Sari Botton: The Pressure to Age Well
“People do feel pressured to age well, but that means different things to different people.”
🎧 33 min | Episode 11 | May 16, 2024
Sari Botton
The Pressure to Age Well
Many people believe that life improves with age: You're wiser, you let go a little, and you enjoy life more. But our culture's spin on the loss of youth can be prickly, often challenging these convictions and stirring up debate.
Author Sari Botton sits at the heart of this conversation. Sari is the publisher of Oldster Magazine, a popular publication on Substack that explores what it means and feels like to move through different phases of life. Her weekly Q&A interviews have drawn a vibrant and vocal community of writers and readers who opine on issues ranging from visibility to sexuality. Nothing's off limits.
“It's been a lifelong fascination for me,” says Sari, about aging. And she's not alone. Spend five minutes in the magazine's comments section, and it's like being welcomed to a lively dinner party where every guest lives life to the fullest.
Listen Now
Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Amazon Music • YouTube • iHeart Radio • Substack
Transcript
(Edited slightly for clarity)
Melissa Ceria: Sari Botton, welcome.
Melissa Ceria: Sari, on your magazine's homepage, there's an article titled "Who Qualifies as an Oldster?" which seems like a great starting point for our discussion. Listeners might be curious if they're the right audience for this topic.
Sari Botton: Well, everyone in my mind is an oldster because I'm using that term in a subversive, pejorative way. I'm taking a word that had been something of a slur, and spinning it around and asking the question of why, you know, what does it mean to be an oldster? And for me, it means everyone is the oldest they've ever been, and it's a big deal to them. The numbers associated with their chronology freak them out, whether they're 18 or 98. And so I want to know about everybody's experience of passing through time in a human body and getting older.
-
Melissa Ceria [00:01:53] You've said that you became interested in aging when you turned ten. What sparked that awareness for you?
Sari Botton [00:01:59] So my 10th birthday party was at Long Beach Bowl in Long Beach, Long Island. It was a bowling alley that no longer exists. And at the beginning of my birthday party, my uncle arrived and the first thing he said to me was, Wow, you'll never be one digit again. And it just blew my little 10-year-old mind, knowing that I had just passed through a portal and I couldn't go back the other way. It was the first time in my life that I had that kind of awareness of something that was a milestone that I couldn't undo. I had moved into a new place, and I had no control over going back, and it made me hyper-aware, hyper-vigilant. I was also a kid who was always either doing things either too soon or too late, depending on, you know, in relation to other people. I was the first reader in my kindergarten class. I was also a late developer, so I just became really hyper-aware of what are you supposed to do when. And I've been studying it since I was ten.
Melissa Ceria [00:03:04] So hyper-aware of this notion of timing. Where do you fit in? Is that right?
Sari Botton [00:03:08] Yes. Yes, exactly. And I never felt like I fit in. So I always wanted to know what's everybody else doing and feeling and thinking?
Melissa Ceria [00:03:15] It sounds like there were moments where that felt daunting, but was it comforting at times as well?
Sari Botton [00:03:20] I mean, I made peace with being out of step with my peers a long time ago. But you know, when I've learned that other people feel similar to me, it's always been comforting. When I post things on Oldster saying, You know, this is what my experience was. How about you? And people tell me they feel, you know, feel or felt similarly. It's very reassuring to me. I feel less like a freak.
Melissa Ceria [00:03:46] Would you say that this notion of time remained in the back, or the forefront of your mind, in your 20s and 30s?
Sari Botton [00:03:54] I recently did a post about the quarter-life crisis, you know, which really takes place between 25 and 30. And I very much had a quarter-life crisis. I was married too young. I was worried that I wasn't making all the right choices, and if I didn't make the right choices by 30, my life was going to be ruined. And then when I turned 30, I was so freaked out, I had to throw myself three birthday parties to distract myself. But I was so nervous about it, and I'm feeling it now as I approach 60. I'm 58, you know, on my 58th birthday, I posted something on Oldster about my anxiety and so many people wrote in to say, actually, my life took off at 60. So, you know, that was great to find out.
Melissa Ceria [00:04:40] What were you measuring yourself against at that time? Can you remember?
