Aging Gracefully is a Lie

On Aging, Dependency, and Cultural Evasion

I think one of my closest cousins, just a couple of years older than I am, still recognizes me. But I’m no longer certain. We spent much of our childhood together. When I was in graduate school, he was in law school across the street, and we often had dinner together. I admired him in the particular way a younger sibling often does—someone slightly older, more accomplished, and already on a clear path.

Now I can’t quite tell whether he knows who I am, or remembers what we shared.

Others, only marginally older, have met different fates. A friend now lives with Parkinson’s in assisted care. Another, a close college friend—an eminent legal historian and an accomplished athlete—died of cancer in his mid-sixties.

But most of the people I know are doing okay. Many entered their 70s cheerfully: with grandchildren, leisure, travel, and work that remains engaging and meaningful. They live with aches and limits, to be sure, but they are recognizably happy.

Those who aren’t still working volunteer, join senior groups, audit university classes, and meet friends for lunch. Their days retain structure, and their sense of identity remains intact.

Others encounter something more difficult, if less catastrophic. A partner’s declining health narrows their shared world. Retirement brings not freedom but disorientation—the loss of routine, usefulness, and the social recognition that work once supplied. Nothing dramatic has “gone wrong,” yet something essential has slipped away.

For this larger group, aging does not arrive as a medical crisis but as a gradual unmooring: the slow thinning of roles, the erosion of purpose, the sense of having outlived the social forms that once made life fulfilling.

This, in practice, is what “aging gracefully” looks like. But our public language about old age rarely acknowledges it.

“Aging gracefully” is one of those phrases that sounds humane but functions, on inspection, as a form of evasion. Like its semantic cousin, “successful aging,” it suggests that old age is something one can manage—through attitude, effort, and resilience—if only one approaches it correctly.

The implication is comforting: decline is optional; dignity is earned; meaning can be preserved through proper adjustment.

This is not exactly a lie, but it is a lie’s first cousin—the truth arranged so as to avoid something truer. People do age differently. Some remain vigorous and engaged well into their 80s. But the upbeat story we tell about old age—of reinvention, positivity, and graceful adaptation—confuses individual capacity with collective preparedness.

It treats aging as a personal achievement rather than a structural condition. And it quietly shifts responsibility onto the elderly themselves for circumstances that no amount of optimism can repair.

We have extended life without rebuilding the social world that once gave later life meaning, status, and support. Longevity has outrun our institutions, our family structures, and our cultural imagination. The result is a growing mismatch between how long people live and how long they remain socially necessary, culturally fluent, and morally visible.

The change in our stories reflects this evasion. Shakespeare’s “second childishness and mere oblivion”—brutal and unsparing—has given way to sitcom wisdom: plucky elders, sassy autonomy, decline softened into quirk. We have moved from cruelty to cheer. But cheerfulness, too, can serve as denial. It reassures the young and consoles the anxious while leaving the hardest truths untouched.

Those truths are not primarily medical. They are social.

Aging as Dislocation

To grow old today is to find yourself disoriented in uncharted terrain. The culture moves faster than the self can keep up. Technologies, workplaces, and social norms reset the rules again and again. The result isn’t just physical slowing. It’s a growing sense of being out of sync.

You haven’t gone anywhere, but the unspoken codes—what counts as competence, taste, fluency, even seriousness—shift beneath your feet. The language changes. The assumptions change. It’s shocking, but true: I’m closer to the end of World War I than my students are to the Vietnam War.

This helps explain a curious finding in aging research: many people in their 70s say they feel about ten years younger than their actual age. By 90, most say they feel their age. That gap isn’t just about health or attitude. It’s cultural.

In a society that treats “old” as a stigma and “youth” as an ideal, feeling younger becomes a way of holding onto continuity and agency—of insisting that you are more than your body’s wear and tear.

