Cultural Death Anxiety: Why Some Societies Fear Age and Others Revere It
Somewhere in Belgravia, behind a façade of pale stone and polite wealth, there’s a Botox clinic so immaculate it feels like sin to breathe in too deeply. The receptionist whispers, the magazines are untouched, and the lighting is kind… unnaturally so. The air smells faintly of roses and antiseptic. In the waiting room, time doesn’t pass. Or rather, it’s suspended, vacuum-packed in syringes and specialist creams, waiting to be injected into the cheeks of the anxious and ageless. There’s a woman beside you flipping through a coffee table book about “refreshed beauty,” her forehead so smooth it looks like it’s trying to forget her past. No one here wants to get old. They want to disappear into youth like it’s a safehouse.
Half a world away, in a village in rural China, someone’s great-aunt used to sit under the plum tree peeling apples for no one in particular. Her face, all gentle folds and sun-worn texture, never pretended. People didn’t avoid her gaze; they leaned into it. Her stories weren’t thrilling, but they mattered, the way an old river matters even if it no longer floods. Her age wasn’t an apology or a punchline. It was architecture. Solid. Useful. Revered.
The difference between these two rooms — one glossy with denial, the other settled in truth, has never felt starker. Age, depending on where you stand, is either a slow betrayal or a kind of triumph. In much of the West, growing older is a problem to be solved: chemically, surgically, or strategically ignored. Meanwhile, in places still tethered to ancestral memory, age becomes proof that you’ve lived deeply, not just long.
How a culture responds to the mirror, to the body’s slow surrender, says everything about its relationship to death. And death, though we wrap it in white linen and call it wellness, is always the thing we’re really trying to outpace. So we inject. We gloss. We whisper words like “rejuvenation” as if decay were optional. But time is coming, regardless. The question is whether we choose to run from it — or walk with it, hand in hand, knowing that even endings can be beautiful.
The Mirror Lies: Youth as Currency in the West
The Western mirror doesn’t reflect reality. It markets. It bargains. It lies in a voice just soft enough to sound like encouragement. “You look great for your age”. “You’re ageing gracefully”. “You don’t look forty”. Compliments as camouflage for existential panic. Because in Anglo-capitalist culture, from the Pilates-laced streets of LA to the Botoxed brow of Belgravia, ageing is not a natural progression. It’s a PR crisis.
Youth here isn’t a phase; it’s a brand. A commodity wrapped in retinol and “clean girl” aesthetics, exfoliated to high heaven and sold back to us in amber glass jars with minimalist fonts. Youth is productivity. Youth is beauty. Youth is moral. Ageing? Poor management, darling. You should’ve moisturised more in your twenties. You should’ve drunk more water. You should’ve said no to stress. As if crow’s feet are a personal failure, rather than the gentle handwriting of time on skin.
We don’t age. We “anti-age.” We firm, tighten, sculpt, smooth. We book in for prejuvenation before we’ve even earned a wrinkle. Teenagers are now getting preventative Botox. Twenty-five-year-olds are sold eye creams “for the first signs of ageing” — which, translated, means having once blinked in direct sunlight.
This isn’t just skincare. It’s theology. We worship youth like it’s salvation. The rituals are absurdly devout. Twelve-step routines before bed. Collagen supplements blessed with the vague promise of elasticity. Face yoga. Green juices. Moon-charged water. And if all else fails: a shaman-led ice bath retreat in Iceland.
But at the dark heart of all this effort lies a spiritual unease. The anti-ageing industrial complex with its serums, surgeries, soul coaches, and cryogenic dream-vaults, isn’t about skin at all. It’s about death anxiety. A very modern, very expensive refusal to accept that the body is temporary. That no matter how many lasers we subject ourselves to, time is not a glitch that can be debugged by science or shamanism. It keeps ticking. Silently. Softly. Like a silk noose.
What unnerves me most is how normalised it all feels. I catch myself inspecting my own reflection, not with curiosity, but with assessment. Are my laugh lines deepening or just a trick of the light? Why does my left eye seem more tired than my right? A friend of my mother once told her she had “timeless skin.” She beamed, then immediately Googled “meaning of timeless skin.” Turns out it’s a compliment that only exists to reassure those afraid of no longer being twenty-four.
Even our language betrays us. “You don’t look your age!” as if to do so would be a misfortune. “She’s let herself go,” a phrase that contains more venom than most crimes. We are taught, slowly and elegantly, to fear softness. To disguise our decades in beige tones and brightening concealer. Growing old in the West isn’t a rite of passage. It’s a slow disqualification.
