed if we are unwilling to learn from and appreciate the old, whether that be past experiences, elders, or past generations. One is not supposed to copy what they did verbatim, but to learn their lessons, either by word-of-mouth or inference, just so you don’t make the same mistakes in life. For that, you need to observe the people you talk to, especially if they are older. Note their life experiences, stories, and advice, and adapt that to your life however you deem fit. You need to look closely and train your rare attention, as Anliette from The Art of Re; calls it.

It takes time to observe and learn, but it’s worth it.

Practical advice?

Look at yourself in the mirror and learn to love yourself as God made you, whether young or old. Look at your surroundings, immediate community, family, friends, and even acquaintances. How can you learn from new things and respect old knowledge as well? How can you learn from your own mistakes, so that your own cycle of adulting comes out clean? Madness, as they say, is doing the same over and over again, and expecting different results. Madness begets depression and dissatisfaction. No matter how much you try to conceal your natural process of aging, if you have not truly grown after 20, 40, or even 60 years of life, you will always remain dissatisfied, constantly chasing youth while avoiding senescence like the Black Death.

That, my friends, is the problem with fearing aging: Superficiality and lack of growth. If you are truly growing, however nonlinear it may be, age will just be a number to you.

With that being said,

What about you? Have you recently celebrated your birthday? What lessons have you learned over the past year? What do you think about aging?

Till next time.

Au revoir,

Christine.