But that insistence can also shade into denial. It offers comfort without addressing the deeper problem: how exposed life becomes once work ends, spouses die, peers thin out, and local community weakens. The trouble with aging isn’t only what happens to your body. It’s what happens to the scaffolding that once held your life in place.

The hardest changes aren’t just the visible ones—graying hair, slower movement, new aches. They are changes in what life asks you to absorb. Friends and relatives develop dementia. Someone has heart surgery. Another goes through chemotherapy or suffers a stroke. A technical medical vocabulary becomes everyday conversation.

Aging isn’t just “feeling older.” It’s the accumulation of losses and shocks that make it harder to sustain the story you once told about who you are.

And here’s the part we don’t often admit: as you age, the culture starts to move on without you. Your reference points stop circulating. The events that shaped you no longer function as shared history. When no one else remembers what you remember, your memories start to feel less like history and more like private weather.

A Brief History of How We Got Here

To understand why aging feels so precarious today, it helps to be clear about what has actually changed.

In earlier societies, old age certainly existed, but it worked differently. Many people who survived childhood lived into their 50s or 60s, and in some places well beyond that. Older adults often remained embedded in systems that still needed what they knew—as advisors, supervisors, custodians of craft knowledge—even when their physical strength declined.

The 20th century radically altered the math of life. Medical advances pushed life expectancy past 70, then 75. By the early 21st century, many Americans could expect to live into their 80s. This was an extraordinary achievement.

The problem is that we extended life without, at the same pace, extending the social structures that make later life livable.

For a brief period—roughly from the 1950s through the 1970s—the United States assembled a partial and uneven settlement around later life, even though life expectancy was shorter. Social Security, Medicare, union pensions, and veterans’ benefits reduced the risk that retirement would mean immediate destitution—at least for those who qualified.

Equally important, many older Americans were embedded in a dense but imperfect civic world: union halls, churches, fraternal organizations, extended family networks, and neighborhood groups. These institutions did not eliminate loneliness or marginalization, and they excluded many by race, gender, and class. But they did offer some people forms of belonging and social recognition that did not depend entirely on continued paid work.

Since about 1980, much of that infrastructure has eroded. Union membership has collapsed. Pensions have been replaced by individual retirement accounts that shift risk onto workers. Civic organizations have withered. Suburbanization has left many older people stranded in homes built for families they no longer have, often without reliable transportation.

At the same time, family life has changed. Divorce is more common. Adult children are scattered across the country. Multigenerational households are rare. Aging has been privatized.

What was once a shared social passage has become an individual problem, with families—often a single daughter—expected to absorb the costs created by inadequate public support.

This is the arc that shapes aging today: we invented long lives, briefly built institutions to support them, and then dismantled those institutions while telling individuals to cope, adapt, and “age successfully.” What feels like a personal struggle is, in fact, a collective failure of imagination and responsibility.

The Third Age—and What It Avoids

Peter Laslett’s idea of the “Third Age”—the period after retirement but before serious frailty—captures something real. Many people remain active, curious, and capable for years after full-time work ends. For those with decent health and resources, this stage can feel genuinely freeing.

But the idea also reflects a wish: that aging can be stretched into a long plateau of vitality, a kind of extended intermission before anything truly hard begins. Maybe that’s why today’s tech billionaires are investing heavily in healthcare as opposed to the arts — to stave off their own demise.

The problem is what comes next. The Third Age exists in quiet denial of the Fourth—the stage when attitude stops working, dependency can’t be avoided, and frailty or cognitive decline shape everyday life. This isn’t a failure of will. It’s the body asserting itself.

Our culture is very good at celebrating the Third Age. We love profiles of 70-year-old marathon runners and TED talks about “successful aging.” What we struggle to face is the Fourth Age—especially its slow-motion disasters: dementia, repeated hospital stays, the shrinking of life to a room, a chair, a routine of medications.

