Cultural Death Anxiety: Why Some Societies Fear Age and Others Revere It
Somewhere in Belgravia, concealed behind a façade of pale stone and immaculate discretion, a Botox clinic operates with such hushed reverence it feels transgressive to exhale. The receptionist speaks in a conspiratorial murmur, the glossy magazines remain virginal in their perfection, and the lighting performs a minor miracle of flattery. The air hangs heavy with the contradictory scent of cultivated roses and clinical antiseptic. In this waiting room, time itself has been anaesthetised, suspended and vacuum-sealed inside pre-filled syringes and opaque jars of miracle cream, awaiting its scheduled deployment into the temples and jawlines of the elegantly apprehensive. A woman seated nearby turns the pages of a heavy volume on ‘refreshed beauty', her brow so placid and unlined it appears to have been gently airbrushed of all memory. The collective ambition in this room is not to age, but to perform a quiet vanishing act into a state of perpetual youth, as if stepping into a witness protection programme for the formerly middle-aged.
Half a world away, in a village in rural China, someone’s great-aunt once sat beneath the gnarled branches of a plum tree, methodically peeling apples without a specific recipient in mind. Her face, a complex topography of gentle folds and sun-softened texture, never engaged in artifice. People sought her gaze, leaning into the quiet authority held within her eyes. Her stories lacked Hollywood drama, yet they carried the weight of lived truth, much like an ancient river matters profoundly even when its flood season has passed. Her age was never presented as an apology or a subject for mockery. It was architecture. Substantial. Purposeful. Revered.
The chasm between these two rooms — one polished to a high sheen of denial, the other settled into a deep acceptance of truth — could not be more pronounced. Age, depending entirely on your cultural coordinates, is either a slow, insidious betrayal or a hard-won form of triumph. Across much of the Western world, growing older is framed as a logistical problem demanding a solution, to be tackled with chemical cocktails, surgical intervention, or a strategy of deliberate, elegant neglect. Meanwhile, in cultures that maintain a tangible connection to ancestral memory, age operates as tangible proof of a life lived with depth, not merely duration.
How a culture responds to the mirror, to the body’s slow surrender, says everything about its relationship to death. And death, though we artfully drape it in white linen and rebrand it under the soothing lexicon of ‘wellness', remains the true adversary we are desperately trying to outmanoeuvre. So we inject. We gloss. We whisper incantations like ‘rejuvenation' as though cellular decay were an elective lifestyle choice. Yet time continues its inexorable approach. The fundamental question is whether we choose to sprint from its shadow, or elect to walk alongside it, hand in hand, with the quiet understanding that even endings possess their own particular, poignant beauty.
The Mirror Lies: Youth as Currency in the West
The Western mirror advertises. It negotiates. Reflection is its forgotten purpose. It articulates a fiction in a tone so gentle it masquerades as support. “You look great for your age." “You're ageing gracefully." “You don't look forty." These phrases function as verbal camouflage for a deep-seated existential panic. Within Anglo-capitalist culture, from the Pilates-sculpted pavements of Los Angeles to the Botox-browed Belgravia, ageing represents a public relations catastrophe requiring urgent management.
Youth in this context is a corporate brand. A commodity packaged in retinol and ‘clean girl' aesthetics, buffed to an impossible shine and sold back to us in amber glass jars adorned with minimalist typography. Youth signifies productivity. Youth embodies beauty. Youth carries a moral virtue. Ageing, by this ruthless logic, indicates personal negligence. You should have moisturised more diligently in your twenties. You should have consumed greater volumes of water. You should have declined stressful situations. As if the fine lines gathering at the corners of one's eyes represent a character flaw, rather than the gentle, inevitable script of time written upon the skin.
We don’t age. We “anti-age.” We firm, tighten, sculpt, and smooth. We schedule appointments for ‘prejuvenation' treatments before our faces have even earned the right to a single wrinkle. Teenagers now receive preventative Botox injections. Twenty-five-year-olds are marketed eye creams targeting “the first signs of ageing" — a condition that, upon translation, means having once blinked in direct sunlight.
This extends far beyond skincare into the realm of secular theology. We worship youth as a form of salvation. The associated rituals are pursued with absurd devotion: twelve-step routines performed before bed, collagen supplements consumed with a vague faith in restored elasticity, face yoga, green juices, and moon-charged water. Should these measures prove insufficient, the final recourse might be a shaman-led ice bath retreat in Iceland.
Beneath the frantic activity, however, churns a deep spiritual unease. The anti-ageing industrial complex, with its arsenal of serums, surgeries, soul coaches, and cryogenic dream-vaults, concerns itself little with skin. Its true target is death anxiety. It represents a modern, exorbitantly priced refusal to accept the body's inherent temporariness. It is the desperate hope that time is a mere glitch, one that can be debugged through a combination of scientific intervention and spiritual bargaining. Yet the clock continues its metronomic pulse. Silently. Softly. Like a silk noose being gently drawn closed.
What unnerves me most is how normalised this collective panic has become. I find myself scrutinising my own reflection, not with curiosity, but with the cold assessment of a quality control inspector. Are my laugh lines deepening, or is it simply a trick of the light? Why does my left eye appear more fatigued than my right? A friend once told my mother she possessed “timeless skin." She beamed with pleasure, then immediately consulted a search engine to decode the phrase. It turns out to be a compliment that exists exclusively to reassure those terrified of no longer being twenty-four.