And so we decorate our denial. We rebrand midlife as “perennial” and funerals as “celebrations of life.” We freeze our eggs, our fat, our expectations. Some even freeze their heads… quite literally. In the hope of being resurrected later, preferably in a world with better skincare. Cryonics is not science fiction anymore; it’s a luxury package for those who don’t trust nature’s exit plan. And if that fails? There’s always “legacy coaching,” where you can pay someone to help you leave behind the illusion of a meaningful life.
The irony is so thick you could inject it. In our scramble to defy time, we rob ourselves of any actual relationship with it. The elderly are no longer seen as wisdom-keepers but as cautionary tales. Don’t become her. The one who let time catch her. The one who stopped trying. Who wears linen for comfort instead of aesthetics.
And yet deep down, I suspect we know the truth. That behind the airbrushed billboards and collagen-enriched lies, there is something deeply unwell about a culture that cannot bear to age. Because to age is to accept change. To admit limitation. To walk into the unknown with grace rather than resistance. But we, Western moderns, would rather sprint backwards in heels than surrender to the stillness of becoming old.
The mirror lies, but we keep looking. Not to see ourselves, but to confirm we haven’t yet disappeared.
Botox in Belgravia: Cosmetic Stoicism and the Fear of the Sag
There is a particular type of woman gliding through Belgravia on a Tuesday morning who looks rested in a way that no amount of sleep ever quite achieves. Her brow is untroubled by time or thought. Her cheeks lift like polite applause. Her lips hover somewhere between silence and subtle dissent — just enough volume to suggest youth, not enough to imply vanity. She is what the UK’s upper-middle class has perfected: cosmetic stoicism. The art of looking untouched by both life and filler, while discreetly investing in both.
This isn’t LA’s maximalism, where faces are restructured like bad property investments, where the lips are ballooned into permanence, cheekbones are sharp enough to cut moral corners. No, the Belgravia aesthetic is stealth wealth for the face. Expensive restraint. If anything is plumped, lifted, or lasered, it must never be known. The procedure must leave no trace, only the faint suspicion that you drink more water than the average citizen and were perhaps kissed on the forehead by a vitamin D goddess at birth.
In these circles, looking your age is not a scandal, exactly. It’s just… unfortunate. Something that could have been prevented. Like mildew. Or parking fines. You are allowed to age, of course, but only if it looks accidental, poetic, maybe French. The goal isn’t to be young. It’s to be timeless — a word that floats generously above expensive moisturisers and quietly snubs chronology. It’s what happens when people with money and anxiety meet people with syringes and discretion.
The popularity of so-called "tweakments" in Britain’s posher postcodes has created a strange doublethink: to intervene without seeming to, to erase the signs of ageing under the banner of “natural restoration.” Dermal filler becomes a kind of emotional primer. A little Botox not to freeze expression, but to lightly sedate it — just enough so your face doesn’t scream “I’m tired” or, worse, “I’ve lived.” The look is fresh, hydrated, diplomatically neutral. The kind of face that’s been on a retreat, not in therapy. No trauma, no sag.
This culture is polite even in its panic. Ageing is never openly derided. It’s simply “managed.” A forehead refreshed. A jawline tidied. Under-eye bags lightly addressed, as if they’d simply said the wrong thing at a dinner party. The vocabulary is always whispering. You’re not trying to look young, heaven forbid, just less stressed. And stress, as we know, is something suffered only by people who don’t have private dermatologists.
Here lies the class rift, carved not in income but in elasticity. In Britain, those with money get to age privately and elegantly. Their wrinkles are curated. Their greying is blended. Their “menopause journeys” are mapped with supplements and £300 facials. Meanwhile, everyone else is left to contend with unfiltered reality. “You look tired” becomes a weaponised phrase, a death knell in beige disguise. Tired is old. Tired is failure. Tired is what happens when you can’t afford invisibility.
The middle classes try their best, of course. They Google “budget-friendly hyaluronic acid” and consider at-home microneedling kits with the same cautious optimism as one might approach DIY plumbing. But time, like inflation, is cruel to those without capital. The rich conceal their ageing behind serums and silence. The rest of us get told we’ve “let ourselves go” by people who’ve never carried a decade without collapsing.
It’s worth noting that men in these circles enjoy a different kind of immunity. Their ageing is called character. Their sag is gravitas. They are allowed to grow old so long as they do it with tailored trousers and good posture. But women? Women must perform the impossible — to change without appearing changed, to care without seeming desperate, to resist entropy with taste.