Sari Botton [00:04:44] I was measuring myself against my peers, but also my parents, you know. What had they done by my age? But peers especially, what were people doing career wise? What were people doing lifestyle wise? Who bought houses? Who was married? Who was divorced?
Melissa Ceria [00:05:00] I mean, most people in their 20s and 30s, though, are kind of charging ahead. And although you progressively become more aware of your own mortality, I wouldn't say that it feels like a pressing subject for most people at that age. Is that what you've seen in terms of the community that you've built?
Sari Botton [00:05:16] Actually, so many of the people in their 20s and 30s who responded to that post about the quarter-life crisis said that they, like I had felt, feel pressured to make the right decisions before 30, or shortly after 30, that they're feeling pressure to find their life partner right away. I mean, I think that a lot of the pressures that my parents felt, that I felt, I think there's still present. And I think that from what I've seen, people in their 20s and 30s do feel the march of time. They do feel like time is running out for them to do certain things. And that was really surprising, but also confirming for me.
Melissa Ceria [00:06:00] And are people engaging in intergenerational conversations on the older?
Sari Botton [00:06:06] They are. I have one of the best comment sections I've ever seen on the internet. Posts get up to 300 or more comments, and people initially comment on the post, and then they start talking to each other, chatting in the comments. And so many relationships have formed and many of them are intergenerational. I see people in their 20s and 30s responding to people in their 70s and 80s. And then the conversation starts and they go back and forth and it's so wonderful to see. It's really inspiring.
Melissa Ceria [00:06:41] And what kind of advice are they giving each other? I mean, I know it's hard to generalize, but what have you picked up on?
Sari Botton [00:06:47] I've seen the older people telling them, You know, you have time. Pace yourself. Be true to yourself. That's the one that keeps coming through. It's like, don't listen to the culture. Don't let the culture tell you what to do. Be true to yourself. Find out who you really are and be true to yourself. And that finding out who you really are seems to be happening for people in their 40s, 50s, maybe a little bit later for some people.
Melissa Ceria [00:07:12] But do you think that it can start happening at a younger age if young people are being encouraged to do that by older people?
Sari Botton [00:07:18] Absolutely. I wish that I had been encouraged to do that, to stop looking around me and saying, you know, what should I be doing? But instead saying, wait, but who am I really? You know, outside of the societal pressures? Who am I? And I didn't really know who I was, fully, or I didn't embrace it until I was in my mid to late 40s.
Melissa Ceria [00:07:44] I mean, it takes time, though, doesn't it?
Sari Botton [00:07:46] It really does. It really, really does. Yeah.
Melissa Ceria [00:07:50] And you need experience, trial, and error. I mean, I think we all fumble in the beginning to figure those things out. I guess the more aware we are, the easier it is to start figuring that out, perhaps. But it certainly doesn't happen in a snap. And maybe life is designed to be that way. It is part of that journey.
Sari Botton [00:08:08] Yes, definitely. I think that we try on and throw off lots of identities and mini identities. You know, it's trial and error, and we look around us and we think, Oh, I'd like to be a little bit like that person, or we don't even realize it's unconscious. We absorb other people's influences. And there's something about arriving in your 40s, 50s and realizing, you know what, that that version of me isn't real. I let myself be too influenced. It doesn't feel authentic to me. I'm not going to be that way anymore. I'm going to stop using that voice and as a writer or, you know, and yeah, it does take time. It is a process of trial and error.
Melissa Ceria [00:08:49] And I'm curious, because I didn't grow up in an age of social media, I'm 50 years old. I can imagine that the pressures are even greater. I see it with my children, for example. Those points of comparison must be greater or more numerous. What are you observing?
Sari Botton [00:09:05] On the one hand, I think that's true. I think that there are more ways to compare and despair in the age of social media, no question about it. But I also think that young people are having the same crises that we had. We have the same pressures and the same anxieties. But yeah, they're a little bit more public now than they were, and they're influenced by other people that we can see, which we couldn't see when you and I were growing up.
Melissa Ceria [00:09:32] Right. I wanted to talk about the conversations that are happening around aging on the Oldster. But before we do that, I thought it would be interesting just to give a quick snapshot of where we're at demographically here in the US. In 2020, about 1 in 6 people in the US were aged 65 and older, and the number of Americans aged 100 and older are expected to quadruple over the next three decades. This is a rapidly evolving landscape, right?
