How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?
-Satchel Paige

I was in the mall this past Saturday. Not a place I’m accustomed to investing any time in—especially on the weekend. I usually can be found at the gym, hiking in the natural beauty of Pacific Northwest, or in a musty library.

But, necessity dictated the excursion to the Mecca of shopping known as Clackamas Town Center. My wife had some to-dos (she’s very purposeful) and I had some general notion of what I was after. Like two infantry soldiers we synchronized our watches and agreed to return to a designated spot in 2 hours.

After 30 minutes of meandering through merchandise I thought: “Two hours…what was I thinking?” Generally a malaise seems to come over me as my energy level tends to be in an inverse relationship with the amount of time spent in malls.

Feeling like Margaret Mead, or a stranger in a strange land, I began to have a subtle shift in my thinking. A little voice seemed to be saying “observe.”

With a change in my interpretive filter I notice a reoccurring theme among the bustling masses of determined shoppers…Approaching from behind I’d see two “girlfriends” walking and engaged in either cell phone conversations or chatting. Most of these pairs were dressed much alike.

As I passed them and looked over I noticed these weren’t contemporaries at all, rather, one was the daughter and the other the mother! Now, twenty years ago there was no doubt who was who—but that has all changed.

Clicking
The futurist Faith Popcorn wrote about this phenomenon over a decade ago in her brilliant book, Clicking (1996). She called it “down-aging,” which is all about throwing out the rules and constraints that dictate how we should behave by certain points in our lives. Ms. Popcorn predicted the rejection of the cultural construction of age, and the potential for personal interpretation.

Once aware of down-aging in our culture, you begin to notice it everywhere as older adults time-shift life experiences and their looks. Popcorn describes elder-moms/elder dads who are standing in the check-out line at the grocer with pampers under one arm for the baby and attends under the other arm for themselves!

Fitness and athletics is another arena where down-aging is evident. The bad news is in sports rehab clinics all across the country clinicians are seeing more geri-athletes with sports related injuries—the good news is that clinicians are seeing more geri-athletes with sports related injuries.

I ran marathons with Mavis Lindgren who began her running career at age 62, and completed her first of 90 marathons at age 72! Go to any gym in the morning and you will be surrounded by gray hair and PE uniform-looking attire.

I once overheard a 20-something blonde beauty at the front desk of a well know fitness chain express her dismay that there were too many old people at the club. Seems she was afraid of the place becoming known as an “old gym.”

I laughed to myself thinking of her disconnect with her paycheck and who comes through the door and I envisioned her drowning in the gray tsunami…just off shore brewing.

It’s almost tired to even mention how marketers have embraced down-aging from the return of many of the classics like high-top black converse sneakers (I read an interview with Daryl Hall of Hall & Oats fame, he was wearing high-top black converse without shoe strings), to increased popularity of the anti-tech toys you played with as a child-like the Schwinn Classic Cruiser bicycle. Portland is deluged now with “fixed speed” bikes, a minimalist 2-wheeler that harkens back to the basics.

Hyper-Habituation (Think Mick Jagger)

As Faith Popcorn notes:
Whatever the crisis-change mechanism at work here, the underlying feeling is “there’s got to be more.” And this search for ever-more leads to down-aging. Not forgetting about your age or railing against your age, but tossing away the old ideas of what chronological age is. For down-aging is fundamentally about changing expectations, dreams, desires, visions. It’s about a constant state of growing, of saying “yes” to life and all its possibilities (p. 275).

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…angled-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.
–Allen Ginsberg

I think it was Albert Einstein who said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” A possible concern with down-aging is that it can be taken too far. As gerontologist HR Moody suggests, each era has its quality of experience not to be missed–neglected it could damage the soul. This is something to consider as you lace up your sneakers and jump on your cruiser…

THE 3 AGES:
1) Chronological age-Age on your birth certificate
2) Physiological age-Age of your biology and biomarkers
3) Psychological age-Age of how you think (Young or old)

See: Faith Popcorn’s Brain Reserve