What’s remarkable (and frankly a bit bleak) is how utterly unradical this all feels. There is no rebellion here. Only careful maintenance. Cosmetic work is less about transformation than preservation. As if the self is a stately home and ageing is dry rot. You’re not trying to be someone else. Just trying not to become someone your friends pity.
And so, the Botox clinics of Belgravia hum quietly, like sanctuaries for those whose greatest fear is not death, but the public process of approaching it. In the waiting rooms, women sit beneath chandeliers and flick through magazines filled with people who look like slightly glossier versions of themselves. There’s a faint smell of rose water and money. A kind of worship happens here — not of beauty, exactly, but of its plausible deniability.
Because in Britain, even vanity must be modest. Even fear must be dressed in understatement. And even the face must learn to keep calm and carry on, ideally with a hint of volume in the mid-face and just a touch of preventative neurotoxin, darling. Just a touch.
Honour Thy Elder: Age as Status in East Asian Cultures
In my childhood growing up in Hong Kong, authority wasn’t predominantly shouted. It was steeped — slow, potent, herbal. You are told to not argue with your elders not because you feared consequence, but because you’d simply never reach their altitude of wisdom. It would be like a daffodil debating a mountain. Age, in the East Asian cosmology I was raised with, is not a pitstop on the way to irrelevance. It’s a slow burn to power. The older you get, the more you know, and crucially the more everyone agrees you know. Even if what you say might not be true or right.
Compare this with Britain, where once you hit fifty your opinions are gently ushered to the side like surplus furniture. You're thanked for your service, given a voucher for the garden centre, and expected to age quietly behind a copy of The Telegraph. In East Asia, your opinions get louder as your knees get worse. You may be arthritic, but you’re also correct. Age confers status, not side-lining.
In Chinese culture, filial piety — xiao — isn’t just a virtue. It’s an ecosystem. It governs not just behaviour but architecture: three generations under one roof, one shared rice cooker, and a grandparent in every corner reminding you that you are loved but also slightly inadequate. You do not roll your eyes at your elders; your eyes remain respectfully forward, as if even glancing sideways might risk dishonour. Their wrinkles are read like scripture. Their opinions are edicts. Their silence? Terrifying.
And yet, there is safety in all this. Age in East Asia is a kind of social pension — the older you are, the more value you accrue. In Japan, elders are often designated as sensei, regardless of whether they teach. Their life itself is the lesson. In Korea, the term noin (elder) carries built-in reverence, not because they used to contribute, but because they still do as storytellers, guides, cautionary tales who actually survived the chaos you’re currently Instagramming with a panic caption. When a Korean grandfather speaks at dinner, you don’t interrupt. You nod, pour his soju, and listen like it’s gospel. Because it is.
Even in the most urban East Asian settings with high-rises, neon, delivery apps, and 5G, the scaffolding of age-respect still holds. I remember attending a dinner in Hong Kong where the seating order, to my trained eyes looked arbitrary. In truth, it was a lattice of status: eldest at the centre, juniors orbiting like moons. No one touched their chopsticks until the oldest person had begun eating. No one left until they had risen. It wasn’t stiff. It was choreography.
Contrast this with London, where the elderly are thanked publicly on buses but privately sidelined. Once they start describing anything as “not what it used to be,” they’re mentally shuffled into the attic of cultural relevance. Even the language is passive-aggressive: “senior citizen,” “silver surfer,” “young at heart” — linguistic funeral wreaths dressed in lavender.
In East Asia, there’s no need to soften the edges. Age is the edge. Elderly didn’t need to pretend they were fun. They were wise, and that was better. They didn’t jog for charity or try to “get down with the youth.” They offered advice that could double as national policy and made soup that could resurrect the dead. They held court. Literally. The living room was their throne, and we were lucky to sit on the floor beside them.
Of course, the system isn’t perfect. Sometimes the reverence veers into suffocation, where elders become unquestionable and innovation is politely choked in the name of tradition. But still, there’s something deeply comforting about a culture that sees age as gain, not loss. Where you don’t have to disguise your years behind serums and euphemism. Where “looking your age” isn’t a slur, but a compliment — proof that you’ve survived, endured, and possibly learned how to make broth that cures heartbreak.
Living between Hong Kong and London has made this cultural contrast impossible to ignore. In one place, I’m taught to listen to age like it’s prophecy. In the other, I watch it be Photoshopped out of existence. One society hoists its elders like banners of inherited knowledge; the other politely ghosts them in marketing campaigns for collagen.
From Ancestors to Algorithms: How Modernity Undermines Eldership
In the age of TikTok, wisdom now has a timer. You’ve got ten seconds to be profound, seven if you want it to trend. Any longer and the algorithm swipes left. The elders of today are no longer sages, they are buffering. Modernity has ushered in a brutal new caste system: the fast and the forgotten. And let’s be honest, Nan doesn’t stand a chance against a 19-year-old doing cartwheels while explaining geopolitics to trap music.
