For most of human history, the average person did not live to see their thirty-fifth birthday. As late as 1900, the global average life expectancy was around 32 years. Getting old — the thing people now complain about, dread, spend fortunes trying to slow — is, in demographic terms, an almost brand-new experience. Many of the ancestors who came before us never got the chance to worry about it.
Helen Mirren, who turned eighty last year, put it more bluntly in an interview with Allure: “You die young or you get old. There’s nothing in between. And I never wanted to die young. I’m too curious about life; I want to see what happens next.”
I keep coming back to that line. Not because it is particularly poetic, but because it names something obvious in a way our culture almost never does. There is no third option. The alternative to getting older is not staying the same. It is not being here at all.
Our modern relationship with aging seems to have quietly forgotten this. We talk about aging as a decline, a loss, a slow theft of the person we used to be. Whole industries have grown up around the idea that youth is what we are trying to preserve and time is what we are trying to fight. It is a strange arrangement when you think about it. We have arrived at a moment in history where most people in wealthy countries will make it to old age — and we have chosen to receive that outcome with dread.
My grandparents’ generation in Ireland lived through the tail end of a time when getting to sixty was itself an achievement. My parents’ generation grew up expecting to comfortably outlive their own parents. Mine has been handed a life expectancy that would have looked improbable to a small child born in 1920, in a house without antibiotics, without childhood vaccines, without indoor plumbing that reliably worked. The privilege of complaining about a receding hairline or a sore lower back is very new in the grand scheme of things. It rides on top of a great many things going right, most of which nobody in the room chose or built themselves.
From my own mid-thirties vantage, what Mirren’s line does is drag it into view without moralizing about it. The alternative to getting older is not a good deal. Every year that passes and does not end you is, in a way that we do not often name, a small piece of luck.
The strange thing about her framing is that it flips the usual complaint on its head. The problem is not that we get older. The problem is that we forget how recently getting older became something most people even got to do. We treat what would have been unimaginable to almost anyone born before the twentieth century as a personal grievance. It is a bit like inheriting a house and complaining about the heating.
What I take from Mirren’s line is not, in the end, the aging half. It is the curiosity half. “I want to see what happens next.” That is the whole thing. Aging is what the ticket costs. Curiosity about what comes next is what you buy. If you are still interested in what tomorrow morning looks like, in the book you have not read, in the friendship that has not yet had its next chapter, then the deal is not a bad one. If you are not, no amount of youth is going to save you.
Getting old is not the miracle we would have chosen. But it is the miracle we have been handed, and it took a very long run of people we do not know to make it possible. That seems worth pausing on, occasionally.
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