Who’s Afraid of the Elderly?

What words do we have in our language to talk about older people? And if each word is not quite as neutral as a dictionary entry might suggest, but carries its own weight, its own colourings and connotations, how many of the words used to refer to older adults are negatively charged? How many were coined with a dismissive edge?

In Greek, the list is long and particularly harsh. It ranges from the straightforward “old man” and “old woman” to compound insults roughly translating as “senile fool,” “filthy old man,” “crazy old coot,” along with references to Tutankhamun and Methuselah as shorthand for the impossibly ancient, and words meaning “wreck” or “decrepit.” The list goes on. And what it brings to the surface is at least one general observation: old age is a target.

“Are old people human beings?” Simone de Beauvoir asked fifty years ago, at the opening of her book “The Coming of Age” — a book that has not aged a single day. Today, two social phenomena give shape and form to the injustices embedded in our language: ageism and gerontophobia.

Ageism refers to all the stereotypes and prejudices that lead to the separation and exclusion of certain individuals from society, based solely on their age. Examples include the tendency to assume from the outset that older people are weak and vulnerable, passive, inevitably grumpy, necessarily asexual, and unquestionably diminished in their mental and physical capacities.

The problem with biases of this kind is that they seem almost too reasonable. They are infused with a kind of “common sense.” They make sense on their own, and quickly. They explain everything, and completely. Things are what they are, no nuance required, no gradations, no distinctions. Under such a steamroller, everything appears smooth, self-evident, and tidy.

But if we tried, pushing back against the current, to examine age-related stereotypes more closely, we would discover that things were not always this way. Somewhere, at some point, older people were considered worthy of respect. Conditions were never idyllic, but in small villages, tight-knit communities, more traditional societies, where knowledge passed from generation to generation and access to information worked differently, the elderly were seen as beacons and bearers of that knowledge. They represented lived experience, keepers and transmitters of a precious distillation of life, a source of inspiration for younger generations. Today, in a society where information flows constantly and is everything, the person over 65 — where the so-called “third age” formally begins — is no longer met with that old-world respect. Their knowledge is considered obsolete. Their wisdom, fossilised. Their experience, outdated. And how could they possibly keep up with the demands of a society that commands speed, efficiency and productivity?

Gerontophobia picks up where prejudice leaves off. While ageism stops at the rejection of the older other, gerontophobia makes the leap from rejection to revulsion. Gerontophobia is an aversion to everything associated with older people. It is, by extension, the refusal to accept older adults within current social reality.

Only children would dare ask these questions out loud. Those who work in senior care facilities will have often heard this one: “But how do you stand working with old people… doesn’t it make you feel a kind of… disgust?” And then the bigger taboo question: “How old are you?” Age is a provocation — and a source of dread. The paradox of our era: in a century when life expectancy keeps rising and medicine has done everything possible to extend human life, we have begun to fear those who live the longest.

But what is it that we struggle so much to name, that we end up calling, awkwardly, “disgust”? What exactly frightens us about older people? From simple avoidance to full revulsion and phobia, what is it about the elderly that provokes such aversion?

Researcher and psychiatrist Jean Maisondieu has argued that the secret behind the devaluation of older people is their proximity to death. That if we become “gerontophobic,” it is because we fear death. As he writes, the connection between the idea of death and old age has always existed, but in earlier times the older person was seen more as someone who had survived, whereas today they are treated as someone who has already half-died, a “walking corpse.”

What we might take from Maisondieu’s idea is the notion that old age remains something unthinkable. Something unnameable, in front of which we lose our footing. Freud, in a short text, wrote about something he called the Uncanny (Unheimliche): something so personal, familiar and known that it becomes incomprehensible, invisible, alien and radically other — to the point of feeling eerie, otherworldly, and therefore threatening. The concept has many applications, and Freud himself never stopped discovering new ones. But in the end, what seems to fit the description most perfectly is old age itself. Old age: so strange and foreign, so familiar, so frightening.

In an era that idealises youth, how do we make peace with this modern “dark object of fear”? Avoidance, discrimination, indifference, concealment, denial, dismissal — all of these could be different names for the same defence mechanism, a kind of self-protection from that unbearable thing we simply refuse to see.

And yet, suddenly, overnight, things shifted. The outbreak of Covid-19 sensitised us abruptly, forced us to look the invisible straight in the eye. Older people acquired a sudden, unusual form of visibility. We witnessed devastation; the cold, dry statistics on population ageing were transformed into brutal television images, and we discovered all at once how very old the West had become. And so, as if a veil had been lifted, we were able to remember that older people exist, to talk about them, to build programmes and policies for their protection.

Must we begin to lose something before we understand its value? Perhaps what is needed is a new way of seeing — truly seeing older people, which means trying to listen to them and understand them. Simone de Beauvoir was right: this is a question of civilisation. The work continues.

Reference Maisondieu, J. (1988). De la gérontophobie aux géronto-folies. Gérontologie et société, 11 / n° 46(3), 21-27.