Thoughts on Aging


I believe that age is neither the loss of youth and the cultivation of wisdom. We never stop growing and learning about ourselves and the world. We cultivate wisdom as we go, but that doesn’t mean we lose our youth. As a matter of fact it seems that the older you become, if you have more youth within you, the happier people seem to be, it keeps them alive. Youth is a state of mind, and we mature our youth over time by gaining wisdom and knowledge.

I can’t really say that things get better or worse as we get older. Sure when we look back, it seems as if our childhood was much easier. But in fact it wasn’t. It seems to me, that the older we grow we have the same amount of easiness as hardships based on our maturity, and our mental capacity. You know those children who are smart? Well they’re only smart based off of their age level and what they can know and fathom. A one year old will cry because they fall down and that’s a hardship for them, as drama is a pre-teen hardship, and raising a family is an adult hardship. But the older we get, it seems as if the previous hardships were easy because over time, we’ve mastered them. It’s all in perspective.
Do you ever notice that it seems that time flies the older we get? Like the angel on the Christmas tree seems to get smaller every year. As we get older, we seem to realize the concept of time more and more. As a child, when I didn’t know how to tell time yet, things often seemed to drag out. But the older I got, the more time meant, and the more society lived by it, everything seemed to run faster and faster. When you look at the clock, time stands still, but when you don’t everything moves!
I believe that there is no better alternative than aging. I think it would be a horrible thing to live forever. There’s only so much a person can do in life, no matter how long it is. I think it would be miserable to live longer than the average lifespan. And sure dying then but never having the effects of aging seems nice, but think about it. physical signs of aging depict a life, wrinkles around your mouth show how much you’ve smiled and on your forehead show how much you’ve been surprised. The aging of your body shows how much you’ve lived (not always) but it can be a timeline of your life. By the time you’re on your death bed, it was no physical object, but it was your life that matters most.
Speaking of timelines, I could only tell you my entire life story but I won’t. The thing is, as an 18 year old, I feel so much older and like I know a lot. But when I think about it, I haven’t lived that long. I can say, “Wow! I’ve lived 18 years!” or I could say “Wow! I’ve lived only 18 years.” Again, it’s all perspective.
There’s an aging theory about why we feel that time seems to move faster the older you get. It states that the first year you’re alive is 100% of your life, the second year is half and so on. On an eighty year scale, on the eightieth year, it seems to go by much faster because it’s only 1/80th of your life. This theory also describes that in our youth, intense memories are slower to our brain, making them more memorable and usually many firsts. The older we get we have less intense memories, so time goes by faster. Here’s an article and a video explaining it more thoroughly.
I really can’t say if young people face different challenges today than when I was younger, because quite honestly I am still young. Though I do think that lifestyle and media do make a difference on your personal challenges.
Aging is all a perspective, though also a physical change that happens to everybody at different rates. There are theories on the perspective/how it feels to age. It’s an interesting topic and I believe, it only makes sense to get older. But now the question lies, what’s the reason for our life? 😉


16 thoughts on “Thoughts on Aging

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