Sari Botton [00:10:02] It is. We're living longer. There's medicine that keeps us alive a lot longer and a lot of awareness about, you know, don't eat only bacon. And it's extending lives, which means that it's shifting -- What's middle age if you're living to 100 or beyond? What counts as middle age? That also shifts our attitudes. And, you know, as we live longer and do things later, we're being younger later, you know, it just, it's all shifting. It's a moving target. It's a little bit hard to understand. It's also a little bit terrifying, like, how am I going to afford to live that long? Right now I can afford to live until about June, you know, like, how is anybody going to. You know, I mean, I think income inequality is going to determine who gets to live that long, who gets to have the medical interventions that extend your life.
Melissa Ceria [00:11:09] That's a really important point. Absolutely. And also relationships are lasting longer, right. You could be married for 50 or 60 years now.
Sari Botton [00:11:17] You could. And if we are living so much longer, are we going to only have one marriage or two marriages, or is that going to change? Because, you know, that's a long time.
Melissa Ceria [00:11:30] That's a long time. But has that question come up of relationships over time?
Sari Botton [00:11:36] Well people marry later if they know that they're going to spend 50 to 60 years with someone and live to over 100? But then again, will reproductive systems, you know, women's reproductive systems in particular, stop being useful at 35?
Melissa Ceria [00:11:53] When we spoke before this conversation, Sari, I asked you a question that had been on my mind for a while, which is that we live in such a performance-driven culture. I was curious if you thought that that extended into aging? Do people feel the pressure to "age well" for themselves, but also in the eyes of others? You paused and you said, well, you know what, I don't have an answer to that, but I'm going to turn this question over to my readers tomorrow. Tell us what happened next.
Sari Botton [00:12:21] Oh, so every other Friday I post what we call an open thread. I tell something that's going on with me, and then I ask my readers to comment. I invite them to comment, and these open threads get 300-400 hundred responses. And this one was no different. It got 300 or so responses, and people said they feel pressured to age well in a variety of conflicting ways. And I noted in the post, I talked about a friend of mine who's 19 years older, who feels the culture telling her to be a proper old lady. Don't dye your hair, don't have plastic surgery. And I feel the opposite. So she's a boomer. She's actually a boomer who rejects these age categories. And I'm a Gen Xer. I'm the oldest Gen X you can be born in 1965. I feel the culture telling me to age well in a different way. The culture, I feel, is telling me to color my hair, get Botox and fillers, maybe plastic surgery. And so I feel like it's an act of rebellion that I am leaving my hair gray and I don't have any plastic surgery or Botox. So it's very interesting. That's where I started, and everyone who responded told me something different: that they feel either they are pressured to eat right or not eat right, reject diet culture, diet, exercise. I mean, and I'm not surprised. It's a capitalistic culture that pressures us to do our best and to buy all the things that will help us do our best and subscribe to all the, you know, magazines that are going to teach us how to do our best. So people said that they feel, they do feel pressured to age well, but that means different things to different people.
Melissa Ceria [00:14:19] I was really amazed and touched by how honest people were. They said, Yeah, absolutely I feel this pressure and let me tell you how. And there was a lot of humor as well in these comments. I mean, I just have a couple of examples here that I just loved. Janet wrote: "At 54 I thought I was over the whole competition thing, but I now find myself slightly envious of someone's blood pressure or cholesterol," which is so funny because I've seen that happen. Or somebody you know will boast about their muscle mass, or their low heart rate because they're so fit. She called it.
Sari Botton [00:15:00] Totally, 100 percent. And then there, you know, our other people who are saying that they feel pressured to act like they don't care, you know, to act like they don't mind getting older and they love their wrinkles even if they don't.
Melissa Ceria [00:15:13] Almost silencing their emotions because of peer pressure.