That imbalance isn’t accidental. The Third Age fits modern values: independence, self-direction, productivity. The Fourth Age threatens all of them. It introduces dependency where we prize autonomy and cognitive loss where we tie identity to mental sharpness. It can’t be solved by effort alone. So we celebrate the Third Age and avert our eyes from the Fourth—even though the Fourth is where most long lives end.

“Successful Aging” and the Moral Trap

The most influential version of this thinking is the “successful aging” model, developed in the late 20th century by gerontologists who defined success as low disease burden, high physical and cognitive function, and continued engagement in productive activity.

The appeal is obvious. The model is hopeful. It suggests that with the right habits—exercise, diet, social connection—one can age well. For many people, this feels true enough to be reassuring.

But once success is defined this way, aging that does not follow the script begins to look like failure.

The model implicitly moralizes decline. It treats aging as if it begins at retirement, when in fact it reflects a lifetime of accumulated advantage and strain. Someone who spent decades in physically demanding work or lived with chronic stress does not enter later life on the same footing as someone who retired from a professional career with a pension.

The problem is not that the framework is wrong in every case. It is that a partial truth has hardened into a norm. In the process, responsibility shifts onto individuals just as public and communal supports are weakening.

“Successful aging” becomes a polite way of looking away. It asks individuals to supply meaning and resilience precisely when their control is shrinking—and allows the rest of us to believe the problem has already been solved.

Retirement as Identity Loss

In modern societies, aging is inseparable from the loss of work—and not primarily because of income. Work is where contemporary life concentrates structure, status, and social recognition. It tells people where they belong and how they are seen. That is why retirement so often feels less like freedom than like amputation.

The problem is that modern life offers few ways to remain socially legible once paid work ends. Knowledge, judgment, and experience no longer have obvious places to land.

Retirement today rarely means only the loss of income. It means the loss of daily rhythm, a community of peers, a sense of usefulness, and an identity others immediately recognize. This matters even for people who disliked their jobs. Disliking work is not the same as being socially unnecessary.

Philip Roth understood this distinction. In Everyman, the protagonist catalogs surgeries like mile markers—hernia repair, angioplasty, bypass. But the deeper terror is not medical. It is what remains afterward: no work, no marriage, no project waiting. By the time the novel ends in burial, the man has already been buried once—alive, in a retirement with nothing to retire toward.

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead offers a counterpoint. Its aging narrator, Reverend Ames, writes a long letter to his young son, trying to pass on what he has learned over a lifetime. The novel rests on a simple but powerful idea: aging is not only about what is lost, but about what can still be handed on—if there is someone ready to receive it.

Ames has a role that gives his final years meaning. The book’s quiet sadness lies in how fragile and uncommon such roles have become.

We made work the primary source of social recognition—and then withdrew it just as other sources of meaning thinned as well. The problem is not that people stop working. It is that we failed to build institutions strong enough to carry a life once work is gone.

Memory Without Witnesses

One of the loneliest features of aging today is something we rarely talk about: memory without witnesses.

As people age, fewer and fewer others share their past. The reference points that once anchored conversation stop circulating. Events that shaped a life no longer function as common knowledge. Older people can find themselves carrying an entire world that the present no longer needs to remember.

When no one else remembers what you remember, your memories start to feel less like shared history and more like private weather—real, but hard to explain or pass on.

May Sarton’s late journals, At Seventy and At Eighty-Two, capture this quietly and painfully. They describe not just physical limitation, but the shrinking of her social world—the way solitude deepens and the mind becomes both refuge and trap. Beneath the elegance runs a steady question: is anyone still listening?

Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? offers a harsher version. She documents her parents’ decline and her own exhaustion: the logistics, the indignities, the moral wear-and-tear of caregiving. The book refuses consolation. It insists that some experiences don’t redeem or uplift; they simply have to be endured, and then mourned.

Chast also makes clear how caregiving erodes reciprocity. Her parents no longer remember the daughter who visits. The relationship becomes one-sided. You remember who they were; they no longer remember you. And you carry those memories alone, weighted by loss even before death arrives.

