Putting a Cap on Eternal Youth: Why Growing Up is Better Than the Alternative
In a world obsessed with youth and haunted by the passage of time, there’s a need to challenge the cultural dread of aging, to learn to celebrate its fruits of wisdom and liberation from the relentless chase of fleeting accomplishments.
By Griffin Gooch
1.
I was only turning 27, but it felt like I was turning 40.
Birthdays have always been hard to swallow. I remember once crying on the eve of my eighth birthday over the existential pain of no longer being seven. And yes, it felt as ridiculous then as it feels typing it now. But even at seven I noticed there was something painful about growing up. Every passing year added more seriousness, urgency, self-consciousness, anxiety, and expectations.
I’m not alone in this fear. In fact, “birthday blues” have become so commonplace that some rallied to include it in the DSM-5’s list of mental health disorders. Birthday blues stem partly from gerascophobia, the fear of growing old. “Aging” is now a common response on those “What are you most afraid of?” surveys. Interestingly, aging sometimes ranks higher than death.
I believe this fear stems from our milieu’s attempts to cater itself toward and around young people . A new wave of horror films—like Old, X, or The Substance—use the throes of aging as the emotional mechanism behind their terror. Or just consider the ways it pervades our music: “Forever Young,” “We Are Young,” “Here’s to Never Growing Up.” Another batch of songs reminisces lost youth: “Springsteen,” “Stressed Out,” or “Closer” (“We ain’t never getting older”). All of which might seem harmless, but media has a much more powerful influence on our beliefs than we give it credit for. As the politician Andrew Fletcher wrote, “If I can write the songs of a nation, I care not who writes its laws.”
Youth obsession isn’t just speculation either. Neuroscientist Sophie Scott found that when people are asked about the highlights of their lives, they invariably talk about their twenties. Even when she tried to nudge the conversations elsewhere or interview different age groups, youth was treated as their apex of significance. Such over-infatuation might be why we’ve been called a “first-half-of-life culture.” It’s a zeitgeist where youth isn’t just tolerated but romanticized.
One of the most romantic aspects of youth is its absence of expectations. Which is where the other angle of birthday blues, atelophobia, or the fear of falling short of unrealistic standards, enters the picture.
The novelist R.F. Kuang, who’s perhaps one of the youngest success stories in her profession, wrote about the similarly precocious Olivia Rodrigo, lamenting the ego-death of no longer being the youngest prodigy in the room. Rodrigo’s song “Teenage Dream” ruminates on the strange tension of growing out of the teenage angst she’s made a career out of. If she “gets better”—more stable, more mature—in the emotions department, will she still be able to make good music? She’s exceeded standards up until this point—how will it feel when she gets a bit older and she’s no longer hurtling over everyone’s expectations? Kuang herself could relate: on the eve of her twentieth birthday, she cried over the death of her time as a teenager.
Both cases might come across as melodrama, but maybe they’re just following the societal script. The public gives grace to the young. Naïve mistakes are anticipated, and displays of basic competency are cause for applause for the very young. Growing up requires losing that buffer of grace. Expectations mount exponentially with each passing year. And falling short of the cultural quota for where you should be professionally, creatively, or relationally can make young adults feel rejected or socially inadequate.
This is where I was on my 27th birthday. I felt like I was falling behind. I didn’t have my dream job. I wasn’t changing the world. I wanted to pause aging because every step forward in time felt like a reminder of the ways I wasn’t measuring up.
This is an exhausting mindset, but it’s a thoroughly Western one. We strive for the new, for continual forward momentum; we consume products so quickly that they lose their sheen within hours and beckon us to buy something newer. Rather than face the inevitabilities of our slowing forward momentum, we take Ponce de León’s route to hunt for the fountain of youth via an endless stream of lifestyle gurus, vitamin supplements, and bio-hacks.
We all realize, at some level, that youth is fleeting, that fighting aging is like fighting gravity, and that accomplishing things at a younger age isn’t inherently “better” than accomplishing something later on. But the stigma persists.
This stigma, like our youth-obsessed media, has real consequences. It takes what would be an otherwise peaceful process of aging and exacerbates all its worst aspects. Yet in reality, aging isn’t something to fear, dread, or just tolerate—it’s something to celebrate.
When we put too many young people front and center—or even just implicitly broadcast youthful beauty, charisma, or naïveté as aspirational—we distract from the radiance of aging.