Sari Botton [00:15:17] Yeah. That they're supposed to not care that they're supposed to be beyond caring. We're supposed to be post ageism and maybe we're not. And then there were a bunch of people who said, the only person I compete with is myself, and I was glad to see them saying that, but I don't know that I believe them. You know, even I, with my gray hair and wrinkles, you know, and my "I don't dye it" stance, I feel pressured. I feel, when I see someone aging better than me in either direction, either caring less or caring more and looking, you know, younger than their age. I definitely find myself comparing myself. I mean, compare and despair is really hard to escape in our culture, so it's a little hard to believe that somebody really only competes with themselves. I'd like to, it's another thing to aspire to, and maybe I'm not doing that well enough.
Melissa Ceria [00:16:16] But it's nice that people can come and talk about this. And I think that to have this forum where we can explore how we feel about aging is important. One other writer said that. She works out a lot. And she said, "I am too proud of needing no pharmaceuticals. I realize how silly this is. Will my gravestone say, She did not need to take any drugs?" Which again, I mean, it's humorous, but it's real. Especially with this longevity movement and this pressure to live a really long time. I worry a little bit that there may be some underlying shame, or a sense of weakness, if somebody is unwell or does rely on medication. What do you think?
Sari Botton [00:17:00] Yeah, I do, and I'd like to dispel that. One of the things I'm trying to do with Oldster magazine is dispel the stigma around aging, normalize aging. And part of that is saying we all have our own experiences of it. We all have our own needs, and that we need to be okay with everyone having their own experience, even if it's not the same as what the culture is telling us we're supposed to be doing. I'm trying to create a forum where people can see themselves in other people's posts, and also meet each other in the comments and be real with each other about what's happening to them. And a lot of them are thanking me for this. I got a note from someone in her 80s saying, Oldster makes me want to keep going on. You know that I've found a community where I'm learning I'm not alone and it's making me want to go on. I mean, that's huge.
Melissa Ceria [00:17:57] Well, that sense of community belonging is so important, right? Because the isolation of growing older can render people feeling very fragile and vulnerable.
Sari Botton [00:18:06] Yes. There is so much loneliness in the world, and it is exacerbated by aging because it becomes harder to go and do things and be with people.
Melissa Ceria [00:18:17] Do you think that there will be more communities built around gathering people who are aging together? And I don't necessarily mean a high end retreat or some of the communities that already exist. Do you think there will be new ways of imagining this going forward?
Sari Botton [00:18:30] Well, some of my other friends who are childless and I talk about, we have joke, but maybe we're not joking, about someday buying a building and each of us has a unit and we take care of each other because we don't have children to take care of us. And we hire people, medical caretakers. I think it could be really cool, like a Gen-X senior home where we do things a little differently. It's not your standard old age home that our grandparents and great-grand grandparents lived in, but maybe it's something else. I don't know. That's my vision. Maybe there's the Oldster, you know, senior living center for Gen-Xers.
Melissa Ceria [00:19:14] The Oldster compound?
Sari Botton [00:19:17] The Oldster Compound. I don't know how I get from here to there, but I do think we're going to see things like that, though, because you've got populations that are aging who are going to have different needs culturally, socially than generations before us. And we're also going to need physical interventions because our bodies are going to be aging, even if our minds and our attitudes are still kind of young and hip.
Melissa Ceria [00:19:41] Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Your community contributes in such a meaningful way to this discussion. People are active. People are working, writing, creating. This is not a generation that will retire so quickly. Is that what you're observing as well?
Sari Botton [00:19:58] Yeah. I mean, not not just my generation, but older generations. On my 58th birthday, I posted on Oldster about my anxiety about turning 60 in 2 years, and so many older Oldsters commented that their lives took off at 60, that they found new work, new hobbies, new partners, new places to live, new travel, that something about getting older and letting go of certain anxieties freed them to make new choices that fulfilled them in ways they had never been fulfilled. And what I realized when I posted that and saw their responses was actually, my life is the best it's ever been at 58. So why was I anxious about turning 60? Why was I assuming things would only get worse? And that's the culture. That's the culture telling me that aging is bad, that getting older is, you're diminished in some way, that life is not going to get better. And I want to push back against that because it was making me scared of something that maybe I don't have to be scared of. And maybe it's making everyone scared of something they don't have to be scared of. You know, I grew up not understanding why people joke in birthday cards about getting older. I don't understand birthday cards that make fun of getting older, I never have. And I don't like them. And so part of what my mission is, is to push back against all of that and to question it.
