Why don’t we see ourselves as elders?

As many of you know I have been busy doing interviews with anyone who is willing, on the subject of eldership. I have been chatting with people from different countries and across the age span. It has been enriching, illuminating and is certainly achieving what I’d hoped for as I head towards launching Emerging Elders (more on that soon). 

One thing that has struck me is how many of my peer generation, let’s say 50+, said that they either hadn’t thought about the word elder, or didn’t know what it meant, or didn’t see themselves as elders. Their responses have made me even more curious. 

Why don’t ageing people see themselves as elders?

The research I’m doing leads me to five conclusions (so far!) and they all come back to Michael Meade’s wisdom that, ‘when a society abandons its elders, the elders abandon themselves’.

1.     The word ‘elder’ is a stranger

Because our society has largely abandoned the idea of eldership, we no longer talk about it. Both the word and the ideas associated with the word elder aren’t ‘out there’. No one is talking about it. No one is aspiring to it because it isn’t something that is being named at all.

‘I haven’t heard of it’

‘I don’t know what it is…what is it?’

‘Do you mean old people?’

These are just a few of the shades of responses that I am hearing.

If you grow up not hearing the word at work, on the news, in your family, or your community, then why would you think about it and even more, why would you think it has anything to do with you? Our culture estranges us from the very idea of eldership.

2.     Our model of aging is unhelpful

Particularly in the West and global north we seem to have a clear map for our lives. It’s in three stages. We get educated, then we get successful and accumulate, then we retire (then we die). The problem of this model is often seen in that third stage, where people take the attitude of ‘it’s my time now. I’ve earned this rest’, or they stay on the run from retirement because they fear the loss of identity, of status, and of relevance to life. The thing to notice is that whereas the middle stage of success and accumulation has its trophies to display, the third phase doesn’t. The third phase doesn’t mention the word eldership and it rarely mentions the word legacy.

Those two words, elder and legacy, were core to traditional models of aging, in which cultures had seemingly four phases of growing up. Education, success/accumulation, transition to eldership and then a focus on meaning and legacy. In such cultures you knew from birth that by your late midlife you needed to make the difficult transition away from your ego. Ego had helped you put up the. scaffolding to build the person you have become, but midlife was the time to deal with the scaffolding (ego) in order to fulfil the real reason that you were here on the planet. Late midlife was the time to put down all the trophies of phase two and invest in turning your experience into wisdom that could then be reinvested in the upcoming generations.

My book, titled To Plant A Walnut Tree, was based on an elder of mine’s wisdom gleaned from his father, who told him that ‘the most unselfish thing you can do with your life is to plant a walnut tree…because you probably won’t see the fruit in your life time’. This is the mind-set of the third and fourth phases of life. Nelson Mandela attributes all his ‘success’ to the fact that he was nurtured by elders from birth until death. He knew as a child that he was to become an elder himself. That road map of how to live a life was embedded from the start.

We don’t have this road map and it is therefore no surprise that most people cannot locate themselves as elders on the map of their life.

3.     We struggle to value our own experiences

It is interesting in the interviews how many people will say ‘I have nothing to offer’. Their life experience counts for little to nothing in their own eyes. If you think you have nothing to offer then you won’t seek to offer it. The people I’ve talked to are overflowing with rich personal, professional, social, relational, spiritual, community experiences, but they conclude ‘I have nothing to offer’.

I mentor young people around the world through my partnership with One Young World and what I notice is the deep hunger of young people to have a mentor, an elder, to support and invest in them. The people I interview carry more useful life experiences in the thumbnail of the little (pinkie) finger, that most young people are gasping for. One teacher I interviewed said it was like as people age they develop this rich, ripe fruit of experience…..then they just let it rot.

4.     We find it difficult to know how to process our experiences to get the juice of wisdom

Of all the qualities that distinguish an elder is their wisdom. They are people who have taken their life experiences and thought them through, processed it, mulled on it, reflected on it until the drops of wisdom come through. While experience may be limited to a time and context, wisdom is usually timeless. Take AI. An older person may be struggling to master an understanding of AI and feel they have little to offer a young person. Technologically speaking that may be true, but the top brains on AI are talking about the cruciality of moral imagination, of the absolute necessity of human connection, relationships and networks. Older people have the potential of this wisdom in spades. AI is an existential crisis. Have we been here before? My generation grew up on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis. My parents had to live with the reality of whether this is how the world was going to end. How did their generation deal with the existential challenges of such times?  Wisdom is lodged in the heart and mind of potential elders if they have done the processing of their experiences. (It is interesting to note that the issues we face with AI are because it didn’t occur to the developers to sit with the elders first and talk about the issues we face when creating technology – whether is an atom bomb, the internet or AI – and seek their wisdom first.)

5.     We don’t know how an elder elders

Eldership is a function or role in life rather than a title or position. It’s a verb. It’s what we do. In one of my face to face interviews I was just getting up to leave when an older friend of my interviewee arrived at the front door. He had a responsible position in the town community that I was visiting. I was introduced by name and then as someone researching eldership.

‘Oh, what’s that?’ he asked.

I created a fumbled answer on the spot.

‘I can see you are at least as old as I am and you will have tons of life experiences. What will you do to percolate the wisdom from it all and invest in the next generation?’

His answer was instant.

‘I’d love to do that. I’d love to share with young people. How on earth would I begin to do it? Tell me and I’ll sign up!’

His answer encapsulates many responses I’ve heard throughout these interviews.

How does an elder elder? What are the routes, the tracks, the opportunities, for young and old to enter into a mutually enriching dialogue around wisdom and innovation?

Even if I took the time to process all of my life experiences how would I find the opportunity to share it? Where would I even begin?

I was asked today which of these five challenges is the greatest one for me personally. ‘The last one’, I replied.

‘That’s why I’m working on this next book and Emerging Elders…to try and answer that question’