The Gendered Burden of Longevity

Nowhere is the gap between our stories about aging and its reality clearer than in its gendered structure.

Women live longer than men, often by five or six years. In practice, this creates a two-stage late life. First comes caregiving—often years of managing illness, appointments, household tasks, and the slow unmaking of someone you love. Then comes widowhood: grief layered onto total responsibility, often with less income and less support than before.

This is not accidental. It’s how extended longevity has been organized.

Women make up most informal caregivers, and the toll is heavy: higher rates of stress, depression, and declining health. Spousal caregiving is especially punishing. You are not a professional who clocks out. You are the person who remembers decades of shared life, who recognizes the man inside the confusion, who grieves someone who is still alive but already, in an essential sense, gone.

Here is the quiet cruelty of long life: for many women, the long-promised “freedom” of old age arrives only after years of unpaid care have drained the very energy and resources that freedom would require. The extra years are not a gift; they are bought through depletion.

This reflects a larger feminist truth. Care work has never been properly valued. We treat it as obligation, as love, as something women naturally do—and therefore as something that needs no pay, no public support, no serious infrastructure. Aging extends this logic into later life. Women are expected to absorb, privately and without complaint, the costs of our failure to build a real system of long-term care.

The idea of “successful aging” assumes a masculine life path: career, retirement, independence. It has little room for the female path, where caregiving is the work, and where caregiving often explains why there is no pension, no clean transition into leisure.

Not all women experience aging this way. Wealth and race matter enormously. But the underlying structure persists: we have extended women’s lives while leaving intact a gendered division of care that turns those extra years into a second unpaid shift.

We call this resilience. A more honest word would be abandonment.

Gray Divorce and the Privatization of Old Age

If widowhood is the old story, divorce is increasingly the new one. “Gray divorce”—divorce after age 50—has doubled in recent decades and is reshaping later life.

Divorce can be necessary and even life-saving. But it also carries delayed costs that show up most sharply in old age: two households instead of one, fractured social networks, weaker ties to adult children and grandchildren, and no default caregiver when decline sets in.

This isn’t an argument against divorce. It’s an observation about what happens when divorce meets longevity. Many people now age without a durable relational scaffold.

For all its flaws and inequalities, marriage once functioned as essential infrastructure. It provided companionship, shared labor, and built-in care when health failed. When that structure dissolves, individuals are left to improvise solutions to problems that partnership once absorbed.

Old age exposes the limits of autonomy. Dependency is not optional. If you live long enough, the Fourth Age will arrive, and when it does, the question is simple: who will be there?

Research consistently shows that marital status matters in late life—not because marriage is inherently superior, but because we have built a society that still relies on it as the primary organizer of care, while failing to create real alternatives for those who age alone.

We have privatized old age. We treat later life as a personal project rather than a shared responsibility. But dependency is not a lifestyle choice. And the Fourth Age cannot be managed through optimism, branding, or grit.

Loneliness and the Collapse of Social Infrastructure

We often talk about loneliness in old age as if it were an individual problem. Make friends. Join a group. But that framing gets things backward. What looks like a personal failure is usually the result of an infrastructural one.

As people age, they don’t just lose friends. They lose the institutions that once organized adult social life. Workplaces, unions, churches, fraternal groups—many of these once provided built-in social contact and a reason to show up somewhere. Union halls weren’t just for bargaining; they were social centers. Churches weren’t only about belief; they hosted dinners, committees, and informal care networks.

As those institutions have weakened or disappeared, families have become the default support system. But families are smaller, more scattered, and often stretched thin. Neighborhoods that once offered daily interaction have been replaced by car-dependent suburbs and quiet isolation.

The result is predictable. Loneliness becomes more common—and much harder to fix. The background structures that once generated connection have been dismantled. Older people are told to rebuild their social lives through personal initiative at exactly the moment when energy, mobility, and spontaneity are declining.