Melissa Ceria [00:21:34] But Sari when you talk about that, I think primarily about the idea of us growing older physically. And there is such an emphasis on that, right? And in the comments, again, in the post that you shared drew a lot of responses around physical well-being, but there is also cultivating curiosity and how important that is.
Sari Botton [00:21:52] It's so important. And I'd like to encourage that. And I'd like to adopt that, you know, for myself going forward. Stay curious. I think that that actually helps keep you young at heart and in your mind, and it leads you to wonderful things that can keep you young.
Melissa Ceria [00:22:13] What else are you curious about learning from your readers as you dive deeper and deeper into this subject?
Sari Botton [00:22:21] I'm curious about how they made leaps to new things in their lives, how they found new careers, new hobbies, new partners. What did it take for them to move past the messaging they've received that said they were done to get to a new place? How have they kept themselves curious? You know, what have they done to counteract what they've been told so that they could live more vibrantly? And also, I want to know what are the things that they are contending with so that I can help them move past those things, those limitations.
Melissa Ceria [00:23:07] Oh that's interesting. So you're open to having that conversation directly with them or inviting other writers maybe to share their thoughts on that. Is that right?
Sari Botton [00:23:16] Yes. Well, that's why I keep featuring other people's voices, not just my own. On Mondays, I publish personal essays from a variety of writers and their experiences. On Wednesdays, I publish the Oldster Magazine questionnaire, also from a diverse array of contributors. And on Fridays, I publish link roundups where I include voices from around the web, or I do the open threads. I alternate between link roundups and open threads on Fridays. So I'm bringing in other people's voices so that I'm having other people tell me what their experience is, and I'm going to be starting to do more different kinds of interviews with different kinds of people.
Melissa Ceria [00:23:57] Can you tell us a little bit more?
Sari Botton [00:23:59] I'm hoping to start something called the Oldster Magazine Radio Hour. I'm going to start with the local radio station here. Someone is going to give me four episodes of his show, and that will be probably in June or July. And so I'm going to be adding this audio component.
Melissa Ceria [00:24:16] That's exciting. I just want to go back to something that you were saying just a little bit earlier. What holds people back: Ageism. People feeling ageism. Do you find that it's mostly women who experience this, or have the men in your community also expressed this experience?
Sari Botton [00:24:35] I think that gendered ageism is more of a problem than just ageism overall. Like, I think that women are experiencing it in a bigger way than men, but men are also experiencing it. And my husband recently experienced it on the job front, he's 62. And I have a piece running soon by Ray Suarez, who's in his 60s, about his experience of trying to find new work in his 60s as a journalist. I think it's happening across the board, but there are ways that it's happening for women that are worse and more prevalent, definitely. More socially for women than for men.
Melissa Ceria [00:25:19] Can you give you a few examples?
Sari Botton [00:25:21] I think in dating and in marriages, I think that women, there's more pressure on women to remain youthful physically. The beauty standards for women at any age, there's more pressure to be beautiful according to the culture. And that extends to when you're getting older. If there's much more pressure to stay slim and without wrinkles. I mean, you know, most of the plastic surgery is being targeted toward women, although I do know men who do Botox and have eye lifts and this and that, but especially gay men. But I think the, you know, women get the brunt of this kind of ageism.
Melissa Ceria [00:26:02] And I'm hearing in the public discourse and part of this is informed by, again, what I read on the Oldster, but other sources and even conversations with people, this idea that if you will your way through ageism that somehow you will not encounter the same outcome. Do you think that will plays a strong role in helping us grow older well?
Sari Botton [00:26:25] Yeah, I think you have to summon some of that to override the messaging that is so negative and pervasive. You have to determine that you are going to ignore that. And that takes courage and it takes will. It does. And not everybody has it all the time. Sometimes you just want to surrender or try to not care, which is also a different kind of will.
Melissa Ceria [00:26:51] Totally. And it takes a lot of work. It's energy.
Sari Botton [00:26:54] It's exhausting.
Sari Botton [00:26:55] It's like.
