“Old age can make it difficult for you to climb a ladder, but it doesn’t have to hinder creativity.” Who is speaking is the writer, psychoanalyst and history scholar Pacho O’Donnellwho at 84 years old has just published perhaps his most personal book, “The art of aging with courage and dignity” (Sudamericana).
Something is changing in the way the culture looks at its old people. There are series starring older people, podcasts and newsletters that address old age without euphemisms, conversations that didn’t exist before. For centuries, aging was considered a decline, a slow unraveling of the body and mind. Today we are beginning to understand that it can be a stage of plenitude, wisdom and, why not, of living new forms of freedom.
Between old age and longevity
O’Donnell suggests that accepting that one is old requires courage. Because it implies recognizing that the body has changed, that the life that lies ahead is probably less than the one that has already been lived. And that awareness can awaken very different emotions, from sadness and fear to serenity and gratitude, even the notion of a wisdom that was accumulated without one realizing it.
The problem is that culture does not help. In a society that venerates youth as if it were a divinity, talking about old age with love and humor for a long time was an act of rebellion. The old man in the media was either wise or ridiculous, and in advertisements he still serves to sell denture glue or collagen for osteoarthritis. There is a name for that: oldism. A discrimination that almost no one recognizes in themselves and that operates in everyday language, in the timing of traffic lights calculated for young people with good pace, in the state of the sidewalks or in the easy insult that can come out in front of a car that is moving slowly: “fucking old man.” Also in retirement, a topic on which the author places special emphasis, pointing out that stopping working often means ceasing to exist.
At the same time, demographics tell a different story. According to the WHO, in many countries those over 65 years of age already outnumber those under 15. Argentina today has 15% of its population over 60. We are becoming an old society in the most literal sense of the term. The question, then, is not if we are going to age, but how.
And the answer is urgent, because time does not wait. Life expectancy in Argentina reached 77.5 years in 2024, almost four years more than in 2000. The fertility rate fell to 1.44 children per woman, the lowest recorded in the country’s history. Fewer Argentines are born and those who are born live longer. The population pyramid is inverting slowly but surely and the society that comes will, inevitably, be a society of old people. The book could be read as a roadmap for a reality that is already here and that we have not yet finished facing.
The coming old age
O’Donnell embodies this new old age before explaining it: at 84 years old he has just published this work and has two more on the way. “Perhaps I write more precisely because my ability to move decreased,” he reasons. It could be said that old age, in his case, sharpened his aim.
It is a long stage, the longest. More than childhood, adolescence, youth. And in that time you can do a lot: pay debts with yourself, study what was not studied, know what was not known. “If you are not what you would have liked to be, old age gives you time to try to be,” urges the author. Many do it: they discover passions dormant for decades, they learn languages, they begin university degrees at 70. Some become TikTokers at 80. The book says it without irony.
Humor is one of the great allies of this stage. Laughing at yourself is a luxury that youth rarely allows themselves. Older people, on the other hand, do it with enviable grace. The book contains the testimony of someone who during the pandemic learned to use Zoom to set up a virtual book club with friends he had not seen for forty years. “There are six of us and we debate as if we were university students. Of course, we take three hours and two naps per meeting.”
According to the Pew Research Center, 68% of older adults say they feel happier than in previous stages of their lives. The thing is that they learned to value what is essential, like a long talk, a coffee without rushing, the right song. The author also mentions a relief that comes with this age. A freedom that is established when one no longer expects so much: “When one can sit down again and look at life like when I was a child, but without having to go to school afterwards. That, friends, is a true privilege.”
And not even death should appear at this moment as a villain, but rather as a witness and stimulus, as a presence that teaches. “That forces us to select what is important and turns each hug into a conscious act,” says O’Donnell. The thing is that in this new version of old age, life coexists with the real possibility of finitude, and in doing so it is intensified and valued more than ever.
The backpack
“Something very important in old age is love,” says the author. “You lament about the amount of time wasted on useless things, and you regret not having dedicated more time to the people you love, the friends you admire“He adds. Therefore, he invites you to do a specific exercise: write a list of the people you love and realize how many there are who were never told how important they were. “Obviousness is very tricky. Let’s not take anything for granted,” he warns. Old age, he says, is the time to empty that backpack. To be more loyal to one’s desire and correct what can still be corrected. “You are a better person in old age because you connect more with your own things, there is time to correct defects.”
And in that emptying, friendship takes on a weight that it did not have before. The book tells the case of María and Antonia, aged 91 and 89, who met working as nurses in Valencia and today call each other every day at 8:30. “To see if the other one is still breathing,” they say, laughing. Their friendship survived marriages, children, widowhood, moves and a pandemic. In northern Argentina there is a group of retired women who call themselves Las Reumáticas del Ritmo. They rehearse choreography with canes and tell jokes that make their grandchildren blush. “We have osteoarthritis, but also attitude,” they say.
A Harvard adult development study, which has been followed for more than eighty years, concluded something as simple as it is powerful: warm relationships are the best predictor of a long and happy life. O’Donnell sums it up with a quote from Jeanne Moreau that she quotes in the book: “Age does not protect from love, but love protects from age.”
Because, in the end, the most feared old age is not that of the body that fails but that of the affections that were left unsaid. And for that we are always on time.
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