Move closer to the angel inside

One of the lessons of getting older is cutting through the white noise, getting to the core of what really counts

Carl Honoré, journalist and author of Bolder: Making the most of our longer lives (@ Madeleine Alldis)

I used to close the book I was reading after the train left Porto Marghera’s station. The passage from the mainland to the maze of Venice’s islands was made of the same fabric of dreams and I didn’t want to miss one bit. Running on a bridge across the sea,  the train seemed to float on it instead. In those late spring afternoons, the water had the color of loose pewter with long brushstrokes of whispered blue. Scanning the horizon like a general, a perfectly white seagull was sitting on top of a briccola, the wooden structure that marks the waterways in the lagoon. Another briccola, another seagull, the same inquisitive look. As I walked outside the station with my Venetian friend, I breathed in the brackish air that preceded the sunset. Venice lay in front of us as a basket of delights. An invisible line separated our goings from that of the tourists and while they walked to and from Rialto, their voices mixing in the background, we turned on the right to Campo San Giacomo. Nestled under the peeling paint of the porch above, there was the most anonymous cocktail bar of the city, the walls painted in a timid yellow color. Four mismatched plastic chairs sat idly a step away from the “Hunchback of Rialto,” a marble statue - known to Shakespeare - supporting a small set of stairs leading to a podium for official declarations. The bar owner was a man in his seventies known as “El Peoco” because of his bald head. On his cocktail list, there was only one option under the unequivocal name of “The Bomb.” As an alchemist, El Peoco mixed half a dozen different liquors and drinks - red, orange, brown, honey colored. Keeping his back to his clients, he protected his secret formula from spying eyes. With a bored ado, he handed us two plastic glasses with a transparent liquid inside that, if it was not for its viscosity, could have been taken for water. We sipped the fresh and lightly sweet beverage while sitting on the plastic chairs and chatted the time away. In front of us, the clock of San Giacometto counted the hours as it had done for the past six hundred years with its golden hands in the shape of sunbeams. The drink changed our perception of the city. Coated with a shiny hand of transparent varnish, Venice felt as soft as velvet, when we went for “baccari” in the local taverns. There we shared a long wooden table with strangers and picked snacks from our plate with our fingers as the Venetian accent resounded mellower than ever in my ears.

The ritual was different when I arrived in Venice alone. I passed up the pleasure of being taken for a local by the ticket agent and instead of hopping on a vaporetto to my friend’s house, I walked down to Cannareggio. Sandwiched between tourist shops, there was a bakery I knew. Its polished wooden doors and windows had the same lustrous quality of Venetian glass beads. For me, nothing meant being in Venice like eating a miniature diplomatic cake on the go with its perfectly cut rectangular shape, its recipe going back to the courts of the fifteenth century. Contained in two sheets of crispy puff pastry, a layer of sponge cake, imbued with pink Alchermes liquor, sat between coats of delicate custard. On top, a veil of powdered sugar gave the most baroque of the Italian desserts an ephemeral touch. There was a sort of internal contemplation on those solitary walks with powdered sugar on my lips and the only company being my footsteps resounding on the stone-paved road. “Venice has the shape of a fish. The station is in the head, the house is in the tail,” my friend had told me and I navigated my way around with a vague sense of knowing where I was, but open to the possibility of getting lost. Sometimes I found myself in a square I had never seen before. Sometimes I walked until I found a familiar sight. My favorite spot was a shop that, like a time-machine, displayed in its windows objects of the sixties and seventies as if decades hadn’t elapsed since then. Other times, I ended up in front of a canal, the water going slowly by and no other way to go but turning back on my steps. Time had a different density in Venice and, free from its constraint, I enjoyed that blurry feeling deep inside of being half away between being lost and having arrived. 

Talking with Carl Honoré, a self-proclaimed ageist until he questioned the assumption in his book  Bolder: Making the most of our longer lives, triggered an emerging awareness in my mind. His words, rolling patiently across the world, made me realize how much my relationship with aging is informed by those lighthearted days on the lagoon and my being at peace, amused, and intrigued by whatever direction the road would have taken.

After you realized you were the oldest hockey player in that tournament you wrote about in your book, what pushed you to explore aging and ageism?

I have always been ageist. I feared that my life would end and no longer be worth living by the time I reached thirty. But it wasn’t. Then I thought it would be game over at forty. But again it wasn’t. Same at fifty. What I discovered was that life was actually getting better. All my life I felt boxed in my chronological age - and that experience at the hockey tournament was an epiphany. Sure, I was the oldest player there but I was also one of the best players, and I was having fun, too. When I realized that the older player who saved the match was me, that made me question why I felt so bad about aging and I wondered if there was a different story than decline and depression ahead of me. 

