Who wants to be ageless? Not me. I am old. Hear me creak. To be old and to be able to participate, even if with increasing cynicism and decrepitude, in the unpredictable verb of “ageing” is surely a blessing. It is a gift famously more attractive than the perennially unpopular alternative. I will turn 50 this year and I have realised that I couldn’t care less if people think I am 70 or 80, let alone 50. I’m just happy to be around. I don’t need anyone to think I’m not 50, and I certainly don’t need them to believe I’m any younger. What would be the point? If people think you’re younger than you are (or, worse, that you “look good for your age”), there’s a pressure there. It might be manageable this month. But how are you going to maintain that over the next five years? Or 10 years? Let’s be optimistic. Better to act like you’re 90 now. I mean, you might never get there in reality. So channel that age. Get the practice in.
The thing is, we are monumentally spoilt, even with the latest alarming news of the UK’s stagnant life expectancy, which is slowly creeping downwards from the upper 80s, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Because only 2,000 years ago, it was completely normal to expect to die a horrible death between the age of 20 and 35. Old people were outliers. It was only from around 1800 that average life expectancy in Europe pushed up to 40, and only in the past 200 years that it has moved beyond all previous imagining and we had to invent stupid sayings like “Age is just a number” and “60 is the new 50.” But if it really were just a number, then no one would need to say that it’s just a number. And if it’s all just numbers, then no number needs to be the new version of another number.
This double-think struck me in the current circus surrounding actor Pedro Pascal. I am a fully paid-up member of this circus, dedicated to celebrating and championing the career of my close coeval and imaginary boyfriend Pedro Pascal, break-out star of the hit TV series The Last of Us and The Mandalorian. I will happily tend the elephants in this circus, and I will do so with no requests for remuneration. However, I object to one of the circus’ mantras: that Pedro Pascal’s age is significant. Pascal just turned 48, and somehow this is supposed to give us all hope: that it’s never too late to have a late-blooming acting career as a bounty hunter with paternal instincts, and that somehow success is “ageless”. But Pascal is hardly late-blooming. He has been very happily having a busy and successful life in dozens of films and TV shows since his early 20s. It just so happens that the limelight of extreme, obsessive celebrity has fallen on him at this particular moment. It’s not inspiring that he’s old; it’s just a fact and a coincidence. Success and celebrity are not “ageless”. They are subjective and fickle.
The obsession with agelessness is becoming so pervasive that people are now even embracing it before puberty. I recently boggled at a nine-year-old “fashion influencer”, with more than 350,000 followers on Instagram, expressing the view that “fashion has no age”. I mean, who would disagree? But how convenient. If fashion is ageless then you can market to consumers from the moment they exit the womb. If success is ageless then you can pressure everyone to “keep grinding” until they drop dead. Far more liberating? Just be old and cheerfully weary and do things in the manner of an old, cheerfully weary person. We need to see all kinds of people represented in society, and the way things are going, even with the life expectancy wobble, there are only going to be more of the old and cheerfully weary around.
We feel obliged to bang on repeatedly about the fact that ageing doesn’t matter. But, the fact is, if age really had no meaning then: (a) we would not bang on about it not mattering, because when things really don’t matter they don’t get mentioned, and (b) digital algorithms would not repeatedly segment us according to our date of birth. The algorithm knows the truth: we’re not getting any younger.
Viv Groskop is a writer, broadcaster and standup comedian