2.
The sidelining of society’s older members is a newer phenomenon. Western society would undoubtedly benefit from a return to traditional cultural models of ascribing wisdom and virtue to the elderly. Many were seen as evidence that character growth was possible. Conversely, youthfulness was depicted as a jumble of immaturity, anxiety, and pressure—something everyone should be thankful to grow out of.
In fact, there’s an ancient Chinese saying: “May you find success at a young age.” Which sounds wholesome until you realize it wasn’t meant as a blessing but as a curse. They’d seen enough young upstarts sacrifice their character growth in pursuit of wealth and power to know that early success caved in on itself in the long run. The more success experienced at younger ages, the harder it becomes to reproduce that feeling of success later.
Harvard Professor and author Arthur C. Brooks calls this phenomenon the “striver’s curse.” After studying the career apexes of scientists, writers, scholars, musicians, athletes, and artists, Brooks found that early success seemed to correspond with a higher level of dissatisfaction after successful careers leveled off. The character chiseled through an even distribution of respect in correlation to age seems to grant the virtue necessary to handle the weight of our accomplishments. But sadly, whatever semblance of respect for wisdom—and drive for maturity—our world once had seems to have altogether evaporated or moved to the fringes.
Aging is something to celebrate, not dread or simply tolerate. In fact, dread is better spent toward perpetual adolescence. One can even discern the impact of youth obsession within contemporary religious communities. When we put too many young people front and center—or even just implicitly broadcast youthful beauty, charisma, or naïveté as aspirational—we distract from the radiance of aging. It’s not hard to find church planters advising strict age limits for who should be on stage. But the elderly are a necessary part of every congregation. They can be models of well-lived lives. Not always, of course; there are plenty of older folks who’ve internalized all the worst parts of life and grown a shell of solipsistic bitterness. But for those who’ve taken the highs and lows of life and allowed those punches to make them wiser, stronger, and happier—those are the ones who are truly radiant.
Churches can help people ease into the simple joys of aging by displaying the elderly in more flattering social positions. Dr. Gail Brenner argues that paying attention to the elderly can train us in five important ways: it encourages us to (1) be present in the moment, (2) appreciate what we have without being attached to it, (3) not waste our talents, (4) accept reality as it is, and (5) be more open to love and loving others. Theoretically, the young could teach these things, but seeing it displayed firsthand by the elderly themselves might simply carry more power. Multiple empirical studies find that behavior spreads most effectively when we see that behavior modeled by others in our real-life social spheres. This is why intergenerational ministry is so vital. Of course, institutions require young people to ensure their future; but they also need the elderly or else the young won’t know what to aspire to other than the passing trends of the day.
Life’s second half is not an entropic spiral into uselessness, but an opportunity to make use of different parts of yourself that were, up to now, dormant.
3.
In recent years, there’s been a notable influx of the “Aging isn’t so bad” book genre. Among its titles are From Strength to Strength, Second Act, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, Second Mountain, and so on. Their messages are all somewhat similar: the author assumes the transition into the back half of life is tumultuous and offers a hopeful way forward. While each book has its merits, New York Times columnist David Brooks’s Second Mountain stands out. Realizing how first-half-of-life culture perpetuates a frustration with aging, Brooks rightly argues that we need to come to a point where we comfortably resign into the second.
In Brooks’s interpretation, those in the first half of life stock up on “resume virtues”—achievements, degrees, zeros on paychecks, etcetera—and neglect “eulogy virtues”—the stuff people say about you at your funeral: the way you loved others, the kind of presence you emitted when walking into a room, what you sacrificed for God and others. It’s natural for the young to strive toward resume virtues in blissful oblivion to eulogy virtues. This is because, as Jungian psychologist James Hollis suggests, the first half’s agenda is social—“meeting the demands and expectations our milieu asks of us”—while the second half’s agenda is spiritual— “addressing the larger issues of meaning.” In other words, the first half is driven by acquisition and the desire to accumulate. Those in the second half, however, will more often find themselves driven toward relinquishment: a need to pare down material or emotional clutter to make space for what matters.
Yet the refusal to let go of acquisition is one reason aging can feel painful. Against popular expectations, it turns out that the most likely demographic to start taking antidepressants aren’t teenagers, but those in their 50s. When your body and neural makeup tell you to slow down, resisting it creates enough dissonance to cause mental and emotional distress. As Jung noted, “What is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age.”