What is the most unexpected thing you have learned about aging while you researched and wrote your book?

I didn’t expect that people are happier in later life. We grow up with so many bleak stereotypes about aging. I bought into the idea that aging was a punishment, a concept that is woven into the language we use. Discovering the “Happiness Curve” and how happiness begins to grow again after we bottom out in middle age was an astonishing revelation. 

What kind of person is emerging from your aging process?

As David Bowie said, ageing is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been. I realize I underwent a 180 degree shift in the paradigm of aging in my head. I am no longer a member of the cult of youth. I have a much healthier relationship with my own aging. David Bowie’s quote is really my spirit now. It’s a little bit like Michelangelo looking at a slab of marble and seeing the angel inside it. You’re always chipping away, getting into the core, the essence of who you are and I definitely have a very strong sense of this now. Every day I move forward, I move closer to the angel inside. 

Is aging giving you a hand in chipping pieces away?

That’s sounds a bit downbeat. I think of it as a more streamlining instead. I think that’s also something we get better at as we age. We get better at focusing on what really matters to us. Activities, people, rituals, work, things that don’t matter anymore, things that don’t light us up, we find it easier to let them go. So that’s why people in later life tend to have fewer friends, but the friends they have bring more happiness, more meaning, more joy. It’s kind of less-is-more as very much the spirit of aging. One of the lessons of getting older, in fact, is cutting through the white noise. Getting through the chaff, and getting to the heart of the matter, getting to the core of what really counts. That’s what I feel very much now. When you’re younger it is hard to say no, you feel like you have to do everything. On the contrary, as you age it just gets so much easier to say no. You know yourself, you know what really matters and you can focus your energy and your attention on those things. That’s a huge benefit. If we come back to the metaphor of Michelangelo and the statue, you’re getting rid of the stuff that doesn’t matter, getting it out of the way, so you can get to the angel.

There’s so much focus on what we need to do with aging. Should we begin to pay more attention to what aging is doing to us instead?

I think it’s very true. I think it’s that Cartesian mind-body split and we focus so much on what happens on the outside, on the physical body. We freak out about our sore knee, or our thinning hair, that line on our face, especially on Zoom when we are all worried sick about looking older and all that stuff, when in fact what really matters, what ultimately makes you happy is what is going on inside. That’s where the most exciting stuff is happening, that’s where the real transformation occurs, that’s where the real sculpting is going on. You can be happy with the physical changes too, if you embrace it in the right spirit, if you don’t latch on to some of the ideals of you at 22 or 28 or whenever you think you were your best physically. There’s an evolution, there’s change going on here, maybe there are things that I don’t like that much, but other changes I do like. And I’m following the David Bowie idea of getting into who I really am. Once we look past a lot of superficial ideas about beauty and youth, we should start to see the beauty in older faces. We don’t always see it, especially if you look at social media obsession with a certain view, especially for female beauty - young women make their faces look the same, the same eyes, the same skin, it’s like a dollyfication. One interesting lesson of Covid is the dichotomy between what is going on in the inside and the outside. What Covid has shown us is that as we get older we tend to become more vulnerable physically, but what we have also discovered through studies around the world is that emotionally older people are coping best. We get better at managing our emotions and coping with adversity. There’s a paradox here: we might get physically weaker, but we get emotionally stronger.

One of the elements that fuels ageism and self-ageism is age apartheid. How important is it to desegregate aging?

Throughout human history, people of different generations have mixed and mingled and that was the norm. At home, at the market, at the field, at fiestas, they just met. Then we got into the industrial era and we siloed. We started at school, you were in your age group, and than the whole society became stratified by age. We have very little exposure to people of different ages and what that does is that when you are not exposed to people who on the surface are different from you, it allows stereotypes to take over and flourish. Studies show that if you bring people together of different generations, it erodes ageism; it begins to bring down those stereotypes because nothing destroys stereotypes better than getting to know the person being stereotyped. It’s the same with racism; it’s the same with sexism. I always promote the idea of bringing the generations back together. That’s why I do not believe in retirement communities, pushing older people into ghettos. Hanging around exclusively with people of the same age is not what people want. It’s not the right way forward. 

Do you notice a link with our economic system? 