We’ve built a society that makes late-life connection difficult and then blames the elderly for being lonely.

Dementia as the Limit Case

Nothing exposes the limits of modern ideas about aging more starkly than dementia.

Our culture assumes that identity rests on memory, recognition, and rational self-direction.

Dementia dissolves all three. Anyone who has watched a moment of non-recognition knows this. The eyes search your face, then slide past it. Confusion flickers, then anxiety, then a polite mask. And you—daughter, son, spouse—must decide whether to insist (It’s me) or spare him or her the shame by pretending to be a kind stranger.

Conversation turns into improvisation. You learn not to correct. Not to argue about the date. You enter his or her reality rather than insisting on a shared one. Love becomes vigilance—watching for wandering, for stoves left on, for dangers your loved one no longer sees.

Dementia forces a question our society avoids: what remains of personhood when memory and recognition fall away?

From the caregiver’s side, the loss is not only the person but the relationship itself. Relationship requires mutual recognition, and dementia takes that first. You continue to care for someone who may never again say your name. The ethical weight is crushing.

This is where Shakespeare’s bleakness returns with force. “Mere oblivion” stops being a metaphor once you’ve lived it.

But dementia isn’t only a moral or philosophical problem. It’s an economic one—and we are badly unprepared. More than six million Americans live with Alzheimer’s today, a number expected to nearly triple by 2050. The costs already exceed $350 billion a year, much of it borne privately by families through unpaid labor and out-of-pocket expenses.

Medicare covers medical treatment, not long-term care. Medicaid helps only after families have spent down their assets. In practice, we’ve turned dementia into a family problem rather than a social one.

Other countries make different choices. Nordic nations provide universal long-term care. Japan has invested in community-based support. The United States has largely chosen not to choose—leaving families to improvise and markets to decide, while wrapping abandonment in the language of autonomy.

We say, She or he wanted to age in place. Often what we mean is: there was no affordable alternative.

Dementia asks a simple question: what do we owe to people who can no longer manage on their own? So far, our answer has been: as little as possible.

What We Refuse to Admit

Why has our culture moved from Shakespeare’s bleak honesty to the cheer of The Golden Girls?

Part of the answer is that we’ve become kinder. We no longer want to speak of old age with contempt. That matters, and it’s real progress.

But part of the answer is avoidance. Cheerfulness helps keep fear at bay. It’s easier to treat aging as an attitude problem than to face it as a structural one—something bound up with how we organize work, family, community, and care.

The language of “successful aging” flatters us into thinking we’ve solved the problem, when we’ve mostly learned how not to look at it. We celebrate the Third Age—the active, healthy, autonomous years—while quietly averting our eyes from the Fourth, when dependency and frailty become unavoidable.

The most honest diagnosis may be this: we’ve built a society remarkably good at extending life and remarkably bad at giving long lives a workable social form.

That doesn’t mean the cheerful stories are entirely wrong. The 78-year-old marathon runner exists. So does the 85-year-old still teaching piano. The problem isn’t that these examples are false. It’s that they’re incomplete.

Much of what we sell as “aging well” is denial dressed up as wisdom.

What Must Change

There’s an old Scottish dirge, “The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond,” often sung as if it were a jaunty tune about friends reuniting: “O ye’ll tak’ the high road, and I’ll tak the low road, And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye”.

But its meaning runs darker.

In one common reading, the singer knows he is about to die. The living will take the high road—the long, visible path through time—while the dead will take the low road, the hidden passage home. “But me and my true love will never meet again.” It’s a song about separation: about who leaves first, and the asymmetry death imposes on those who stay behind.

What gives the song its power isn’t grief alone, but the recognition that some journeys can’t be shared, some losses can’t be softened by cheer, and some roads never meet again.

That is the existential burden of aging our culture prefers not to face. We celebrate the high road—activity, independence, reinvention—while turning away from the low road that so many must walk quietly and alone: dependency, fading recognition, lost fluency, and the gradual disappearance of witnesses to one’s life.