Our very language betrays this deep-seated fear. “You don't look your age!" is declared as if looking one's age would be a personal misfortune. “She's let herself go," a phrase dripping with more social venom than most criminal accusations. We are taught, with slow and elegant insistence, to fear physical softness, to disguise our accumulated decades in neutral tones and brightening concealer. In the West, ageing transforms from a honoured rite of passage into a gradual process of social disqualification.
And so, we decorate our collective denial. We rebrand midlife as a state of being “perennial" and funerals as “celebrations of life." We freeze our eggs, our fat, our expectations. Some choose to freeze their heads — quite literally — investing in the hope of a future resurrection, preferably in a world offering superior skincare technology. Cryonics has transitioned from science fiction to a luxury package for those who find nature's exit plan aesthetically displeasing. Should that fail, one can always hire a “legacy coach" to help construct the illusion of a meaningful existence for posterity.
The resulting irony possesses a density you could inject. In our frantic scramble to defy time, we forfeit any authentic relationship with its passage. The elderly are no longer viewed as keepers of wisdom but as walking cautionary tales. Don't become her. The one who let time catch her. The one who stopped trying. Who now wears linen for comfort rather than for aesthetic effect.
And yet deep down, I suspect we know the truth. Behind the airbrushed billboards and the collagen-enriched falsehoods, there is something deeply unwell about a culture that cannot bear to witness its own maturation. To age is to accept change. To admit limitation. To walk into the unknown with grace instead of frantic resistance. We, as modern Westerners, would rather sprint backwards in high heels than surrender to the dignified stillness of becoming old.
The mirror lies, and yet we continue to gaze into it. We look not to see ourselves, but to seek confirmation that we have not yet entirely disappeared.
Botox in Belgravia: Cosmetic Stoicism and the Fear of ‘the Sag’
There is a particular archetype of woman navigates the pristine streets of Belgravia on a Tuesday morning, projecting a state of repose that transcends ordinary sleep. Her brow remains untroubled by either time or taxing thought. Her cheeks ascend with the gentle, approving lift of polite applause. Her lips exist in a state of deliberate ambiguity, poised between silence and subtle dissent — possessing just enough volume to suggest youth while carefully avoiding any overt implication of vanity. She embodies what the British upper-middle class has perfected: a form of cosmetic stoicism. This is the art of appearing untouched by both life’s experiences and aesthetic intervention, while maintaining a discreet, substantial investment in both.
This aesthetic stands in stark contrast to the maximalism of Los Angeles, where faces undergo restructuring like speculative property developments, lips are inflated into permanent statement pieces, and cheekbones are sharpened into instruments capable of cutting moral corners. The Belgravia approach constitutes stealth wealth applied to the human face. It is expensive restraint made flesh. Should any feature be plumped, lifted, or lasered, the fact must remain an absolute secret. The procedure must leave no discernible trace, fostering only a faint suspicion that its beneficiary drinks more water than the average person and was perhaps blessed at birth by a benevolent Vitamin D deity.
Within these rarefied circles, displaying one's age does not constitute a scandal. It is simply regarded as unfortunate, a condition that could have been prevented with adequate foresight, much like mildew or an accumulating parking fine. One is permitted to age, of course, but only if the process appears accidental, poetic, or perhaps vaguely French. The ultimate goal is not to mimic youth, but to achieve a state of ‘timelessness’ — a word that floats ethereally above jars of expensive La Mer moisturiser, quietly dismissing the vulgarity of linear chronology. This is the inevitable result when people possessing significant capital and free-floating anxiety encounter professionals wielding syringes and absolute discretion.
The proliferation of so-called “tweakments" across Britain's more affluent postcodes has cultivated a peculiar form of doublethink: the ambition to intervene without appearing to have done so, to erase the markers of ageing under the virtuous banner of “natural restoration." Dermal filler functions as a kind of emotional primer. A little Botox is deployed to lightly sedate expression, just sufficiently to ensure one's face does not scream “I am tired" or, more damningly, “I have lived." The desired effect is a countenance that looks freshly hydrated and diplomatically neutral, the kind of face that has recently returned from a wellness retreat rather than from a course of therapy.
No trauma, NO SAG!
This culture remains impeccably polite, even in its panic. Ageing is never openly derided; it is simply “managed." A forehead is “refreshed." A jawline is “tidied." Under-eye bags are “lightly addressed," as if they had committed a minor social faux pas at a dinner party. The entire vocabulary operates at a whisper. One is not trying to look young — heaven forbid — merely “less stressed." And stress, as everyone knows, is an affliction reserved for those without private dermatologists on speed dial.
Here lies the true class divide, etched not in income statements but in skin elasticity. In contemporary Britain, those with substantial means are afforded the privilege of ageing privately and elegantly. Their wrinkles are curated. Their greying is artfully blended. Their “menopause journeys" are meticulously mapped with bespoke supplements and three-hundred-pound facials. Meanwhile, the remainder of the population is left to contend with unfiltered biological reality. The phrase “You look tired" becomes a weaponised observation, a death knell disguised in beige. Tired is old. Tired is failure. Tired is what happens when you cannot afford the cloak of invisibility.
