Why Aging Still Needs a Revolution

More than fifty years ago, Simone de Beauvoir published La Vieillesse, a monumental and unsettling study of old age. She was warned not to write it. Even naming “old age” was taboo. When the book appeared in English, its title was softened to The Coming of Age—a euphemism that revealed just how uncomfortable Western culture was, and still is, with the realities of growing old.

Beauvoir’s book was bleak, documenting the cultural contempt that renders so many older adults—women and men alike—isolated, diminished, and pushed to the margins. And although times have changed, they have not changed nearly enough.

More than fifty years later, we find ourselves asking whether Beauvoir's challenge has even been met halfway. We may speak constantly about "successful aging," but we still struggle to talk honestly about old age itself.

Why Age Studies Emerged

The stubborn persistence of ageism helped spark the rise of age studies in the 1990s. Scholars like Margaret Morganroth Gullette asked a radical question: How did we ever come to believe that aging is purely biological?

Age studies insists that aging is not a decline narrative, but a lifelong developmental process shaped by culture, memory, identity, and social expectations. It asked us to look at how we struggle, at every age, to remain the person we feel ourselves to be—and how that struggle shifts across the lifespan.

The Paradox of Longevity

We are living longer than any generation before us—thirty years longer, on average, than people did a century ago. Yet this extraordinary demographic shift has not softened our cultural obsession with youth. If anything, it has intensified generational tensions. Popular writers warn of a “silver tsunami,” as if older adults were a natural disaster rather than a growing, diverse, and vital part of society.

At the same time, the wellness industry urges us to “age well,” promising that with enough discipline—exercise, diet, supplements—we can remain forever youthful. Most older adults, when asked, say they “don’t feel old.” Developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert captured this beautifully when he wrote, “How can a 17-year-old, like me, suddenly be 81?”

This dissonance reveals two things:

1. We lack a positive language for old age, and

2. We experience aging as a kind of temporal vertigo—a layering of ages inside us, all at once.

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott once described the unconscious as “all ages and no age.” Age studies helps us understand that this is not a poetic metaphor but a lived reality.

Dependency Is Not a Failure

Perhaps the most liberating insight to emerge from age studies is this: dependency is not the opposite of a good life. It is part of every human life. One of the most important contributions of age studies is its insistence that dependency is not a personal flaw but a universal human condition. We are born dependent, we live interdependently, and we age into forms of dependency again. Yet Western culture teaches us to deny this truth, celebrating autonomy as the only acceptable form of adulthood.

This denial creates suffering. It blinds us to the collaborative, reciprocal nature of care. It also makes it harder to acknowledge grief, loss, and vulnerability as integral to a full life. As psychosocial theorist Stephen Frosh suggests, perhaps we should not expect to answer the question “Are you happy now?” with a simple yes. A meaningful life is textured—shot through with joy, sorrow, conflict, and connection.

The Promise of Intergenerational Conversation

Despite the cultural forces that keep us sorted into age bands—especially the recent trend of blaming “Baby Boomers” for everything from economic inequality to climate change—age studies offers a different vision. It creates spaces where younger and older people can speak honestly with one another, without erasing differences or forcing sameness.

Intergenerational dialogue is not just pleasant; it is necessary. It helps us see aging not as a personal failure or a private burden but as a shared human journey.

Perhaps the revolution aging still needs is not simply longer lives or healthier bodies, but a new story—one that recognizes aging as one of life's richest developmental journeys. Until we change that story, we will continue to fear the very future every one of us hopes to reach.