You say tomato and I say "tomahhhto," and when the Gershwin brothers resolved the dispute in their song by deciding to call the whole thing off, they really meant: big deal, who cares, we're both talking about tomatoes and it's really not worth ending a love affair over.
I think there's some of that going on right now in the discussion around how each of us chooses to age. I had dinner the other night with the head of a top market research firm and was unsurprised when he described the results of a recent focus group testing of a prospective anti-aging product.
A company was interested in fine-tuning how they should describe a new shampoo that would leave hair shinier, bouncier and thicker. They were specifically interested in getting feedback on whether the product should be marketed as "anti-aging."
My friend was stunned by how polarized the women were by the use of the word anti-aging. Each of the groups across the country were pretty evenly divided between those who wholeheartedly embraced any "anti-aging" product, and those who reacted against the very idea.
"Come on - is there anyone out there who doesn't want to look younger?" people in the first group said. "Maybe they won't admit it, but give me a break!" While the other half said, "You can look good at any age. Why this pressure to look ‘young?' This is a denial of who we are and you are encouraging us to feel bad about ourselves, so you can make money."
We're at an awkward moment in this cultural conversation. "Old" people will be the largest segment of our population as baby boomers continue to hit their 60s, and, for the first time half of Americans will live to reach their 80s. When my grandparents were born, the average life expectancy was 47 years; in 2000 it was 79 years for women.
That is a huge shift in just a few generations. As a culture we've never had to deal with (and look at) such a massive group of old people, and we simply haven't had the time to think about what it means - and how we as individuals want to deal with it. And very smart companies, wanting to sell lots of products, have played off of our insecurities by trying to convince us that looking the best that we can is only about looking as young as we can.
I happen to think it's a lot more complicated than that. I don't think there are many of us who aren't interested in looking and, more importantly, feeling our best. It's a no brainer: if you look good, you feel better. What is at issue, though, is the question of what it means to look good at 45 or 55 or 65? Is it a smooth brow? Sexy clothes? Big lips? Shiny gray hair? Good posture? Laugh lines?
Getting older and the ultimate extension of that process - death - is a bummer to think about. It's much easier to look in the mirror and think nothing is changing (a delusion my failing eyesight nicely enables), but maybe what we really need to help us along the way is a broader range of what "old" looks like. Neither anti-age nor pro-age, just...human.
I have no doubt that by the time my teenage daughters might worry about looking old, the cosmeceutical industrial complex will figure out how to retard the visible signs of aging without the use of drastic and disfiguring surgical techniques.
My guess is that they will be able to take a pill in order to have perpetually dewy skin. But for those of us aging in this new era, perhaps we should just call a truce between the two camps and agree to simply celebrate that we're all around for another day.
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