The middle classes pursue their own solutions with determined optimism, searching for “budget-friendly hyaluronic acid" and contemplating at-home microneedling kits with the same hesitant ambition one might apply to DIY plumbing. Yet time, much like inflation, proves particularly cruel to those without the capital to negotiate its terms. The wealthy conceal their ageing behind a fortress of bespoke serums and disciplined silence. The rest of us risk being told we have “let ourselves go" by individuals who have never carried a single decade without a structural support team.
It is worth observing that men in these same circles enjoy a different form of immunological privilege. Their ageing is labelled “character." Their sag is reinterpreted as “gravitas." They are permitted to grow old, provided they do so while wearing tailored trousers and maintaining excellent posture. Women, however, must perform the impossible: to evolve without appearing changed, to invest effort without seeming desperate, to resist entropy using only the tools of impeccable taste.
What is remarkable, and frankly rather bleak, is how utterly unradical this entire enterprise feels. There is no rebellion here, only careful, continuous maintenance. Cosmetic work is less about transformation than about preservation, as if the self were a stately home and ageing a persistent case of dry rot. The objective is not to become someone else, but to avoid becoming someone your friends might pity.
And so, the Botox clinics of Belgravia continue their quiet hum, functioning as sanctuaries for those whose greatest fear is the public spectacle of approaching death. In their waiting rooms, women sit beneath tasteful chandeliers, flicking through magazines filled with images of people who resemble slightly more polished versions of themselves. The air carries the faint scent of rose water and old money. Within these walls unfolds a strange liturgy, venerating not beauty's presence but its artful concealment.
Because in Britain, even vanity must demonstrate modesty. 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
During my childhood in Hong Kong, authority was rarely declared. It was a presence that steeped into the atmosphere, slow and potent, like a bitter herbal brew. The instruction to never argue with one's elders stemmed from an accepted understanding of their superior, accumulated wisdom, rather than from a fear of punishment. To challenge them would be as futile as a daffodil attempting to debate a mountain. Within the East Asian cosmology that shaped my upbringing, age is not a temporary stage preceding irrelevance. It represents a gradual, deliberate ascent to a position of inherent power. The older an individual becomes, the more knowledge they are presumed to possess, and, crucially, the wider the consensus around that presumption grows. This holds true even when their specific pronouncements may lack factual accuracy.
Compare this with Britain, where crossing the threshold of fifty often sees one's opinions gently ushered to the sidelines like surplus furniture. You are thanked for your service, presented with a garden centre voucher, and expected to recede quietly behind the broadsheet pages of The Telegraph. In East Asia, one's opinions gain volume and weight as one's knees begin to protest. You may be arthritic, yet you are also, by cultural default, considered correct. Age confers an elevated status, not a gradual erasure.
In Chinese culture, filial piety — xiao — transcends the category of a simple virtue. It functions as a complete social ecosystem. It governs behaviour and even influences domestic architecture, with three generations frequently residing under one roof, sharing a single rice cooker, and a grandparent occupying every corner, offering reminders that you are both loved and perpetually slightly inadequate. One does not roll their eyes at elders; one's gaze remains respectfully forward, as if even a sidelong glance might court dishonour. Their wrinkles are read like sacred texts. Their opinions carry the force of edicts. Their silence possesses a terrifying, absolute quality.
And yet, this structure offers its own form of security. Age in East Asia operates as a kind of social pension plan; the older one becomes, the more cultural value one accrues. In Japan, elders are often addressed as sensei (teacher) as a matter of course, regardless of their profession. Their very existence constitutes the lesson. In Korea, the term noin (elder) comes with built-in reverence, bestowed not for past contributions but for their ongoing role as storytellers, guides, and living cautionary tales who possess the hard-won knowledge of surviving the very chaos you might currently be documenting on social media with a panicked caption. When a Korean grandfather speaks at the dinner table, you do not interrupt. You nod, you pour his soju, and you listen as though his words were gospel. Because, in a very real sense, they are.
Even within the most hyper-modern East Asian environments — all soaring high-rises, neon signs, instant delivery apps, and 5G networks — the underlying scaffolding of age-based respect remains unshaken. I recall a dinner in Hong Kong where the seating arrangement appeared, to my untrained eye, arbitrary. In reality, it was an intricate lattice of hierarchical status, with the eldest positioned at the centre and the juniors arranged around them like orbiting moons. No one lifted their chopsticks until the most senior person had begun to eat. No one departed the table until that same person had signalled the meal's conclusion. The process was not stiff or forced; it was a form of deeply ingrained social choreography.
Juxtapose this with London, where the elderly receive public thanks on buses yet face private marginalisation. The moment they begin a sentence with “It's not what it used to be," they are mentally consigned to the attic of cultural relevance. The very language used to describe them is laced with a passive-aggressive pity: “senior citizen," “silver surfer," “young at heart.” These are linguistic funeral wreaths, artfully arranged and scented with lavender.
In East Asia, there exists no such compulsion to soften the hard edges of ageing. Age is the edge. The elderly are under no pressure to perform a youthful vitality. They are valued for their wisdom, a quality considered superior to being ‘fun.' They do not jog for charity or strain to “get down with the youth." They offer advice that could double as national policy and prepare soups rumoured to possess resurrective properties. They hold court, quite literally. The living room serves as their throne, and the younger generations consider themselves fortunate to sit on the floor beside them.
