SUNDAY, 16 NOVEMBER 2025

When we’re young, very few of us can imagine ourselves growing old. We see these sorry creatures with white hair struggling to walk a few steps and taking what feels like an age to do even the most basic of tasks and they almost seem to be a different species. Often our only contact with the elderly is meeting up with gran and grandad, and many of us love them to bits, but their world remains a foreign terrain of cardigans and cups of tea and houses which are uncomfortably hot with the TV turned up to the decibel levels of a pneumatic drill.

This gap grows wider each day as technology changes so rapidly that yesterday’s cutting edge becomes tomorrow’s blast from the past. In previous centuries, the place where we were born often became the place where we were buried, unless we were sent to war to die on behalf of king and country, and our daily routines, our hobbies and our pastimes wouldn’t stray very far from those of earlier generations. We wore similar clothes and did similar jobs to those of our parents in an age when only the upper classes could afford the luxury of fashion. Then ‘yoof’ culture took off in response to post-war affluence and the crack that appeared between the generations became a chasm, as the most important relationships in life took place with people of the same age rather than those of a similar background or locality or social class. Slowly this morphed into our contemporary reality where instead of dying in the house in which we were born, we die in retirement homes which have ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’ written above the front gate.

Getting old is far from fun. The most obvious and visible problem is physical decline. At first this is merely annoying as things which used to come easily – opening jars, bending down to pick something up, being able to put on our underwear while standing up – become demanding tasks. Leonard Cohen said this much better than I am here, with his usual wit and wisdom, in Tower of Song: ‘I ache in the places where I used to play’. Each day we wake up and feel an obscure pain somewhere in our body, which then disappears on the following day, only for a different ache in another part of the body to take its turn to torment us. In the next stage that follows this period of irritation, the decline becomes incapacitating, and then we know for sure we are heading for the rest home and waiting for God. We revert to being little children, unable to take care of ourselves, except now we have the mind of an adult who squirms with embarrassment inside and shares the rage of Dylan Thomas ‘against the dying of the light’.

Until that mind goes. Because at some point after the physical decline, the mental decline kicks in. At first this is as trivial and frustrating as being unable to recall the names of people, places and things, but underneath this early symptom the short-term memory is gradually starting to crumble. I can see this in myself even at my age of 72, which is fairly youthful nowadays by the standards of our medicated world. When I was a kid, I’d learn something new and most of the time it would be lodged in my memory forever; now almost every fresh piece of information is gone in a flash, and if I want to remember something, I have to make a conscious effort to keep learning it again and again until it is finally fixed in my brain. And revisit it from time to time just to make sure.    

These biological problems would present themselves whatever the culture around us. However, the modern western culture which is spreading throughout the globe is hardly helping because there is not the same regard for age that used to exist in traditional cultures wherever they were on the globe: the Orient, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America. I suggest that the main reason for this is not a collapse in ethical standards, but the fact that there are so many of us dinosaurs around these days. We’re not special anymore. The strengths we were traditionally credited with, such as the wisdom of age and the benefits of a lifetime’s experience, and the role as adviser and comforter which we might hold as a result, have been handed over to therapists and self-help gurus and online influencers, and even of late, God help us, to the clutches of AI. It is now we wrinklies who need to learn and to adapt because most of us have no idea about modern technology and can’t do even simple things with it that are child’s play for the young.

Meanwhile, everything in advertising screams that being young is so much better than being old. Whether it’s yogurt or clothing or travel that is being sold, a Martian watching these adverts as their sole source of information would conclude that members of the human species must all pop their clogs on reaching the age of thirty-five. It’s true that some marketing is targetted at old folks, but this is essentially limited to niche markets: stairlifts, Saga holidays, funeral arrangements, incontinence briefs, elasticated trousers. Our culture is obsessed with ‘yoof’, and ageism is one of the few forms of discrimination still accepted or ignored.