The lesson every generation is forced to learn is that resume virtues don’t satisfy our existential cravings in the long run. Since our brains and bodies can’t escape the reality of our imminent deaths forever, there comes a point in the human maturation process where meaning simply can’t be predicated on temporal successes. It’s precisely this refusal to stop prioritizing the resume that causes some to experience midlife as torturous.
Aging is nowhere near as bad as it’s characterized. In fact, it even opens up new parts of your brain, allowing you to process information in novel ways. Life’s second half is not an entropic spiral into uselessness, but an opportunity to make use of different parts of yourself that were, up to now, dormant. But if we don’t learn to accept growing up, we will always experience aging as a curse rather than a blessing.
There’s no real need to disguise our age, to worry our best creative years are behind us, to fear our bodies and minds are in constant decay.
4.
Coming to terms with the joys of aging might require a sober evaluation of youth. Not just the youth in our memories (which are always far too rose-tinted), but youth as it really is —hormonal naivety and all.
We tend to feel things most strongly when we’re young—like the first time you hold someone’s hand or get your sixteen-year-old heart sliced to bits. Youth brims with the highest highs and lowest lows we ever experience, simply because all experiences are new and maximally novel. But being jerked in all directions by our hormones and emotions doesn’t always feel great. That naïve romanticism only seems covetable from the jaded adult who’s edited all the bad parts out of their teenage memories.
I think this might be why people get mentally stuck in their youth: they’re our decades-long time capsule of all our most enormous dopamine spikes. So we hold on to them as if those were the “golden age” when really, they just contained more erratic and hormonal thrills than we experience in our fifties.
There might be less thrills and firsts, but aging is filled with more benefits than we realize. Our emotional intelligence sharpens. The accumulated wisdom from the trial and error of living grants us a sharper ability to discern how to manage our time and relationships better. Our brains naturally grow less impulsive and more self-controlled. We come to know ourselves well enough to say no and keep boundaries. We hurry less, love more.
I can say from my sparse experience that even though some parts of growing up aren’t enthralling (aging out of college ministry was quite the odd feeling), other parts are. I’m not as anxious as I was when I was twenty. Recent memory does not recall any melodramatic fits of rage from getting stuck in traffic. When I disagree with someone, I don’t feel the need to lash out. These aren’t just the natural results of aging. It’s due to aging while keeping the reality of the spiritual needs of my soul in the forefront of my mind. It’s due to the going-on-eight years of intentional spiritual formation practices every morning. It’s part of growing in my understanding of being loved and learning to love and illuminate others. Of taming the need to refine resume virtues and intentionally keeping the eulogy virtues before the daily consciousness. So, in that sense, perhaps the point in all of this is that aging is most brutal for those who reject a spiritual framework—as is more and more common in the modern West—and most joyful for those who manage to frame each passing year in terms of the spiritual growth it permits.
Putting a cap on eternal youth helps us accept reality for what it is. Like the author of Ecclesiastes says, “For everything there is a season, and a time…a time to be born, and a time to die…a time to weep and a time to laugh” (3:1-4). There’s no real need to disguise our age, to worry our best creative years are behind us, to fear our bodies and minds are in constant decay; rather, we can stand with the writer of Proverbs who said that “The glory of young men is their strength, but the splendor of old men is their gray hair” (20:26). If we find ourselves with strength and ambition, let’s use that to God’s glory. If we find ourselves with gray hair and a desire to spend time with loved ones, let’s also use that to God’s glory.
I’m learning to like my birthdays. My resume virtues make me a little self-conscious from time to time, but I’m beginning to understand that success and age don’t have to correspond. If the research is true, then it might actually be better for me if my career success were to get delayed for a bit.
There are certainly difficulties in aging that there’s little use in ignoring. But like the psychologist Gina Barreca puts it, “Growing older still seems better than the alternative.” Despite our cultural messaging, there’s more beauty to be found in life’s invitation from gray hairs than there is in prolonging adolescence.
Griffin Gooch is a writer, speaker, and professor based in Michigan who is currently working on his Ph.D. at Aberdeen University. Griffin is highly interested in the intersection of theology and other academic disciplines, and currently writes most frequently on Substack.