Naturally, this system is not without its flaws. The deep reverence can sometimes veer into intellectual suffocation, where elders become unquestionable deities and innovation is politely stifled in the sacred name of tradition. Nevertheless, there is something deeply comforting about a cultural framework that interprets age as cumulative gain rather than systemic loss. A world where one need not disguise their years behind a fortress of serums and delicate euphemisms. Where “looking your age" stands as a compliment and tangible proof that you have survived, endured, and possibly mastered the recipe for a broth that can cure even the most stubborn heartbreak.
Living between Hong Kong and London has rendered this cultural chasm impossible to ignore. In one home, I was raised to listen to age as though it were living prophecy. In the other, I observe it being systematically airbrushed from existence. One society hoists its elders aloft as banners of inherited knowledge; the other, with impeccable politeness, ghosts them from the marketing campaigns for the latest collagen supplement.
From Ancestors to Algorithms: How Modernity Undermines Eldership
In the age of TikTok, wisdom comes with a timer. You have ten seconds to be insightful, seven if you aspire to trend. Any longer, and the algorithm swipes left. Today's elders are no longer sages; they are buffering. Modernity has ushered in a brutal new caste system: the fast and the forgotten. Let's be honest, Nan is utterly outgunned by a teenager performing cartwheels while explaining geopolitics to a trap beat.
The internet, our great oracle of Everything, is fundamentally ill-suited to the elderly. This extends beyond mere function — though watching an octogenarian attempt to ‘double tap' an Instagram post does trigger a specific blend of affection and existential dread — to its very philosophy. The web deifies the new. Novelty is its supreme value. Anything that did not occur this week, preferably this morning, is deemed irrelevant. Timelessness has been demoted to a branding strategy, a hollow claim in a culture that prizes immediacy above all else.
Before the endless feed, wisdom was allowed to marinate. It emerged from lived experience, from long silences, and from the kind of life mistakes that leave you with both back pain and emotional depth. Now, knowledge is microwaved, zapped into 30-second clips, packaged with frantic jump cuts, and garnished with a soundbite destined for viral cannibalisation. A grandfather's four decades in the shipping industry is utterly dwarfed by a podcast hosted by twenty-something men who deserve to have their microphone privileges permanently revoked.
Even our language betrays this seismic shift. ‘Boomer' has shed its neutral and demographic skin to become a casual insult, a gleeful shorthand for irrelevance and cringeworthy opinions. You know a society's moral compass is malfunctioning when ‘too old to understand' passes for a legitimate rebuttal. We have transitioned from revering our elders to ghosting them; this is rarely an act of cruelty, rather one of digital efficiency. They simply do not fit the interface. They scroll incorrectly. They pause for thought. They refer to YouTube as ‘The YouTube'. Unforgivable sins in the church of engagement.
And yet, the supreme irony is that the platforms fuelling this cultural ageism were built by men who are themselves hurtling towards middle age. The Mark Zuckerbergs of the world optimise for youth engagement while quietly Googling ‘how to stretch hamstrings after 40'. Even the architects of our youth-obsessed reality cannot escape its consequences. It seems Father Time has superior SEO.
The flattening power of technology is immense. It democratises visibility, but only for the loudest microphone for those who have mastered its specific choreography. Everyone has a voice, technically. But the podium is reserved for the fresh-faced, the flawless-skinned, and the algorithmically anointed. Old age, with its beautiful, meandering cadences — the reflective pauses, the qualified ‘maybes', the stories without a viral punchline — is ruthlessly edited in post. Such nuance is punished by an attention economy that rewards only speed. We scroll past our elders as if they were expired advertisements.
When the elderly do stumble into virality, it is seldom for their depth. It is for being ‘cute' or ‘surprisingly tech-savvy', patronising code for ‘still breathing, but online'. A grandfather dances on TikTok and the internet applauds, not for his rhythm, but for his sheer audacity in occupying a space presumed off-limits. It is the digital equivalent of dressing a cat in a suit and celebrating when it remains upright.
Then there is the aesthetic assault. Social media is designed for consumption with your own face half-reflected in the black mirror, and nothing induces quiet panic like seeing a wrinkle on-screen and realising it is your own. Platforms like Instagram offer filters that literally erase age. Your pores vanish, your eyelids lift, you become a smooth, ageless entity — not quite human, entirely unconvincing, yet supremely ‘engaging'. In this world, age is algorithmically airbrushed from existence.
Contrast this with ancestral cultures, where longevity was proof of divine favour. If you survived long enough to hold strong opinions, you had earned the right to share them without hashtags. You were a keeper of lore, not just someone who forgot a password. The village elder held authority because they remembered history as lived experience, not as data points. They could name trees, predict weather, and read people. Now we outsource all such wisdom to apps that cannot distinguish a pine from a birch.
Living in a hypermodern world while carrying an Eastern reverence for age is like speaking fluent Latin at a rave. No one understands you, and you are definitely killing the vibe. Yet, I feel the absence of slow wisdom. I miss people who do not preface every thought with ‘hot take' or ‘real talk', individuals for whom speech was always substantive. I miss knowledge that arrived without a notification.
There is a phrase in Cantonese: “長輩話要聽" (elders' words must be heard). This requires active listening, instead of simply blind obedience. Their words are to be sat with, sipped like a strong, slow tea. We were never meant to race through knowledge as if it were a limited-edition product drop. Sometimes, the objective is to steep in it, to let it grow lukewarm and complex and a little bitter. That is what the old understand. It is a form of knowing that refuses to be downloaded.
