Book Review: How to Age

Two reasons for picking this book up: Its compact size that fits into my small shoulder bag, and that it was a prescriptive nonfiction. I found it at the library.

It turned out not so much about HOW exactly to age, but how to resist the stereotype around aging, the historical background to the current age-ism and their alternatives.

I found the writing easy to read. I will quote a part of a paragraph that I thought summarized much of the book eloquently. “…although we’re living longer, fitter and healthier lives than ever before, we spend more time worrying about ageing: we get older later but fear getting older younger. This is particularly strange since technology has made brute strength less important. You’d imagine that, as a result, there’d be less prejudice against older people who are physically weaker than younger ones. Yet while ageing..is a dynamic process and is changing all the time, public policy is locked into the past and lags behind lived experience by at least twenty years. This ‘structural lag’…prevents older people playing their full part in society.

After a while, however, I got increasingly less interested. The author is a sociologist, “Professor of Life Writing and Culture,” – whatever that means, and an Oxford graduate. So, I don’t know if the decidedly colloquial writing is the format of the series for which she wrote (“The School of Life”), she refers little to substantial academic research and more on observations, or so it felt to me. It felt like a dinner party conversation – only that I got cornered by her and she was talking at me, not allowing me to respond, giving me her perspective that seemed to be based on little research. Moreover, the book offered me little that I had not thought of before. She seemed to assume that the world, including her readers, were more prejudiced against the aged and the process of aging that how I felt.

To be fair – she lives in London. I live in the U.S. And most of my 30+ years in the States were spent in its biggest cities, surrounded by other liberal minded creatives and innovators. We are probably less bound by social conventions than the general population. My friends are intergenerational, interracial, and very diverse in all sorts of other ways, too. I have friends in their 90’s, as well as 20’s. Lastly, I almost died at the age of 20 from a disease. More importantly, I prepared myself to die – I looked back on my life, thought about death, and was ready to let go. This may have had more impact on my views of mortality, physical strength/weaknesses, and social values and priorities than I tend to give credit.

The lessons learned from this book.

• Academic writing does alienate readers, but if you present just anecdotal evidences one after the other, you may as well be talking to your next door neighbor.
• Presumptions on reader’s prejudices make your writing feel either ignorant of your readers, or just arrogant.
• A small paper bag is easy to carry – and convenient to read, when one is trying to avoid the blue light from the smartphone.