Surveys on the subject show that a large majority of older workers feel they have been subject to discrimination in the workplace on the grounds of age, especially in hiring and promotion. This research only records people’s impressions, though, and doesn’t prove by itself that such discrimination exists, but it is hard to see how ageism could be studied through quantitative research in the manner of that into racism or sexism. There are several studies, for example, where similar CVs were sent out to employers with just a change of name in the candidates, which showed very clearly that people with a foreign-sounding name, especially African or Middle Eastern, were much less likely to get through to the interview stage. But this approach cannot be used to study ageism because people of different ages of necessity will have very different CVs. Other ways must be found to study whether ageist discrimination in the workplace is real, but I’d be astonished if it isn’t.  

One thing many older people say is that they feel as if they are invisible in public, as if they no longer exist. They are tolerated at best, assumed to be incapable and out-of-touch and likely to have misplaced more than a few of their marbles, and seen as an inconvenience that slows down the fast-paced lives of the young and middle-aged. The old lady who wants to chat with the checkout clerk at the supermarket elicits a rolling of eyes from those in the queue, while the old man with poor eyesight slowly counting out his money might attract sympathetic looks from the customers waiting behind, but smiles that are overly polite betray underlying annoyance while out of sight on the floor feet are tapping with impatience.

However, as a brief detour from my list of the negatives of old age, the fact that we oldies are disregarded is in some ways one of the few benefits of advancing years. Like the woman in Jenny Joseph’s poem, we can ignore social conventions, refuse to be sensible, behave anti-socially, wear purple, and spit. We can go as far as being downright rude, even to the point of launching ripe language towards a perfect stranger, and unless he is psychotic we won’t get punched in the mouth like a younger person would. The target of our outburst is far more likely to turn away with a shake of the head, while muttering audibly under his breath, ‘Stupid old git.’

The old lady at the supermarket who wants to stop and chat as she used to be able to do when she was young is probably lonely. Loneliness is one of the most heartbreaking realities for many elderly people, despite advertising’s comforting images of contented elderly couples relaxing in their garden or surrounded by loving grandkids. The reality is different, and many of the elderly have very little social contact other than a vicarious rapport with the faces on their TV screen. Cohen begins Tower of Song with the statement that his ‘friends are gone’, and if we survive long enough, those with whom we shared our lives will one by one be no more. So the aged often live alone, their friends having died and their spouses passed away, and are trapped in a kind of prison, especially if health or mobility issues make them unable to join local clubs or social groups. Meanwhile, many of the actors they used to adore, the comedians that made them roar with laughter, and the musicians they grew up listening to have all shuffled off their mortal coil. The world has become an alien space, not at all like the place they grew up in, as the speed of change goes into overdrive and they feel lost and left behind.

Many people, I suspect, will counter that a lot of this is not inevitable and the elderly should embrace the modern world and not wallow in nostalgia for the past. But why? What is so wonderful about a modern world where most young people growing up are likely to be poorer than their parents, while the kind of tyrants their generation fought against in the Second World War are taking over the world funded by billionaires? I often describe myself as a cultural dinosaur, and I’m quite happy to be one. I have no desire to embrace contemporary culture. I feel music, for example, is now populist rather than popular, not springing naturally from the grass roots but confected by marketing people to whom everything is merely another product, a commodity to flog, no different from cans of beans. Meanwhile, film is dominated by asinine superhero movies where the special effects are infinitely more interesting than the characters or the plots. This feels very similar to me to the flashy, trashy court masques of the 17^th century after the glories of the genuinely popular Elizabethan and Jacobean stages. We are now spoonfed ‘culture’ by marketing departments who think Art can be created by formula and focus groups and to whom success comes down to sales figures. And this is unlikely to change anytime soon, since humanity’s latest deus ex machina, AI, is making things much worse.