So yes, the internet has undoubtedly made the world faster, louder, brighter. But in its relentless pursuit of speed, it shaves away something essential: slowness, storytelling, the long and imperfect arc of a lived memory. Perhaps the most critical wisdom for our time rests in the conscious act of revering the old, of slowing down enough to truly hear them, even if they are still, endearingly, searching for the unmute button.
The Mediterranean Myth: Glamour, Grandmothers, and Generational Proximity
A specific European daydream persists with stubborn charm. It invariably opens somewhere under a Tuscan sun, where a Nonna stirs a sauce in a pot the size of a baptismal font, her hands guided by the muscle memory of generations. Children dart around her feet like skittish olives. The table is long, the wine is endless, and everyone knows their place. The elderly are seated at the head, a matter of cultural decree rather than mere courtesy.
It is a seductive image. Southern Europe has marketed this fantasy of intergenerational harmony with the same effectiveness it sells cured meats and mid-century espresso machines. In Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal, old age is not quietly Botoxed into submission, instead welcomed with dessert and typically followed by a ceremonial nap. The grandmother functions less as a retired person and more as a matriarchal cornerstone, wielding wooden spoons and moral authority in equal measure. She is wise, warm, and occasionally terrifying. Above all, she remains perpetually visible.
At first glance, the Mediterranean model presents itself as the definitive antidote to Anglo-Saxon death anxiety. While the English-speaking world chases youth with a desperate arsenal of injections, corrections, and euphemisms, the South appears to wrap its elders in lace doilies and devout respect. They live with their families. They cook. They bestow blessings without requiring a full confession. Crucially, they are present, visible, folding napkins with a ceremonial gravitas that would impress a head of state.
But let’s not get drunk on romanticised olive oil just yet.
Proximity should never be confused with genuine reverence. Sharing a roof with your grandmother does not automatically translate to heeding her advice. An invitation to Sunday lunch offers no guarantee that her values are being absorbed; sometimes, it simply means you require a babysitter for the children while you scroll through Instagram, pretending to watch La Vita è Bella on mute.
The reality of multigenerational living in the Mediterranean is frequently as much an economic calculation as an ethical one. Property prices are ludicrous. Pensions are often precarious. In countless cases, moving in with your parents (or never moving out) constitutes an architectural necessity rather than a moral virtue. Nonna’s presence is sustained not solely by her wisdom, but by the prohibitive cost of the flat upstairs and the superior quality of her bolognese compared to a Deliveroo order.
Then we must consider the matter of ritual. The weekly lunch, the saint’s day feast, the sacred act of overfeeding — these are beautiful traditions, undoubtedly. Yet they can also confine the elderly to a performative role: the ever-present granter of meatballs and unsolicited opinions. They risk becoming less a full human being with evolving thoughts and more a piece of beloved family furniture. One does not question the Nonna; one receives her pronouncements like communion wafers quietly, politely, and then proceeds to live exactly as one pleases. In this context, inclusion can be symbolic. Grandparents are included in the family portrait, yet often written out of the actual script.
We must also confront the issue of glamour. Mediterranean old age is celebrated primarily when it behaves photogenically. A Nonna on a Vespa in Naples? Divine. A wrinkled hand rolling gnocchi in a shaft of 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. Actual reverence is patchy. Sometimes it looks like honour; other times it is simple inertia, disguised by a gallery of family photos.
Religion, too, plays its sneaky, foundational role. Catholic guilt is a phenomenal social adhesive, bonding families together long past the point of logical cohesion. You do not visit your grandmother because you genuinely desire to; you visit because the Virgin Mary would regard you with profound disappointment if you did not. The reverence is real, yet it is also ritualised, codified, and delivered with a generous side of passive-aggression. It is love, unquestionably, but love fortified by obligation and neatly wrapped in Tupperware.
And yet, even amidst these contradictions, something vital does survive. Southern Europe, for all its romanticised veneer and underlying rot, has at least maintained the visibility of its old people. Loud, even. They argue in cafés. They shout at television news broadcasts. They wear proper, sturdy shoes. They are not hidden away, nor quietly relocated to suburban bungalows to decay behind net curtains and NHS leaflets. They persist stubbornly, proudly, and emotionally fluent in the eloquent art of the long, world-weary sigh.
Perhaps that is the heart of it. The Mediterranean does not so much revere age as it simply insists on keeping it in the room. Sometimes the room listens intently. Sometimes it tunes out completely. But it never seeks to erase. There exists a shared, unspoken understanding that ageing, while inconvenient, is also entirely inevitable. You might as well season it well and invite it to dinner.
In that sense, perhaps the Mediterranean is less a utopia of eldercare and more a society honest about the glorious, grinding mess of it all — the beauty, the burden, the burnt edges of family life. It understands that a grandmother’s wisdom is worth bottling, even if nobody actually bothers to read the label. And in a world of curated youth and TikTok therapists, that stubborn, unglamorous honesty feels genuinely radical.
Even if, in the end, her primary function is to remind you that the sauce is too watery and that your cousin is, disappointingly, still single.