The internet, our great oracle of Everything, is not built for the elderly. Not just in function (though watching an octogenarian try to “double tap” something on Instagram does trigger a unique blend of affection and existential dread), but in philosophy. The web worships the new. Novelty is God. If it didn’t happen this week, preferably this morning, it’s irrelevant. Timelessness? That’s a branding strategy, not a cultural value.
Before the feed, wisdom used to marinate. It came from lived experience, long silences, and the kind of life mistakes that leave you with back pain and emotional range. Now, knowledge is microwaved — zapped into 30-second clips, packaged with jump cuts and captions, and garnished with a soundbite that hopefully goes viral before it’s cannibalised by another trend. Grandfather’s four decades in shipping? Dwarfed by a podcast hosted by 20-something-year-old men who should have their microphone privileges revoked.
Even the language betrays the shift. “Boomer” used to be a neutral descriptor. Now it’s an insult hurled with glee, shorthand for irrelevance and cringeworthy opinions. You know society’s moral compass has hiccupped when “too old to understand” is considered a legitimate rebuttal in debate. We’ve moved from revering elders to ghosting them — not out of cruelty, but out of digital efficiency. They don’t fit the interface. They scroll wrong. They pause. They call YouTube “The YouTube.” Unforgivable.
And yet, what’s ironic is that most of the platforms driving this cultural ageism were built by people who are, themselves, ageing tech bros. The Mark Zuckerbergs of the world are hurtling toward midlife crises in ironic graphic tees, still optimising for engagement while quietly Googling “how to stretch hamstrings after 40”. Even the architects of our youth-obsessed reality can’t escape it. Father Time’s got better SEO.
The flattening power of technology is immense. It democratises visibility, but only for those who already understand the choreography. Everyone can speak, technically. But the loudest microphone is reserved for the fresh-faced, the flawless-skinned, and the algorithmically gifted. Old age, with all its beautiful meandering, gets edited out in post. The slow cadences of wisdom — the reflective pauses, the qualified “maybe,” the stories with no punchline, don’t perform well in an attention economy that punishes nuance and rewards speed. And so we scroll past our elders like expired ads.
Even when the elderly do go viral, it’s rarely for their depth. It’s for being “cute” or “surprisingly tech-savvy,” which is just code for “still breathing, but online.” A grandpa dances on TikTok and people lose their minds, not because he has rhythm, but because he dared to exist in a space presumed not for him. It’s the digital equivalent of putting a cat in a suit and applauding when it doesn’t fall over.
There’s also the aesthetic assault. Social media is designed to be consumed with your face half-reflected in the black mirror, and nothing drives panic quite like seeing a wrinkle on-screen and realising it's your own. Platforms like Instagram have filters that literally erase age. Your pores vanish. Your eyelids lift. You become a smooth, ageless entity — not quite human, not quite believable, but definitely "engaging". In this world, age isn’t honoured. It’s algorithmically deleted.
Compare this to ancestral cultures, where age was proof of divine favour. If you lived long enough to have opinions, you’d earned the right to share them without hashtags. You were the keeper of lore, not just someone who couldn’t log in. The village elder had authority because they remembered history not as data, but as experience. They could name trees. Predict weather. Read people. Now we outsource all that to apps that can’t even tell a pine from a birch.
Living in a hypermodern world while carrying Eastern reverence for age is like speaking fluent Latin at a rave. No one knows what you’re saying, and you’re probably killing the vibe. But I miss the presence of slow wisdom. I miss the people who don’t preface everything with “hot take” or “real talk”, because their talk was always real. I miss knowledge that didn’t arrive as a notification.
There’s a phrase in Cantonese — “長輩話要聽”, elders’ words must be heard. Not blindly obeyed, but heard. Sat with. Sipped like tea. We weren’t always meant to race through knowledge like it’s a limited edition drop. Sometimes, the point is to steep in it, to let it get lukewarm and weird and a bit bitter. That’s what the old know. And it’s the kind of knowing that can’t be downloaded.
So yes, I do think the internet has made the world faster, louder, brighter. But in its speed, it risks shaving off something essential. Slowness. Storytelling. The long, imperfect arc of memory. And maybe the real wisdom, now, is not just in revering the old, but in slowing down enough to hear them, even if they’re still trying to find the unmute button.
