“Don’t stop painting!” says the woman in the barber chair next to me. “Believe me, it makes you ten years older in one fell swoop.” She can hardly disguise her horror. “Grey hairs are graveyard flowers.”
Gray is old. Deterioration, dry wood. In this age of ‘forever young’ and digitally manipulated ideals of beauty, gerontophobia (the fear of aging) is rife. The social image of the elderly, especially older women, is often negative. Gray-gray locks, grooves and folds, sagging corners of the mouth, a waist that disappears; they are curses that you want to put off coûte que coûte for as long as possible. Everyone wants to grow old, but nobody wants to be, goes the cliché. Except when you’re young, there’s something exciting about getting older. But once we get past 20, the pursuit of eternal youth sets in. Anti-wrinkle creams, botox against crow’s feet, breast, stomach and buttock corrections, it’s booming business. The American research firm Statista expects that the industry of age-defying drugs will continue to grow to almost 90 billion euros in 2026. And if you think that only commercial companies are working on anti-aging, you will be disappointed. Science is also fully committed to finding an elixir of life that slows down aging and extends our lives.
And we’ve been living much longer than expected. So much so that pension funds and insurers have to reserve loads of extra capital to be able to pay out all pensions in due course, as Achmea announced last week. According to the latest life expectancy projections, children born now will move towards 100 years (women 93 and men 90); one of the main reasons why our pension system is no longer sustainable. So that will work for all of us. Fortunately, there is plenty of work with all those dire staff shortages. Would you think. Yet there are still 55 thousand over-55s who would like to get a job, but are unable to do so. Wisdom and experience lose out to negative imagery. Until there is nitrogen hassle with farmers, then an old man like Remkes is taken out of the stable.
Incidentally, the aversion to old age is not a worldwide phenomenon. In Africa, old age is embraced. Like in Ghana, where there are no words for ‘getting old’ at all. Instead of: ‘She is old’, Ghanaians say: ‘She has grown’. An excellent expression for what old age actually means. Much better than the stereotypical image of the oldies sucking their lower lips behind the geraniums, waiting for the Grim Reaper to arrive.
Just as I’m about to respond to the woman in the barber chair next to me, the salon door swings open. It’s Mrs. Petersen. 94 and a regular customer for years. ‘It worked,’ she says cheerfully, as she takes a hand drill that she – as it turns out later – borrowed from my hairdresser, out of a blue Albert Heijn bag. “The bumper of his car is back on. It was a piece of cake.’ Her neighbor had hit a pole with his car and Mrs. Petersen had ‘helped him for a while’. ‘That saves him another expensive bill from the garage,’ she says with a laugh. Only then does her eye fall on the hair dye brush in the hands of the hairdresser. “Oh, and I’d stop painting. With all the price increases today. Well I’m going again.’
She’s gone. Her black-colored hair blowing in the wind.