Elders as Living Archives: Indigenous Memory Cultures
In our slick, pixelated world of data storage and cloud servers, the concept of an elder as a ‘walking archive' appears almost archaic. The idea that a person could carry history in their bones, storing entire lifetimes of knowledge in their mind like a hard drive immune to a factory reset, feels like a romanticised pre-modern fantasy. Yet for countless Indigenous cultures across the globe, this represents a foundational reality. The elder functions as the keeper and the very embodiment of memory. Their age does not diminish their value; it compounds it exponentially. In this framework, time operates not as a thief, but as a master sculptor.
Consider the Maasai of Kenya, whose elders are revered as the living vessels of clan history. Within this context, old age is a badge of growth, a testament to wisdom seasoned like a rich stew, slow-cooked over decades of communal rites and ritual. These elders have no need to catalogue history in books or digital files. Their physical bodies carry the epic sagas of their people, with each wrinkle and silvered hair marking a distinct chapter of survival, tradition, and spiritual resilience. Their narrative is spoken in parables, woven seamlessly into the rhythm of daily life. This oral history transcends mere recitation; it is a dynamic, living conversation that ebbs and flows, a river perpetually replenished by the tributaries of lived experience.
This practice extends far beyond the Maasai. From the First Nations of Canada to the Māori of New Zealand, the elder’s role is sacred, intricately woven into the very fabric of community existence. These societies remain largely untouched by the 'death anxiety' that so preoccupies the West. They do not perceive the passage of time as a grim countdown to an inevitable end. Instead, age is viewed as a process of sedimentary accumulation, a gradual build-up of knowledge where each year deposits a fresh layer of understanding onto the self. Time, in this worldview, deepens and enriches.
The elder becomes a living library, simultaneously holding history and actively participating in its continuous creation. Their knowledge refuses stasis, unlike a book gathering dust on a remote shelf. It is vibrant and dynamic, alive in the manner of the rising sun or the turning seasons. It resides in their capacity to recall ancestral names, to sing the songs that animate their people’s history, and to tell the stories that bind entire communities together. The elder’s memory serves a purpose beyond reflection; it is a tool for action, for instilling these vital narratives into the next generation, for passing the baton of existence from one set of weathered hands to another.
In these communities, the elder is never treated as a cultural accessory, like an antique chair relegated to a dusty corner. They are integral, a cornerstone essential to the survival of their people. Their knowledge carries immense practical weight — often more critical than any formal degree, more valuable than any material wealth. This wisdom is the lifeblood of cultural continuity. It is woven into the land itself, encoded in the sacred mountains, the migration routes of animals, and the properties of healing plants that grow wild. This is knowledge that cannot be acquired by downloading an application. It must be lived, touched, breathed, and shared through direct, sustained relationship.
There is a certain humility in this view of aging, a quiet yet potent defiance against the Western narrative of ‘use-by dates' and miraculous anti-ageing serums. In many Indigenous cultures, old age is less a state of decline than a hard-won accomplishment, a milestone to be met with pride instead of trepidation. It represents the culmination of life’s journey, the finish line of a race well-run. It is the recognition that the individual forms 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 while becoming a crucial 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 envision time as a river. Western culture often seems focused on building dams in a frantic attempt to control and halt the flow, terrified of what the current might sweep away. By contrast, many Indigenous cultures perceive time as a river that carves its way through the earth, depositing fertile sediments as it moves, building immense layers of understanding, connection, and memory. The elder is the bank of that river, the place where the water has deposited the richest sediment, holding within their being centuries of accumulated knowledge. The youth, in turn, are the fresh waters, the flowing current — fast, vibrant, and restless, yet ever in need of guidance from the stable, knowing bank. Together, they form an entire hydrological system, flowing endlessly without the panic of running out of time.
Naturally, this worldview is not without its own complexities. In an global era where individualism reigns supreme, the idea of subordinating personal ambition to the collective good can feel alien, even restrictive. However, within these cultures, there is a profound understanding that the individual exists in service to the greater whole. There is a deep comfort in knowing that your personal time and your ageing body are not merely your own private property. They belong to the community, to the lineage of your people. Your wrinkles, your greying hair, your deliberate gait are the visible signatures of the great conversation between generations, a dialogue that has persisted for centuries and will continue long after you are gone.
In this way, the elder is never a relic. They are a powerful reminder of what has been, and simultaneously, an essential bridge to what is yet to come. Their memory flows with the constancy of a river — ever-changing, yet perpetual, always deepening, always layering.
And perhaps, in our frantic, youth-obsessed world, has something significant to learn from these cultures. Maybe we should begin to consider ageing as an accumulation of experience, wisdom, and connection. Because in the final analysis, time does not only take away. It also gives. It deposits. It layers. And the elders, with their immense and quiet dignity, are the keepers of that invaluable treasure.
The Loneliness of the Aged: Western Isolation and the Crisis of Meaning
In the West, to grow old is to undergo a gradual, systematic disappearance. This vanishing does not happen all at once; it occurs through a series of polite, incremental erasures. First, you become invisible in advertisements, then in the thrust of dinner party conversation, and eventually, in the physical world itself. One day you are a person, the next you are a “resident." You come to live in a facility named for a tree or a tranquil bird, tucked discreetly behind manicured hedges and a keypad entry system, a place where even death arrives with complimentary landscaping.