The Mediterranean Myth: Glamour, Grandmothers, and Generational Proximity
There’s a peculiar genre of European daydream that always begins the same way: somewhere under a Tuscan sun, a Nonna stirs sauce in a pot the size of a baptismal font, her hands moving with the muscle memory of centuries. Children dart around her like olives in a bowl. The table is long, the wine is endless, and everyone knows their place — especially the elderly, who are seated at the head, not out of courtesy but cultural decree.
It’s a seductive image. Southern Europe has long sold the fantasy of intergenerational harmony with the same flair it sells cured meats and mid-century espresso machines. In Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal, old age isn’t quietly Botoxed away, it’s served with dessert. And usually followed by a nap. The grandmother is less a figure of retirement and more a matriarchal cornerstone, wielding wooden spoons and moral authority in equal measure. She is wise, warm, occasionally terrifying. And never, ever invisible.
The Mediterranean model looks, at first glance, like the solution to Western death anxiety. Where the Anglo world chases youth with desperation with injecting, correcting, euphemising, the South seems to wrap its elders in lace doilies and devout respect. They live with their families. They cook. They bless you without needing to know what you’ve done. And most of all, they’re there. Visible. Present. Folding napkins with ceremonial gravitas.
But let’s not get drunk on olive oil just yet.
Because proximity is not the same thing as reverence. Living with your grandmother doesn’t mean you’re listening to her. Inviting her to Sunday lunch doesn’t guarantee you’re absorbing her values, sometimes it just means you need someone to keep the kids busy while you scroll through Instagram and pretend to watch La Vita è Bella on mute.
Multigenerational living in the Mediterranean is as much about economics as it is about ethics. Property prices are absurd. Pensions are precarious. In many cases, moving in with your parents (or never moving out) isn’t a moral virtue, it’s an architectural necessity. Nonna isn’t there just because she’s wise. She’s there because the flat upstairs is too expensive and her bolognese is better than Deliveroo.
And then there’s the matter of ritual. The weekly lunch, the saint’s day feast, the sacred act of overfeeding… these are beautiful, no doubt. But they can also trap the elderly in a kind of performative role: the ever-present granter of meatballs and unsolicited advice. The person who exists more as furniture than as a full human being with evolving thoughts. One does not question the Nonna. One simply receives her opinions like communion wafers — quietly, politely, then goes back to living however one wants. Inclusion, in this context, is often symbolic. Grandparents are included in the frame, but rarely in the plot.
Let’s not ignore the glamour either. Mediterranean old age is only celebrated when it behaves photogenically. A Nonna on a scooter in Naples? Divine. A wrinkled hand rolling gnocchi in golden light? Instagrammable. But a lonely elderly woman in a housing estate outside Barcelona, struggling with dementia and forgotten by her children who now live in Berlin? Less so. Reverence, in reality, is patchy. Sometimes it looks like honour; sometimes it’s just inertia covered in family photos.
Religion plays a sneaky role too. Catholic guilt is a phenomenal adhesive, it sticks families together long past the point of logic. You don’t visit your grandmother because you want to. You visit her because the Virgin Mary would frown if you didn’t. The reverence is real, but it’s also ritualised, codified, and occasionally passive-aggressive. Love, but also obligation wrapped in tupperware.
And yet, even within these contradictions, something does survive. Southern Europe, for all its romance and rot, has at least kept old people visible. Loud, even. They argue in cafés. They shout at television sets. They wear real shoes. They are not hidden, nor quietly moved to the suburbs to quietly decay behind net curtains and NHS leaflets. They persist — stubborn, proud, emotionally fluent in the art of the long sigh.
Perhaps that’s the heart of it. The Mediterranean doesn’t revere age so much as it insists on keeping it in the room. Sometimes it listens. Sometimes it tunes out. But it doesn’t erase. There’s a shared understanding that ageing, while inconvenient, is also inevitable, so you might as well season it well and invite it to dinner.
In that sense, maybe the Mediterranean isn’t a utopia of eldercare. Maybe it’s just honest about the mess of it all — the beauty, the burden, the burnt edges of family life. It knows that a grandmother’s wisdom is worth bottling, even if no one actually reads the label. And in a world of curated youth and TikTok therapists, that alone feels radical.
Even if, in reality, she’s mostly there to remind you the sauce is too watery and that your cousin is still single.
Elders as Living Archives: Indigenous Memory Cultures
In the slick, pixelated world of data storage and cloud servers, the idea of an elder as a “walking archive” seems almost quaint. To imagine someone carrying history in their bones, storing entire lifetimes of knowledge in their mind like a hard drive without a reset button, feels like a pre-modern fantasy. But for many Indigenous cultures around the world, this is not just a quaint metaphor, it is an actual practice. The elder is not only the keeper of memories, but the very embodiment of them. Their age doesn’t subtract from their worth; it multiplies it. Time is not a thief here. It’s a sculptor.