Capitalism prospers on the cult of youth. There’s a conceptual, intellectual link as capitalism thrives on novelty. It thrives on the new, it needs new things for people to want and then to buy and then the whole cycle continues. Novelty is glorified, there’s a kind of deification of the new and new is linked to young. There’s also a more clear and brutal link, which is if you make people feel bad about the way they are, you can sell them more stuff. All of us are aging and if you can make aging something shameful, something that makes you feel guilty, embarrassed, disgusted, then there’s an awful lot of stuff that you can sell people on the back of that idea. That’s why the anti-aging industry is worth billions around the world, because this ageist industrial complex has sold us the idea that growing older is shameful.

What we see and what we do not see influences our ideas about aging. Should we aim for laws to regulate age diversity on our media and in the companies that shape the popular imagination? (In the UK, for instance, only 5% of people working in marketing are over 50)

Ideally, a richer, wider depiction of human beings in advertising would come along naturally. I would like to see that grow naturally from a cultural change about aging. As a general rule, I tend to be a bit uncomfortable with laws and that stuff, but I think there’s room for some macro rules and we have them here in the UK against sexual stereotypes and aging is becoming part of the conversation as well. Rather than a state law, I would think about regulations or a code of conduct for advertisers in each country. The dialog is moving in that direction. You see more people complaining and calling out ageist advertising. The UN recently launched a campaign against ageism, so things are moving. That’s not the only solution, but it’s part of it. 

We keep reading about the “untapped market” of the boomers, suggesting that they will be a target for more goods and services. It seems that nobody ever questions if they would prefer connections, sense-making, and change-making. What is your take?

I never use phrases such as Boomers and Millennials, because to me that feels ageist, it’s like saying that everybody born in the same decade is the same when in fact we know that there is more variety as we age. It’s clear that in later life there seems to be a human tendency to look for more than just financial and social status. We want to give back, whether you call it gero-transcendence, there’s a whole bunch of words that seems to describe this human phenomenon. So, what do we do with that phenomenon? There’s a difference between what we should do and what we are doing. What we are mainly doing with it is the capitalist way, tapping into it to sell stuff to people. Because the whole cult of youth makes those who are over fifty feel bad, there’s a lot of money to spend there. And then I think there’s a lot of money to be made tapping into financial fear about longer living. There are thousands of people who are offering coaching on how to pivot in later life, which is okay. I worry that we are losing human component in this process, however there is some natural desire to do good, to serve a higher purpose, to give back. It’s a bit like with the green revolution. Ultimately, it’s a noble cause, and some people are going to make money out of it. The more we can talk aloud about that need, that urge, that impulse in later life to help, to give back and be of service, that’s great. We need to talk more about it, get it out in the open, to create programs, to create social networks for that. If the question is if we need to put more emphasis on it, absolutely, that’s still a huge  untapped resource in the world right now. There’s a vast reservoir of goodwill that exists in people in later life and I don’t think we’re making the most out of it. 

Think about a claim like successful aging. We take for granted that being young is the measuring stick of being old. Do you agree?

When we talk about successful aging, we are using a market perspective. If you say something like successful aging, already you’re creating two layers. You’re creating those who are doing it successfully and those who aren’t. Winners and losers. As soon as you start creating winners and losers, that opens up scope for selling stuff. I never use that expression. I talk about aging well, aging on your own terms. These are more neutral definitions. For instance, if you think about the work place, people of all ages want the same things: flexible work, carrying on with learning, strong social connection, balance and leisure time. They want to do work that is meaningful. 

Can an aging population be an occasion to move from a profit-based to a value-based approach to reality?

I don’t think it’s an old-young binary inclination to give back; this is true for all generations. Can we tap into that and make the world a better place? Yes, we could, but at the same time I would not shut out the fact that even people in their twenties can bring up that amazing human experience of wanting to be of service. It also depends on the life stage. Sometimes we are too busy to be able to share our time and our energy.

Considering your experience with writing your book, what else requires our attention when it comes to aging and ageism?

The words we use. All these terrible expressions like, the wrong side of forty, over the hill, finished at forty.  Every time we use them we are reinforcing the myth, the lies, that aging is all about decline. I think it is important to challenge the images that we use in advertising, but it is also important to watch our language. I kind of changed the language I use about aging. I never use “senior moment” if I forget something. As I do a lot of sports and I know my body well, if something is hurting, my first thought would not be aging, but maybe I pushed too hard. We have to start reframing in our heads as that makes a big difference. The conversation, the chatter in our own head, is so important for how we age.