Rant over. But that’s what we old people do – we rant. And it’s one of the very few things we’re known to be good at. This was officially recognised by two very successful TV series of the early 2000s, Grumpy Old Men and Grumpy Old Women, in which a mix of comedians, actors and well-loved UK minor celebrities railed against the horrors and absurdities of contemporary British life. Similarly, a very popular and long-lasting sitcom, One Foot in the Grave (1990-2000), featured a main character, Victor Meldrew, who moaned and whinged and ranted through every episode. The actor was so adept at the role that the name of the character became an eponym for a grumpy old man (‘he’s a real Victor Meldrew’). So while being old may take away many of our pleasures, one of the few that remain is the joy of an uncontrolled rant.

The problems of growing old extend beyond the physical or psychological; they can easily take on a philosophical or existential nature. This begins with retirement, which obviously can offer great benefits such as more freedom and a chance to do all the things we felt we were too busy to do when we needed to work to survive. But many people find that perhaps the job they longed to be released from formed a kind of spine to their lives, and once they have lost the structure which their work gave them they find it difficult to fill all the time that is now available. One of the reasons I regularly update this website, for instance, even though almost no one ever visits it, is because it gives me a routine and a reason to get up in the morning. It solves the problem of how to fill the hours without hitting the booze at noon.

The sense of detachment from a world which has moved on and left us behind doesn’t help senior citizens at all. When the things we do are merely pastimes, it is hard to have long-term goals. To use myself as an example again, when I wrote my first novel about thirty years ago and a publisher wanted to publish it, I was spurred on by the dream that maybe this could be the first step to a working career as a writer (sadly, it wasn’t). But I know that if a similar thing happened today and my writing began to attract interest, it would not feel like the start of something or the gate to a future life. I’m simply too old for those dreams. I don’t deny that this shedding of ambition has its advantages, such as allowing a freedom to be who we want to be and do what we want to do, unencumbered by thoughts of failure or success, but it is hard to dismiss the feeling that all we are doing is playing football in training matches where the result doesn’t matter, far from the real action on the pitch in a competitive game. Essentially we’re doodling.

I recognise that a simple and powerful argument against all of what I have written is that growing old is preferable to the alternative. But is it really? What is the point of continuing to live if the life we have is a daily chore with arthritis thrown in for good measure? Yes, the adverts make it look so effortlessly pleasant, as middle-class couples with health and disposable income visit English Heritage sites, but the reality for most of the elderly is very different: chronic health issues and fretting about every penny.

For me there is a fault in our philosophical thinking about life and death. There has always been a desire to live forever, whether it’s the alchemists seeking the elixir of life, or the various pseudo-scientific attempts of the 20^th century such as cryogenics, or the contemporary fantasy of downloading our consciousness into software, but this desire for immortality is ill-considered. Imagine the sheer boredom of being stuck with oneself for the whole of time immemorial or a life as a kind of living fossil amid a culture which left you behind several ages ago. Not to mention the practical issues of how we feed and find a space for everyone in a world where no one dies. This is hell, not paradise on earth.

I accept that most people reading this will see it as excessively depressing, focusing only on the negatives, but I can’t see the point of sugar-coating the reality that there is no place for the elderly in our contemporary world because we no longer serve any purpose and the freedom that we longed for on retirement isn’t the burden off our shoulders that we had imagined. We are often kept alive by a cocktail of drugs which allows us to just about function but not to thrive. The role of wise old head has gone in an age where the elderly outnumber the young and it is the latter who are in tune with modern culture and the latest technology. It is this, more than the physical decline or even the mental decline, which is making life so alienating for so many of the old in the modern developed world. I concede that old age can be meaningful and happy if we enjoy good health and don’t need to count the pennies, but not even these can fully compensate for a life which is just a way of passing time, a game of chess with Death.

Death gives meaning to life because it enables new life. Without it, there would be nothing except repetition and the slow encroachment of entropy, both personal and societal. So while getting old sucks, all we can do is hope that our faculties hold out as long as possible and we are able to enjoy the autumn of our lives, but then be ready to accept when our time is over and we should leave the world behind. It’s time for us to step into the shade and let others have their moment in the sun.