The Maasai of Kenya, whose elders are considered the living vessels of clan history. Here, old age is a badge not of decline, but of growth, and of wisdom seasoned like a good stew, slow-cooked over years of communal rites and ritual. These elders don’t need to catalogue history in books or digital files. Their very bodies carry the sagas of their people, each wrinkle and grey hair marking a chapter of survival, tradition, and spiritual resilience. The elder’s narrative is spoken in parables, woven into the rhythm of daily life — oral history is not a mere recitation but a dynamic, living conversation that ebbs and flows, like a river constantly replenished by the tributaries of experience.
And it’s not just the Maasai. From the First Nations of Canada to the Māori in New Zealand, the elder’s role is sacred, woven into the fabric of community life. These societies are not concerned with the "death anxiety" that plagues the West. They don’t see the passing of time as a countdown to an inevitable end. Instead, age is viewed as a process of layering — a sedimentary build-up of knowledge, each year adding a new layer of understanding to the self, like a river depositing silt at its banks. Time doesn’t erase; it deepens.
It’s almost as if the elder becomes a living library, not only holding history, but participating in it, acting as both record-keeper and storyteller. Their knowledge is not static, like a book gathering dust on a shelf. It’s alive, alive in the way the sun rises each day, in the way seasons change and rivers swell. It lives in their ability to recall the names of ancestors, the songs that keep their people’s history alive, the stories that hold entire communities together. The elder’s memory isn’t simply for reflection; it is for action, for instilling those stories into the next generation, passing the baton of existence from one set of weathered hands to another.
In these communities, the elder is not treated as an accessory to culture, like an antique chair gathering cobwebs in the corner. No, they are integral to the survival of their people. Their knowledge is vital — more important than any degree, more valuable than any material wealth. Knowledge, in this context, is the lifeblood of survival. The elder’s wisdom is woven into the land itself, whether it be the sacred mountains, the migration routes of animals, or the healing plants that grow in the wild. This knowledge isn't something you can get by downloading an app. It’s something that must be lived, touched, breathed, and shared.
There’s a certain humility in this view of aging, a quiet defiance to the Western narrative of "use-by dates" and anti-aging potions. In many Indigenous cultures, old age is not something to fear or hide; it is something to aspire to. It’s the culmination of life’s journey, the finish line of a race well-run. It is the recognition that the individual is part of a much larger web: a living, breathing continuity of culture, history, and spirit. To age is to be entrusted with the stories of the past, but also to become a conduit for the future. Elders are the living connection between what was and what will be.
Perhaps the best way to picture this is to imagine time as a river. In Western culture, we build dams, trying to control and stop the flow, fearful of what might be swept away in the current. But in many Indigenous cultures, time is a river that carves through the earth, depositing its sediments as it moves, building layers of understanding, connection, and memory. The elder is the bank of that river, where the water has been most sedimented, holding within their body centuries of accumulated knowledge. The youth, then, are the fresh waters, the flowing current — fast, vibrant, restless, but ever in need of guidance from the bank. Together, they form a system that flows endlessly, without the panic of running out of time.
Of course, this view of aging doesn’t come without its complications. In a world where individualism reigns supreme, the idea of sacrificing one's personal ambitions in favour of the collective good can feel foreign. But in these cultures, it is understood that the individual is always in service of the greater whole. There’s a comfort in knowing that your personal time, your aging body, is not merely your own, as it belongs to the community, to the lineage of your people. Your wrinkles, your greying hair, your slow gait — they are the signs of the great conversation between the generations, a conversation that has been happening for centuries and will continue long after you are gone.
In this way, the elder is not a relic. They are a reminder of what has been, but also a bridge to what is yet to come. Their memory is not trapped in a single moment in time, but rather flows like a river — ever-changing, yet constant, always deepening, always layering.
And perhaps, in our frantic, youth-obsessed world, there’s something we could learn from these cultures. Maybe, just maybe, we should start thinking about aging not as a loss, but as an accumulation of experience, wisdom, and connection. Because in the end, time doesn’t take away. It gives. It deposits. It layers. And it is, after all, the elders who are the keepers of that treasure.
The Loneliness of the Aged: Western Isolation and the Crisis of Meaning
In the West, to grow old is to gradually disappear — not all at once, but in polite increments. First you become invisible in adverts, then in dinner party conversations, and eventually, in the physical world itself. One day you’re a person, the next a “resident.” You live in a facility named after a tree or a tranquil bird, tucked behind hedges and a keypad entry, where even death comes with landscaping.