Sari Botton [00:26:57] It's exhausting. Sometimes you think you're battling it and you're and you're not being successful. I'll give you an example that I've written about a few times. When I first moved into this house in 2018, so that's six years ago, I was 52, I was waiting for someone from the power company to come and approve something about our boiler. And I was in my paint splattered carpenter pants. My hair was in pigtails, you know, I was dressed as I often am, as if I'm in junior high. And I figured I looked kind of young. And the person from the power company was a young woman in her 30s, and she called her boss to say who she was dealing with, and she said, "It's an older woman." And I looked around me and said, Older woman! You know, an older woman? What? Me? You know, I was so shocked by the reflection I was being given about how I appeared. I didn't think that my appearance registered as older woman, but here I am, I have gray hair. I am in my 50s, you know, but I, I think I look, you know, in my mind, well, in my mind I'm ten and a half, you know.
Sari Botton [00:28:12] But it's also this idea of being labeled something.
Sari Botton [00:28:15] Yeah. You know, and who's doing the labeling determines the label. You know, there's all this different perspective. But then I also meet people all the time. Well, I'll tell you this, last week I was in the city. I ate in a dark restaurant at the bar, and I got asked out by a 27 year old guy.
Melissa Ceria [00:28:34] Magnificent.
Sari Botton [00:28:35] It was magnificent. I was sitting at the bar of Superiority Burger in the East Village. It was dark, so you probably couldn't tell how, just how gray my hair is. I know that I do look kind of young for my age, I always have. People are always surprised that I'm as old as I am. So this guy sat down next to me. We struck up a conversation. It was a lovely conversation. He was cute. I was thinking to myself, oh, if I were 20, you know, I didn't know he was 27. But if I were his age, I'd be interested in this guy. We had a lovely, lovely conversation. At the end of it he said, Listen, I got to go to the gym, but could I get your number? And I said, well, A. I'm married and B. I'm 58, I don't know about you. And he said, "Oh my God, my parents are your age." I said, "I was born in 1965." He said, "I was born in 1996." And I said, "Well, when I was your age, in 1996, I was traipsing around this neighborhood with a string of Peter Pans. You know. Wow. And you were just being born." And we laughed and I said, "I'm flattered. Thank you. You just made my week, my month." You know, it was, it was very flattering. And I love when things like that happen. People do tell me I look young for my age and I'm flattered. And then I feel guilty about being flattered. It's a whole meta thing that goes on for me. I'm really obsessed with this whole subject. There are so many different ways it makes me feel and think, and so I'm really glad that people are responding so well to Oldster, because I just want to keep doing it. I just want to keep exploring this.
Melissa Ceria [00:30:07] Absolutely. And I think that one of the things that you just touched on is this idea of being seen, and your readers have talked about this, it's such a potent idea, which is, as we become oldsters, just how good it feels for people to know that they are still seen and not rendered invisible, suddenly.
Sari Botton [00:30:29] Yes, although there are a lot of respondents, either in the comments or in the questionnaire, who talk about what a relief it is to feel invisible, to stop feeling like they have to keep performing for everyone around them. It's really interesting. Elizabeth Gilbert, in particular in her Oldster questionnaire, talked about what a relief it is for her to feel a little less visible, to have less of a sex drive. It takes some pressure off of her. So some people are enjoying being invisible. But I want people to feel seen in their concerns, in their experience, not just are they looking good or are they attracting other people?
Melissa Ceria [00:31:13] Well, you certainly have your work cut out for you, Sari, as you keep cultivating this wonderful community. My closing question to you is, How do you see yourself growing old?
Sari Botton [00:31:25] Well, I have this idea that I'm going to always feel like all the younger versions of myself are inside me, because that's how it's been so far, and I like that. And so I hope I get to keep feeling like I'm ten-and-a-half in 15 and 35 all at once with whatever age I am. I'm anxious about how am I going to afford everything that it takes to stay healthy and young? I am anxious about that. I don't have a lot in retirement. I am a little bit nervous about what the future holds for me, but I'm also excited to see how it all unfolds and to do it a little differently than prior generations.
Melissa Ceria [00:32:09] Sari, I wish you all the best and I hope that the Oldster compound comes to fruition.
Sari Botton [00:32:15] Thank you.
Melissa Ceria [00:32:15] That we can all enjoy some time there. Thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed talking with you about this.
Sari Botton [00:32:22] Thank you. Me too. Thanks for having me on.
Explore More
Website
Substack
Instagram