But this burden is not borne by the elderly alone. It is also carried by those who accompany them: spouses—usually wives—who manage years of caregiving; adult children who step into unfamiliar roles of responsibility and moral strain; families who must make decisions with no map and little support. Aging is a shared passage, and its costs ripple outward, reshaping entire lives.

Loch Lomond reminds us that separation isn’t a personal failure. It’s part of being human.

The tragedy of modern aging isn’t that this low road exists. It’s that we’ve built a society that denies it, hides it, and leaves those traveling it—and those walking beside them—without companionship, meaning, or honor. We’ve extended life without learning how to accompany it to the end.

Facing this honestly would mean admitting some basic truths: that dependency isn’t failure; that frailty can’t be overcome by willpower; that the Fourth Age will come for most of us—and that grace lies not in avoiding it, but in meeting it without evasion.

It would mean rebuilding what we’ve allowed to collapse: not just medical care, but community; not just nursing homes, but neighborhoods where older people remain visible and needed—and where caregivers are supported rather than isolated.

It would mean treating caregiving as real work, deserving real support: paid leave, respite care, long-term care insurance, and guidance for those suddenly responsible for lives other than their own.

It would mean cities that don’t strand older adults and their caregivers in car-dependent suburbs: walkable streets, safer crossings, usable public transit, places where generations mix and help is close at hand.

It would mean creating roles, not just activities—ways for older adults to contribute that don’t require pretending to be sixty, and ways for caregivers to remain socially anchored rather than consumed by invisible labor. Mentorship. Intergenerational housing. Civic life that values experience even when it comes in slower bodies—and care when it comes with exhaustion.

And it would mean telling better stories. Not Shakespeare’s annihilation—“second childishness and mere oblivion; / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”—and not sitcom reinvention. But stories that admit what we’ve avoided: that we’ve added years without adding meaning, created a new stage of life, and left it culturally empty for both the aging and those who love them.

We’ve built an extraordinary infrastructure to sustain life—statins, stents, joint replacements. What we haven’t built is the culture needed to hold long lives once the productive years are over.

So we age into a world unprepared for us. The language shifts. The technologies race ahead. The institutions that once organized life thin out or disappear. Our memories become less shared history than private weather.

We become immigrants in our own time, displaced without having moved.

This isn’t an individual failure. It’s a structural one. It can’t be solved by optimism or by exhortations to “age successfully.” Those ideas misdiagnose the problem by locating it in people rather than in the society they inhabit.

One reason we’ve turned so eagerly to therapy in old age is that so many other forms of guidance have disappeared—not only for the elderly, but for their spouses and their children. In earlier eras, people did not face the final stages of life alone. They were accompanied—by elders, clergy, teachers, mentors, kin, and communities that understood aging as a shared passage rather than a private ordeal.

Today, therapy is often asked to fill that void. Sometimes it helps. But too often it translates social and existential strain into individual diagnoses. Loneliness becomes a symptom. Disorientation becomes a disorder. Caregiver exhaustion becomes burnout rather than a predictable consequence of structural neglect. Grief and dependency are labeled rather than interpreted.

I’m skeptical of a culture that rushes to diagnosis. But I’m not skeptical of the need for guidance. Aging demands it—not only for those who are declining, but for those who must decide, daily, how to care, when to intervene, and how to endure what lies ahead.

People need mentors, advocates, and witnesses—others who can help them navigate loss, renegotiate identity, and preserve dignity when autonomy fades. Those guides may be therapists. They may also be pastors, teachers, peers, or elders who have already walked the road.

The crisis of aging isn’t that we lack techniques for managing decline. It’s that we lack a shared moral and social framework for understanding it.

We have extended life without extending meaning.

And until we relearn how to accompany one another—to the end, and alongside one another—“aging gracefully” will remain what it has become: not wisdom, but a culture that praises the high road while abandoning those on the low.