Ageing here transcends a mere biological process; it is a deliberate social redirection. You are gently, yet firmly, moved out of the frame. A curious choreography governs this exit. You “retire," a word that sounds restful but functions as an administrative euphemism for your time being up. You transition into “assisted living," a term that manages to sound vaguely helpful while perfectly euphemising a form of social exile. The phrase “nursing home" has fallen from favour, as if the problem were merely semantic, as though renaming the vessel could alter the sensation of its slow descent.
The lexicon of this exile is endless and possesses an almost cruel tidiness. Seniors are not dying; they are “transitioning." Their memory is not failing; they are “experiencing cognitive shifts." And when they are no longer mobile enough to venture out and be ignored in public, they are treated to “recreational therapy" on Wednesday afternoons: balloon volleyball or reminiscence bingo. The cruel irony is that the only aspect of their past society seems to value is their capacity for nostalgia, stripped of its deeper context.
In Western societies fixated on productivity, ageing represents a dual aesthetic and economic crisis. You cease to be profitable. You are no longer a target consumer of trending goods, unless your desires narrow to ergonomic slippers or vitamin D in industrial quantities. You are retired from your role as a performer of identity in the grand theatre of relevance. The aged are psychologically unmoored, written out of the narrative long before the final chapter concludes.
We address this existential displacement with the same sterile politeness we reserve for a malfunctioning appliance. The core issue is not that you are alive; the problem is that you are no longer useful. Within a system built on relentless hustle and disruptive innovation, age signifies lag rather than growth or mastery. The old are not seen as repositories of hard-won knowledge; they are viewed as outdated browsers, struggling to load. You do not visit them for wisdom; you visit out of obligation, a duty now so burdensome it requires scheduling through a dedicated application.
There is a deep, existential violence inherent in this isolation. A society that severs its elders actively denies them meaning. Because meaning, in the Western paradigm, is found in constant motion. It is located in work, in networking, in virality, in being wanted. What becomes of a person when their inbox empties, when their phone falls silent, when their opinion is deemed redundant because an algorithm has already predetermined what is best? They transform into a relic in a world that worships exclusively at the altar of the immediate present.
Of course, there are exceptions, the sprightly grandmother with a million TikTok followers or the silver-haired model cast in a Gucci campaign. Yet these are not genuine reintegrations. They function as novelties, like zoo animals briefly admired and exoticised for their unusual presence, only to be forgotten the moment the digital feed refreshes. They do not testify to true inclusion, merely to its performative, fleeting cousin.
Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of elderly people fade from public life into these controlled, sanitised environments. They inhabit care homes where the furniture is crafted from wipeable plastic and the wallpaper is selected for its “soothing" properties. In these spaces, individual memory is reduced to a name tag and a diet plan. Conversation becomes a scheduled activity, visiting hours are meticulously logged, and every attempt at autonomy is shadowed by a clinical “risk assessment." These are not sanctuaries for a life well-lived. They are well-lit, carefully managed waiting rooms for disappearance.
What is truly striking is the subtle, systemic cruelty of its management. Western societies do not explicitly banish the elderly; they tuck them away with a reassuring smile. “It is safer this way," we insist. “They will have more company." Yet structured loneliness remains loneliness. Sitting at a table with others who have been similarly filed into irrelevance does not forge genuine connection. It creates a peculiar form of purgatory, a liminal space suspended between memory and forgetting, furnished with pre-portioned meals and the relentless murmur of daytime television.
We frequently speak of ageing as an inevitability, yet we seldom acknowledge the deliberate way we have chosen to experience it. Because it is a choice, a cultural, economic, and aesthetic one. It is a choice to prioritise speed over reflection, sex appeal over wisdom, novelty over continuity. We are afraid not just of dying, but of what the ageing process reveals about our core values: that we assign worth only to what is young, loud, and instantly legible. We have built a civilisation with a fundamental allergy to stillness.
Consequently, the elderly become the ghosts of a future we refuse to believe in. We hide them because they represent our own selves projected forward, stripped of filters and ambitions. They are a living memento mori, whispering in their cardigans and supportive slippers: you too will slow, you too will sag, you too will be shelved.
Perhaps the ultimate tragedy, however, resides in our collective agreement to find this situation normal. We have edited old age out of our stories, out of our streets, out of our own mirrors. This editorial decision stems from an insecure lack of courage: the courage to look ageing directly in the face and still discern beauty, purpose, and enduring presence.
One might imagine our society as a fashion runway: all bright lights, tight timelines, and a single, forward direction. And when you finally reach the end of the catwalk? You are gently wheeled offstage, the curtain is drawn, and the applause remains strictly optional.
Death Is Not the Enemy: Towards a Healthier Relationship with Time
Somewhere in our recent history, we began to treat death less as an inevitable horizon and more as a design flaw. A glitch in the human operating system that could be patched with superior skincare, omega-3 capsules, or, for those with the requisite capital, biohacking retreats in the Swiss Alps. The Silicon Valley ethos seeks to “solve" death, approaching it as a clumsy user interface in need of a decisive software update. In a paradigm where time is money, ageing represents the ultimate devaluation — a slow, inexorable march into obsolescence, akin to a smartphone that can no longer receive updates and eventually refuses to open its most popular applications.
Yet what if the true crisis resides not in death, ageing, or the softening of jawlines, but in our frantic, desperate scramble to outpace them?
