21st Century Call: Move Beyond our Cult of Youth to a Cult of
Living
I posited
in my last entry that many of our strategies for living the Cult of Youth may
actually be counter-productive due to the fact that our efforts to appear
younger somewhat prevent us from being and living more youthfully. After all, our goals should be about
improving our quality of life; not simply about creating optical illusions for
others!
Here I
would like to prolong that reflection by considering our current fears and
goals in order to reframe them into a Cult of Living.
It’s time to reconstruct our fears of aging and
our goals of youth.
There is
societal significance in the obsession of effacing age. Ostensibly, it is an attempt to defy
mortality, in response to our great fear of death.
But could it, in reality, represent a fear of being?
Indeed,
wrinkles are often indicators of our past and the experiences which have built
our personal character and have led us to make certain choices, good and
bad. They represent our gained
perspective, right or wrong. They are a
visible mark of our growth and evolution, easy or belabored. They are part of who we are.
And here we
are trying to efface them. Erase
them. Disown them. Avoid ever acquiring them. As if refusing our very being would allow us to
relive our nostalgic idea of the easiness of youth, or start again with a clean
slate; keep our options open. Perhaps we
are flirting with perpetual adolescence in order to flee the alleged
constraints of being an adult: the end
of possibilities, the end of spontaneity, and the compromise of our dreams (as
depicted by “emerging adults” (18-29 year olds in the Western world) recorded
by socio-psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett’s extensive research).
But, could
it be that out of fear of this type of stagnation, we are avoiding filling in
our actual lives as completely as we could or should? That we don’t want to accept who we are, opting
instead to play act and perform, as would an adolescent, simply in the name of a
figurative possibility of re-creating our lives? Could this be the key to why we are rejecting
any visible manifestations of “growing up”? And, by consequence, any overly
defining characteristics?
These reflexes reveal erroneous representations
of youth and of adulthood.
Youth and adolescence
are not so much about freedom but about conformity, as they try on different
masks to figure out who they are and who they want to be. Far from freestyle living and spontaneity,
adolescents are beholden to others’ approval and an exacerbated need for
belonging and approbation. Even their
dreams are normative, “everyone will find a lifelong partner, and a great job,
and live happily ever after”.
In today’s
performance society, the need to make the “right” choice is acute; it’s not
surprising we all shy away from closing doors.
But the representation of adulthood and age as only rigid, static,
conservative, and anti-dynamic is inaccurate and limiting. In reality, adulthood represents the life-stage
during which we acquire at last the wisdom and maturity required for actually
free and deliberate living, positive control, etc. For, adulthood can (and should) be a very
dynamic stage in which the individual has at last accepted responsibility for
one’s self, making one’s own decisions, and with financial independence. It is
the stage during which the individual has shed the urgent need for approval and
during which, thanks to having closed certain doors, we can open new ones more
befitting to whom we have become and want to actually be.
On the
other hand, if we don’t (or society doesn’t) allow us the freedom to make
choices and move on, we will continue to
prevent ourselves from building a strong sense of who we are. In this case, we quickly find ourselves up
against the “void” of existence which is at the root of our Cult of Youth. As has said Susan Ertz in her novel Anger
in the Sky, “millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with
themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”
As a society, we seem to have opted for projections and appearances
instead of actually building ourselves up to Be.
Again, much
of the confusion stems from our performance society in which there can only be one
winner and in which we are each pitted against each other. Part of the trouble is that as a person ages,
that person, man or woman, as a social animal, needs to feel assured that
he/she will not be ostracized, cut off from the community (especially as the
person reaches an age that is less self-sufficient, depending more on society
and social network for survival). For
that, he/she needs to feel desired, loved, included.
The trouble
is, we’re all competing for the same places. Cougars and Lolitas are aiming to charm the
same men (who, clearly, still need to be liberated and realize that their
manliness is not exclusively proven by their ability to seduce young women –
they should move on to mature women!!!).
Just as are Snow White and the Evil Queen. But attempting to retrieve the person we were
at 20 is a chronic of a failure foretold… and can only lead to despair. The Evil Queen is proof! And putting all our worth in our looks is a
second error that I’ll develop in next week’s blog.
The fact of
the matter is that we owe it to ourselves, as individuals and as a species, to
explore the full potential of each age and life-stage and, in this way, embrace
the many dimensions of Being.
This is
why, to make for a more durable societal scheme in the 21st century,
we need to clarify (and make, if so needed) roles for each, enabling older men
and women to have a respectable and respected place in society. In addition to the beauty of youth, maturity
can and should have an appeal. We must
reshape our societal myth of beauty, charm, attraction, etc., to make it fuller
and more extensive than simply an anti-age appearance. It’s the only way to avoid having “being” reduced
to being “young” (i.e. in one’s early 20s – which is also a problem for young
girls and young teens).
What is now needed is to foster conduits so
that mature and aging adults’ contributions are recognized and valued… in order
to induce a synergetic cycle that benefits each age and its valuable role.
We can
begin by recalibrating our aims. Currently,
the way we are pursuing the Cult of
Youth seems to be pushing us into incorporating mainly the negative aspects of
youth:
- effacing signs of wisdom, living, experience
- marginalizing memory and experience
- holding hostage our attention with nostalgia, however inaccurate it may be
- wasting our resources and energy on how many wrinkles we have (or could have one day) rather than living and thriving
- rigidifying ourselves to better resemble a 2-dimensional, taxidermic, still-life identity rather than embracing life as movement and evolution with ever more to discover
- giving into clannishness and identity appearance politics typical of adolescents who are copying instead of creating new paths thanks to the lives we have built… and the fruits of our experiences and travails
Instead, we
should be trying to integrate the
positive aspects of youth.
After
all, what actually constitutes “youthful” living? Curiosity, liveliness, liberty, autonomy,
eagerness, taking on new challenges, defying norms and trying out new
playgrounds, being groundbreaking, audacity, excitement, innovativeness… All characteristics that are potentially enhanced
with age!
In reality, we need to age to be able to live
young! Instead of trying so desperately to reduce age to youth, we should be
building youthfulness with age:
-
- liberating our thoughts and wisdom, no longer beholden to adolescent conformity- regenerating our brain acuity by continually learning new things, analyzed with due perspective
- confronting our ideas with others, including not like-minded people
- pursuing innovativeness which, as Regis Debray aptly put it, requires memory and experience
- being dynamic and constructive by activating our relativity & experience
- pioneering further as to how we want to live once our bodies are no longer as performing
- Expressing ourselves and living with passion now that we have shed the adolescent pitfalls of rejection, judgment, or alienation. “Living life out loud” as puts it Mike Robbins
- Revalue-ing as positive wisdom and experience, contemplation, analysis, etc. as a counterweight to today’s acceleration & superficiality
These
shifts would enable us to move beyond performance society and embrace spherical
rather than linear “then and than logic” so that we can actually build, at once,
on our personal histories, desired future, current characteristics instead of
trying desperately to efface them… In
short, we could actually benefit fully from “Being.”
In turn,
this would enable us to actually welcome
our human reality as growing beings who continually and renewably add and
invest in their being through new experiences and perspectives… regardless of
linearly quantitative “age”!
Let me know
what you think, and stay tuned for another bite from the apple,
Eve
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