Ageing: Everybody's Doing It – Life-Affirming Technology and the Longevity Economy

Introduction

Youth is a cultural obsession that drives the social and economic machinery of modern life. Our dominant narratives are steeped in the desire for, and the aspirational value of, youth. This is particularly potent in the context of Western consumerism, wherein ‘old’ is set up as the ultimate foil to ‘young’. One simple way to structure something as ‘good’ or ‘desirable’ is to define and denigrate an opposite that is equally ‘bad’ and ‘undesirable’. These polarities make a useful shorthand language for advertisers to convince or remind us to buy their goods and services: to get the good and avoid the bad. In this context, ‘old’ is the negative antithesis to the positive ‘young’: insofar as the latter marks out beauty, energy, vitality, strength, vigour and the luxury of time, the former is saddled with images of frailty, weakness, tiredness, sickness and mortality itself. But over time, these cease being convenient marketing symbols and instead become permeating features of our cultural landscape that are so ubiquitous as to seem like the truth of ‘how things are’. In this youth-driven culture there are few stories more ripe for redefinition than the way we structure and relate to the idea of ageing. This is not just for reasons of factual accuracy or social justice but also for economic possibility. The need to communicate new stories about ageing and older people in general has never been greater because our flattened, one-dimensional ideas have never been more incorrect. As life expectancies increase and later life is stretched across multiple decades, the gap between these stories and reality grows. Rather than being understood as an opportunity for economic and social impact, the growing ageing population is viewed through a negative lens as a problem to be solved, or worse, avoided altogether. This chapter asks you to pull up a seat, listen and really hear a new story about life-affirming ageing in the era of technology.