Ageing here isn’t just a process, it’s a redirection. You are gently but firmly moved out of the frame. There’s a curious choreography to it. You retire, which sounds restful, but is really an administrative way of saying your time is up. You move into “assisted living,” a term that manages to sound vaguely helpful while euphemising your exile. It’s not “nursing home” anymore, because apparently the problem was semantics. Rename the ship, and maybe it won’t feel like it’s sinking.
The euphemisms are endless and almost cruel in their tidiness. Seniors aren’t dying; they’re “transitioning.” Their memory isn’t failing; they’re “experiencing cognitive shifts.” And when they’re no longer mobile enough to go out and be ignored in public, they’re treated to “recreational therapy” on Wednesday afternoons: balloon volleyball or reminiscence bingo, the cruel irony being that the only thing society wants from their past is their nostalgia.
In Western societies obsessed with productivity, ageing becomes an aesthetic and economic crisis. You are no longer profitable. No longer a consumer of trending goods, unless it’s ergonomic slippers or vitamin D in bulk. No longer a performer of identity in the theatre of relevance. The aged are not just physically sidelined — they are psychologically unmoored. They have been written out of the story long before it ends.
And we treat this with the same sterile politeness we give to malfunctioning appliances. The issue isn’t that you're alive… it’s that you're not useful. In a system built on hustle and innovation, age doesn’t signify growth or mastery. It signifies lag. The old aren’t repositories of knowledge; they’re lagging browsers. You don’t visit them for wisdom, you visit them out of obligation — and even that is increasingly scheduled through apps.
There’s a deep existential violence in this. A society that isolates its elders doesn’t merely ignore them, it actively denies them meaning. Because meaning, in the West, is in motion. It’s in work, in networking, in virality, in being wanted. What happens when your inbox empties, when your phone stops ringing, when no one needs your opinion because the algorithm already decided what’s best? You become a relic in a world that only worships the now.
And yes, there are exceptions, like the sprightly grandmother with a million TikTok followers, the silver-haired model cast in a Gucci campaign. But these aren’t reintegrations. They are novelties. They function like zoo animals: admired briefly, exoticised for their age, and then forgotten the moment the feed refreshes. They're not evidence of inclusion, but its performative cousin.
Meanwhile, most elderly people fade from public life into controlled environments. Care homes where furniture is made of wipeable plastic and the wallpaper is designed to be “soothing.” Places where individual memory is reduced to a name tag and a diet plan. Places where conversation is scheduled, visiting hours are logged, and every attempt at independence is shadowed by a “risk assessment.” These are not sanctuaries. They are well-lit waiting rooms for disappearance.
What’s striking is not just the loneliness, but the subtle cruelty of how it’s managed. Western societies don’t banish the elderly — they tuck them away with a smile. “It’s safer this way,” we say. “They’ll have more company.” But structured loneliness is still loneliness. Sitting at a table with others who have also been filed into irrelevance does not create connection. It creates a kind of purgatory: a space between memory and forgetting, filled with pre-portioned meals and daytime television.
We often speak of ageing as inevitable, but we rarely speak of the way we’ve chosen to experience it. Because it is a choice — cultural, economic, aesthetic. A choice to prioritise speed over reflection, sex over wisdom, novelty over continuity. We are afraid not just of dying, but of what ageing reveals about our values. That we only see worth in what is young, loud, and legible. That we’ve built a civilisation allergic to stillness.
And so, the elderly become the ghosts of a future we don’t want to believe in. We hide them not because they are unpleasant, but because they are us projected forward, stripped of filters and ambitions. They are a memento mori, whispering in their cardigans and slippers: you too will slow, sag, and be shelved.
But perhaps the real tragedy is not in how the elderly are treated, but in how we have collectively agreed to find it normal. How we’ve edited old age out of our stories, out of our streets, out of our mirrors. Not because we lack space, but because we lack the courage to look ageing in the face and still see beauty, purpose, and presence.
I like to imagine that we build our society like a runway: bright lights, tight timelines, one direction only. And when you reach the end? You're gently wheeled offstage, curtain drawn, applause optional.
Death Is Not the Enemy: Towards a Healthier Relationship with Time
Somewhere along the line, we began treating death not as an eventuality, but as a design flaw. A bug in the human software that ought to be patched with better skincare, omega-3 capsules, or (should your bank account permit) biohacking retreats in the Swiss Alps. Silicon Valley wants to “solve” death, as though it were a clunky UI that just needs a better update. In a world where time is money, ageing becomes the ultimate devaluation. A slow descent into obsolescence, like a phone that no longer gets updates and eventually won’t open Instagram.
