Everyone old is new again
The days of retirees retreating to the background are long gone.
A curious thing is happening in plain sight: old people don’t look, or act, how they used to.
Seventy is the new sixty, sixty the new fifty, and fifty… well, fifty has quietly slipped off to Pilates and hasn’t come back yet.
Compare today’s retirees with the cardigan-and-slippers brigade in old movies and the family photo album and the difference is striking. The question is: what changed?
Part of the answer sits on our plates. Diets are better, or at least more varied. Fewer of us are living on meat-and-three-veg boiled into submission, and more people understand the value of fresh food, moderation and the radical idea that vegetables don’t have to be beige.
We also smoke less, drink a bit more thoughtfully (usually), and take our cholesterol levels and blood pressure seriously.
Lifestyle matters too. Previous generations slowed down because they were expected to. Retirement meant retreat. Today, it often means reinvention. People walk, swim, cycle, travel, volunteer, learn instruments, start small businesses and discover muscles they didn’t know existed. Exercise used to be something you gave up with youth; now it’s something you take up to defend it.
Fashion plays its part. Clothes are lighter, brighter and less age-coded. There’s no longer a strict uniform for “elderly”. Jeans don’t expire at 60, sneakers are no longer suspicious, and nobody blinks if a grey-haired man wears a hoodie or a woman of 70 has pink streaks in her hair.
Looking younger is easier when you’re not dressed like a walking apology.
Attitude may be the biggest shift of all. Today’s older people grew up with rock ’n’ roll, television, feminism and social change. They don’t feel old inside because their cultural reference points are still alive and evolving.
When you’re still listening to the same music, arguing about politics and making travel plans, “old” feels like something that happens to other people.
Of course, perception muddies the waters. We always think we look fine for our age, while young people continue to see anyone over 40 as faintly prehistoric. That’s tradition — andm sadly, it won’t change. Each generation redefines old as “ten years older than me”.
So are old people younger, or just better at ageing? Probably both. Time still does its work, but we’re pushing back with better health, looser rules and a refusal to fade away quietly.
Old age hasn’t disappeared; it’s just had a makeover.