When it comes to aging, there isn’t such a thing as normal, anymore. Is it normal, for instance, when you age to have knees that ache from time to time? Or should you go for knee surgery. To require reading glasses? Or go for laser. To pee more frequently? To be less adept at (or interested in) sexual performance? Or to take wonder drugs.
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How about medical tests that come back with the news that your bones are thinning, your cholesterol raising? How do you resist blaming yourself for the poor choices you’ve made that have taken their toll on you, as you find yourself no longer sprinting but rather loping through the marathon of life?
It’s easy enough for a trailing edge boomer with one complaint or another to take a swat at one or two of his/her biggest issues (cholesterol lowering medicine and hair-coloring to cover the grey…) but for many leading edge boomers, physical “stuff” becomes something of a game of swat the weasel: you bang one down with a hammer and another pops up. The magic drugs, which work so well singly, start to pile up/interact/react, and before long, you’re not only dealing with the drugs, themselves, but the side effects.
But here’s the bigger question for you. If the vast majority of people in any particular age group are prone to such things as aching backs, thinning hair and sloping shoulders—even if these physical shortcomings may be undesirable--are they also “abnormal?” When did “normal aging” become an illness?
While modern medical advances have blessedly raised the prospect for aging more well-fully for us than was possible for our grandparents and even our parents, boomers suffer from a psychological side effect that is also new to our generation. We suffer from the pathologicalizing of physical manifestations. What is now often considered “illness” is what was once considered to be simply part of the human condition.
As such, we are confused about when to fight towards “the new normal”—taking advantage of a biotechnical stew of new compounds that address each of our issues individually—and when to surrender and accept that some degree of change, okay admit it, decline is inevitable?
I would suggest that just as Dove has taken on the anti-aging regimens of beauty and transformed them into the notion of pro-aging, so do boomers, pharmaceutical companies and society at large, need to get to work on a revised notion of “the new normal” as applied to the physical aspects of aging.
Carol Orsborn