Many philosophical traditions outside the Western mainstream view impermanence as the fundamental condition of existence. Buddhism, for example, understands death as an essential component of life's intrinsic rhythm, a necessary exhale that gives meaning and completion to the inhale. Stoicism similarly encourages a regular meditation on mortality, its purpose is to recalibrate our values towards what is truly significant, steering us away from a panicked frenzy of productivity. These are intensely practical worldviews, devoid of melancholy. They have no time for fetishising youth because they are preoccupied with honouring what is hard-won: wisdom, presence, and a deep-seated acceptance of what is.
Imagine a culture that chooses to integrate decay with elegance, rather than building its foundations on denial. A world where crow's feet are not flaws to be “treated" but stories to be read, like tracing the veins in marble to admire how time has etched itself into a unique beauty. Where birthdays transform from eulogies for lost youth into rituals of reverence for experience gained. Where the old are consulted like weathered, invaluable books, their pages rich with marginalia and difficult truths.
Ageing, when liberated from societal panic, reveals itself as an expansion, rather as a decline. It is the gathering of a complete self, the prudent pruning of illusion, the unlearning of tiresome performances. Youth, for all its vigour, is often a loud, anxious rehearsal. Age is the moment the curtain rises and you finally, truly know your lines. This phase lacks the glamour of a beginning, yet possesses the gravity of genuine knowing. It is the state of having witnessed enough seasons to understand that living well has a negligible connection to collagen levels and a fundamental connection to how gently, and how bravely, one can face impermanence without looking away.
The Western mindset, however, often recoils from gentleness in favour of dominance. We celebrate youth for its implication of potential, power, and marketability. Age, by contrast, whispers uncomfortable truths about limits; and in a culture that mistakes limits for personal failure, this is an unforgivable sin. We do not honour our boundaries; we Botox them into submission. We do not prepare for death; we rebrand it as “wellness," apply a pastel label, and monetise the underlying fear. “Longevity" becomes the new holy grail — not so we can live more deeply, but so we can simply live longer, as if quantitative extension could ever substitute for qualitative depth, and as if a life were a spreadsheet whose cells must be maximised.
What we require is a conscious shift from this obsession with eternal youth towards the courage to inhabit our years fully. We must build a culture that sees ageing as a state to be actively embraced and become. A world where the mirror reflects a portal to personal history. Where silver hair does not disqualify one from desire, relevance, or reinvention, instead crowing its wearer with the audacity to exist without apology.
This transformation needs a fundamental rethinking of our relationship with time itself. We must learn to see it not as a linear race, but as a flowing river; not as a force to be conquered, but as a current with which to move. In this model, the elderly would no longer be considered “past their prime," but understood as entering a different, quieter, and more potent season of life. Stillness would be recognised as a strength, not a symptom of decline. Life would be appreciated as cyclical, not linear. Death would be a present reality, not a hidden taboo. Perhaps then, the existential terror we currently pour into serums, supplements, and social media validation could be redirected, repurposed into the creation of authentic meaning.
The pressing question remains: can the West learn to age without spiralling into a perpetual crisis of identity? Can it cease equating youth with life itself, and start to recognise that a full life includes, and often finds its richest expression, in advanced age? True dignity is found in depth, moving beyond the futility of denial. A face lined with time is a complex and moving poem waiting to be read.
There is something wildly radical about making peace with impermanence. This acceptance refuses to be neatly marketed. It looks terrible in before-and-after photographs. It cannot be sold in a bottle; it can only be practised through daily living. This inherent resistance to commercialisation is precisely what makes it so vital. Until we cease treating age as an affliction, we will continue to miss the quiet, incredible beauty of becoming who we are — slowly, truthfully, and in our entirety.
The Beauty of Becoming
I stand before the mirror, still near enough to childhood that I can trace its ghost in the architecture of my cheekbones, yet already conscious of time’s patient, sculpting hand. I observe a certain softness in my face, certainly, yet the soul behind it feels keener, more defined. A new kind of perception is dawning, one born not from age itself, but from the deepening awareness of its inevitable approach. And instead of meeting this with fear, I find myself imagining it as a state worth stepping into with a sense of reverence.
There is a deep beauty in the process of becoming. This beauty has no relation to arriving at some static ideal of perfection; it thrives in the state of being endlessly, imperfectly reshaped. The lines that will one day chart my face will function as footnotes to a life fully felt: testaments to late nights, deep laughter, heartbreaks weathered, and mornings that began again with quiet resolve. Age, if we allow it its true voice, is a form of truth-telling. It pares away the performance of youth. It is the skin learning to speak its own authentic language, a dialect less concerned with appearance and more with the accumulation of evidence.
Perhaps the most evolved societies are those that move beyond preserving the youthful looks of the young, focusing instead on creating a world where their elders are permitted to be radiant in their unvarnished reality. They are neither hidden away, nor tidied up, nor reduced to stereotypes; they are honoured with genuine regard. Age should not be mistaken for a shadow falling over a life; it is the light itself, shifting direction to illuminate a different, richer landscape.
And so I find myself asking, even now, before the years have fully imprinted themselves upon me: what would it mean to grow old guided by grace instead of fear? How would our lives change if we saw time as a gentle teacher rather than a relentless thief? In a world so terrified of endings, could the most authentic beginning actually be found in the very thing we have been conditioned to avoid — the slow, steady, and magnificent art of becoming?
S xoxo
Written in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
29th March 2025