In her late 60s, Adelaide-based novelist Carol Lefevre had the distinct sense she was at the threshold of unchartered territory.
“[I saw] turning 70 as a kind of border to be crossed,” she tells ABC RN’s God Forbid.
She was uncertain about what might lie ahead.
“I was wondering how I was going to cope when I was in that territory on the other side.”
She began writing a series of essays “as a way of finding out what I thought, what I felt, and what people expected of me”.
The process was “not always comfortable”, but it helped her understand an intimate and complex feeling she was experiencing: homesickness.
Rather than longing for a place, Ms Lefevre found herself yearning for a time.
She missed her younger self. And when she spoke with people of a similar age, she found they did, too.
After all, as she writes in a recent essay, “old is a country no-one wants to visit”.
Australia’s ‘youth obsession’
While ageing creeps up slowly, certain moments can “suddenly confront us” with the “enormous change that’s taken place”, Ms Lefevre says.
She experienced one such moment recently while driving, when singer Jackson Browne came on the radio.
The sound of his voice sent a shockwave through her.
“It kind of catapulted me back in time to a time when I [was] living quite differently,” she says.
When, instead of “going to bed at eight o’clock at night on a Saturday”, she was out adventuring in the world.
“There’s no road back [to the past]. And that’s the really difficult part.”
Ms Lefevre traces a sense of grief in ageing to the ageism that is rife in Australian society. She says we are raised to be “age denialists”.
Clinical psychologist and men’s health researcher Zac Seidler agrees.
Australia has a “youth obsession”, he says.
“There are so many different cultures that have a lot of respect for their older generations, and I feel we are moving further away from that.”
When speaking with older Australians, he says he often hears that they feel “they don’t necessarily have a purpose or use within our society anymore”.
“It should be the complete opposite; they are the most useful, they have the greatest wisdom to pass down,” Dr Seidler says.
“And nonetheless, for some reason, we push them into the corners of society where they kind of lose their voice and their power.”
A 2020 survey of more than 80,000 people across 57 countries found that ageism negatively impacts the health of older individuals and remains “a neglected global health issue”.
Older Australians are also over-represented in suicide rates, with men over the age of 85 three times more likely to die by suicide than the national average.
Sue King, director of advocacy and research at Anglicare, has seen the effects of ageism firsthand through working with older Australians.
“There’s lots of complex layers of grief and loss for older people,” she says.
In Anglicare’s aged care facilities, she says she sees “a lot of people who have just shut down” because they have “surrendered so much” of their independence and sense of purpose.
The age of invisibility
Ageing can present extra barriers for older women.
Women “have always been at this dreadful nexus of sexism and ageism”, Ms Lefevre says.
Ms King says women are particularly vulnerable “because the pay gap is so great and has been so great for them in the past”.
“Many of them have been carers, they’ve only worked part-time, they’ve got no savings, their superannuation is very limited, so they actually don’t have anything to fall back on.”
Indeed, women aged 55 and over are experiencing the highest rates of homelessness in a decade.
Ms King says when older women reach a point of crisis, “they tend to withdraw from their social networks because they’re embarrassed, they feel ashamed”.
Ms Lefevre adds that many women also experience a sense of invisibility after a certain age, which adds to “internalised ageism”.
“Society really devalues [women] once they’re no longer of child-bearing age,” she says.
“Something happens. It’s like a switch that’s flipped at around about the age of 50.
“I can remember this happening, that there was suddenly less eye contact, less engagement from people.”
Language around older women is often degrading too, she says.
“Mutton dressed as lamb, the cougar, all these awful stereotypes … all of these phrases have come into use and are just used all the time without any thought.”
It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that older Australians might long for youth.
Dr Seidler says it’s a sentiment he hears from his patients frequently.
“As the world moves on, there is this notion that there is no place for older individuals, and therefore, the zeitgeist has moved past them,” he says.
“So many people that I talk to feel that their past actions, their past selves, their past experiences, are all that they are and all that they can be.”
Owning ‘old’
Feeling homesick for one’s younger self might be a natural response to ageism, but it doesn’t have to be painful.
“We need to find a way to understand that everything that happened to us — that homesickness — is a strength; it’s the beauty of experience,” Dr Seidler says.
Part of that acceptance has to come from the people and places around us, he says.
“I think that if [older people] are given space and ability to exert their wisdom in many ways, there is so much power in that.”
Both Dr Seidler and Ms Lefevre point to “blue zones” — regions of the world with unusually high proportions of centenarians — as examples of societies that support and empower older individuals.
Researchers have identified a sense of purpose, social engagement and close familial connections as key contributors to the longevity of these communities.
But the other part of accepting old age has to come from within, Dr Seidler says.
“My aim as a clinician is to get to a point where we can really empower [older] individuals to see their natural capacity for growth, for giving, for sharing that wisdom, and not leaning into these tropes about use-by dates.”
A key element of that is embracing joy and “surrounding yourself with others”, he says.
A growing body of research bears this out, with multiple studies linking joy and positive feelings about ageing to better health outcomes and higher quality of life in old age.
Ms Lefevre says writing about ageing has shown her the true “purpose” of old age: finding a balance between the past and present.
“[It’s] the ability to focus in the present moment and find some kind of acceptance for who we are now, knowing that in a way, we still carry all those earlier iterations of us inside,” she says.
She also believes “old people need to own their age” and take pride in it.
“No amount of regret is going to do us any good.
“We have to heal ourselves of that desire, look forward as much as we can, and just inhabit the present vividly and passionately, and enjoy every moment for what it is.”
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