But what if the problem isn’t death, or ageing, or sagging necklines — but our frantic attempt to outrun them?
In many non-Western philosophies, impermanence isn’t a problem; it’s the point. Buddhism, for instance, doesn’t view death as an interruption of life, but as part of its rhythm. Like the exhale that follows the inhale. Stoicism, too, invites us to meditate on mortality not to panic ourselves into productivity but to recalibrate our values — to remember that we’re on borrowed time, and that every wrinkle is a receipt. These aren’t sad philosophies. They’re deeply practical ones. They don’t throw parties for youth because they’re too busy honouring what’s been hard-won: wisdom, presence, acceptance.
Imagine a culture built not on denial of decay but on its elegant integration. Where crow’s feet are not something to “treat” but to read. The way you might trace veins in marble, admiring how time has etched itself into beauty. Where birthdays don’t become eulogies for youth but rituals of reverence. Where the old aren’t stashed away with crossword puzzles and overcooked peas, but consulted like weathered books full of marginalia and truth.
Ageing, when divorced from panic, is not a decline but an expansion. It's the gathering of self. The pruning of illusion. The unlearning of performance. Youth, after all, is often a loud rehearsal. Age is when the curtain opens and you finally know your lines. It’s not the glamour of beginning, but the gravity of knowing. Of having seen enough birthdays to realise that living well has very little to do with collagen levels and everything to do with how gently, how bravely, one can face impermanence without flinching.
But the West doesn’t like gentle. It likes dominance. Youth is celebrated because it implies potential, power, marketability. Age, on the other hand, whispers of limits and in a culture that confuses limits with failure, this is a sin. We don’t honour boundaries; we Botox them. We don’t prepare for death; we brand it as “wellness,” slap a pastel label on it, and monetise the fear. “Longevity” becomes the new holy grail — not so we can live deeply, but so we can live longer. As if quantity could substitute for quality, and life were a spreadsheet to maximise.
What we need is less obsession with eternal youth, and more courage to inhabit our years fully. A culture that sees ageing not as something to survive, but something to become. Where the mirror isn’t a source of dread, but a portal to history. Where silver hair doesn’t disqualify you from desire, relevance, or reinvention, but crowns you with the audacity to exist without apology.
This would also mean rethinking our relationship to time itself. Not as a race, but as a river. Not as something to conquer, but to move with. The elderly would no longer be “past their prime,” but entering a different, quieter, more potent season. Stillness would be a strength, not a symptom. Life would be cyclical, not linear. Death would be present, not hidden. And maybe, just maybe, the existential terror we pour into serums, supplements and social media could be repurposed into meaning.
Can the West learn to age without spiralling into crisis? Can it stop equating youth with life, and start recognising that living includes, and often peaks, in age? That dignity isn’t in denial, but in depth? That a face lined with time is not a problem to solve, but a poem to read?
There is something wildly radical about making peace with impermanence. It refuses to be marketed. It doesn’t look good in before-and-after photos. It cannot be sold, only practised. And that’s precisely why it’s so necessary. Because until we stop treating age like an affliction, we’ll keep missing the quiet, incredible beauty of becoming who we are — slowly, truthfully, and entirely.
The Beauty of Becoming
I stand before the mirror, still close enough to childhood that I can trace its outline in my cheekbones, but already aware that time sculpts. I see softness in my face, yes, but it’s the soul behind it that feels sharper. There’s a new kind of seeing that comes, not with age itself, but with the awareness that age is coming. And rather than fear it, I’m beginning to imagine it as something worth stepping into — not reluctantly, but with reverence.
There’s beauty in becoming. Not in arriving at perfection, but in being endlessly, imperfectly reshaped. The lines that will one day map my face won’t be flaws, but footnotes of late nights, deep laughter, heartbreaks survived, and mornings that began again anyway. Age, if we let it, is a kind of truth. It strips away performance. It’s the skin learning to speak in its own language — less about appearance, more about evidence.
Maybe the most evolved societies aren’t the ones that keep their youth looking young, but the ones that allow their elders to be radiant in their reality. Not hidden, not tidied, not reduced, but honoured. Age is not a shadow falling; it’s a light changing direction.
And so I ask, even now, before the years have fully taken hold: what would it mean to grow old not with fear, but with grace? To see time not as a thief, but as a teacher? In a world so terrified of endings, might the real beginning be in the very thing we’ve been taught to avoid — the slow, steady art of becoming?
S xoxo
Written in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
29th March 2025