Psst, want to feel old? Liam Gallagher, the eternally chippy younger brother of rock, apparently now needs a hip replacement. At 49, the ex-Oasis frontman is suffering from arthritis, which he seems to be approaching with customary but misplaced stubbornness. This week it emerged that he is refusing to have the surgery his doctor recommended, because hip replacements are for old people. And who wants that?
“I think I’d rather just be in pain,” he explained to Mojo magazine. “It’s the stigma, saying you’ve had your hips replaced.” Either he hasn’t seen the reboot of Sex and the City in which a fiftysomething Carrie has surgery on hers, or else – surprise, surprise – one lone stab at reinventing the idea of growing older for primetime isn’t nearly enough.
Middle age is many things, but it isn’t always rock’n’roll. There comes a point when you can pull a muscle just by getting up too quickly from the sofa, and when the only phone number you come home clutching from a night out is that of a hotly recommended osteopath. While women are popularly supposed to mourn the fading of their looks in their 40s, nobody I know is traumatised by the odd grey hair or wrinkle. What we secretly fear instead is looming decrepitude, or the idea that one day our bodies may just stop doing what we need them to do.
Generation X can’t afford to get old; not that kind of old, anyway. Gallagher’s body has to hold out long enough to headline Knebworth this summer. The rest of us, meanwhile, still have teenage kids to launch into the world, our own parents to look after, pensions whose pitiful inadequacy will keep us working into our 70s, and bosses seemingly just waiting for a chance to put us out to grass. We don’t have time to crumble.
Even the Queen, for heaven’s sake, is said to fear using a wheelchair in public in case the bodily reality of being 96 is somehow seen as humiliating or diminishing, a sad reminder of the stigma still clinging to both disability and age. Yet those words – decrepitude, crumble, humiliating – give the game away. Is it really ageing itself we fear, or the horribly negative ideas attached to older bodies which we’ve unknowingly internalised, much as teenage girls absorb seemingly by cultural osmosis the sense that their (in retrospect glowingly perfect) bodies are too fat or too skinny, or just in some mysteriously undefined way shaming?
A new book by the Yale professor of epidemiology Dr Becca Levy, Breaking the Age Code, argues that the grim assumptions we all unthinkingly soak up about growing older have a direct impact on how we actually cope. Levy’s research found that people with cheerily optimistic ideas about ageing lived a startling seven and a half years longer than those gloomily anticipating the worst. She finds that older people’s memory, balance or walking speed improve when they’re exposed to positive stereotypes – such as the idea that age brings wisdom – before testing, while exposure to the idea that older people are doddery and forgetful made them perform worse in physical tasks.
Intriguingly, that mirrors more familiar research suggesting girls score worse in maths tests if told in advance that boys are better at maths, or that stereotypical assumptions about black college students can lower their grades. Most startlingly, Levy’s work suggests that even among people genetically susceptible to Alzheimer’s, those with positive beliefs are less likely to develop dementia.
It may be that cheerfulness itself has some kind of chemical impact, lowering levels of stress hormones. Or it could be that people confident of thriving in old age are motivated to keep fit, eat healthily and push for medical interventions if something goes wrong, while those convinced that it’s downhill all the way from 40 resign themselves to falling apart. “I don’t mind a little pain,” said Gallagher unhelpfully. “Keeps you on your toes.”
There’s an obvious risk here of falling into a sort of medical “lean in” doctrine, blaming sickness on an individual’s failure to be sufficiently upbeat rather than the structural inequalities driving public health. But if Levy is right, we should be worried that ageism is still the most socially acceptable form of hate speech, the one prejudice for which nobody ever seems to get cancelled. We should be worried too about the way it’s fuelled by economic resentment of baby boomers, and lockdown sceptics arguing that it wasn’t worth closing pubs to save pensioners who were probably going to die soon anyway. In reality, the typical person dying of Covid lost a good decade of life they’d otherwise have enjoyed, but since when did kneejerk prejudice bow to facts?
During the pandemic, subconscious ageism may have cost lives, making us too slow to shield care homes from the virus. Yet according to what Levy suggests, it’s been quietly killing the middle aged for years: sapping confidence, breeding fatalism, making people feel bad not just about their necks (the title of Nora Ephron’s legendary collection of essays on female ageing) but apparently now their hips too. We are just so conditioned to see the older body as a source of shame; sagging, creaking, leaking, but not to be complained about to doctors because what did you expect, at your age? Well, maybe we should expect better. If Levy is right, lives depend on it.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
