The Passing Years

"It showed [Getty Images search for online images of older people] that we are just not visualizing older people with the same richness and diversity that we use to visualize younger people."
"Instead of representing aging in a genuine way we are reinforcing stereotypes."
Rebecca Swift, director of creative insight, Getty

"If we can get people to think about aging in a much more positive way and not as this inevitable cascade of decline then we could start to see really impressive feats of function in older people that wouldn't be just exceptions to the rule but would just be, 'Well, that's what older people do now'."
Joe Baker, kinesiologist, York University, Toronto

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau star in Grumpy Old Men    Credit: Rex

In bygone societies the elderly were celebrated for assumed and legendary levels of wisdom, related to their years of life giving them opportunities for experiences, each of which is considered a learning opportunity to accumulate knowledge and confidence about the world around them. Placing them in a trusted position to teach the younger generation through capitalizing on the knowledge they acquired through living and exposure to life's vicissitudes.

The elderly were respected and honoured, as long as they weren't living in subsistence societies where resources to sustain life were limited and everyone in society was expected to expend time and energy to be productive. In some such societies, once the elderly became infirm and could no longer contribute to the general weal while remaining respected, they acceded to a custom of removing themselves, recognizing they had become a burden.

In today's societies of relative plenty while the elderly have equal status in importance to all others their status as elders is accepted as a natural order of life progressing from infancy to adulthood to the senior years and death. An aura of expendability has arisen in a culture that celebrates youth, freshness, action, beauty and good health. Everyone wants to be included in the category of 'young', including the elderly, attempting to fashion themselves as pre-elderly.

And those whose health is impaired by age to the point where such a pretense is no longer viable, regard themselves gloomily as old, decrepit, awaiting the inevitable. That frame of mind can wreak deadly damage on a psyche fixated on the benefits of youth they feel they never fully sufficiently appreciated when they were young and yearn to recapture now that they are not, but with ill health dominating their lives they surrender to mere existence with scant pleasure in life.

Rebecca Swift was alluding to a 2016 search by Getty Images relating to their stock photo inventory and their web-crawling technology, discovering in their search for typical photographs of the elderly that what they found were pictures of unhappy, sedentary people, people shown in stereotypical activities; sitting around with grandchildren, having tea with other elderly; typical inaction associated with 'being old'.

Film and advertising, television shows and online images all portray the typical older person whom society generally glances past, ignores or views as caricatures, because of course aging is a natural phenomenon beloved of no one.   If, on the other hand, as a member of that demographic one is routinely exposed to these popular cultural tropes it has a depressing effect; a generation viewed in unappealing stereotypes, gearing the onlooker to anticipate their own impending fate.

It is well known that exposure to racist and sexist assumptions can cause minorities and women to test and think less positively about themselves. There are studies that demonstrate that older people will tend to walk, talk and think more tentatively if they have been exposed to ongoing, unflattering images of the elderly frail, incapable of adequately caring for themselves, withdrawing from general society.

Vivienne Flesher

At York University's School of Kinesiology and Health Sciences, Rachael Stone, a researcher, had older test subjects climb a flight of stairs. She then had them repeat the exercise after giving them a false article to read on aging eroding stair climbing ability. From speed, to accuracy, to balance, their performance deteriorated.

Memory too is susceptible to a similar decline when doubts assail one's capacity because of exposure to stereotypical renditions of the elderly mind fraught with memory lapses. Those risible but telling "senior moments". Many elderly make the assumption that their memories are failing them and because they feel that way, they make no effort to use that function; to recall a long-familiar recipe, to rely on a GPS system driving a familiar route. Cognitive decline follows when the brain is underused.

There are ample studies that illustrate that people with a more positive view of growing older will be better at looking after themselves, performing better on memory and motor control tests where they are able to walk faster, standing a better chance of recovering from disability and living an average of seven and a half years longer than others of their age group who make no effort to use all their functions, physical and mental.

Researchers at Yale University studied people with a gene variant linked to dementia, finding that those with a favourable view of aging were fifty percent less likely to go on to develop the disease than those with a gloomy outlook. Professor of epidemiology and psychology Becca Levy, the lead author in the study regards the results as an action call: "This helps make the case of implementing a public health campaign against ageism".