Eligible age or disguised old age

A few months ago, the hoax spread that the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation of Mexico had ruled in favor of people being able to change their age by changing their date of birth on their identification documents, to reflect their "personal truth."

In the end, the Supreme Court itself had to clarify that it was only about correcting the date of birth if there was an error in the registry.

The matter would have been less credible if in the 2021 elections, and under Mexico's gender identity laws, 18 men had not registered as transsexual women to circumvent parity requirements, which also happened three years earlier.

And it is that this happens when "what is felt" tries to erase the facts.

However, regardless of our desires and even subjective certainties, neither make-up nor surgical interventions transform biological reality.

We try to erase the passage of age, to deny it, with a

that, in its most extreme cases, is pathetic.

Luckily, the news with which this article began was a hoax, but for how long?

Because, certainly, if we do not look at ourselves in the mirror we continue to have the indefinite age of early youth, and transhumanism promises us not only an extension of life, but even immortality.

The dependence on nature, so important in ancient times, is something out of fashion.

The Stoics defended nature as a measure of moral balance (think of Seneca, or even earlier Cicero's

).

Modernity, from Newtonian physics to the Industrial Revolution, has sought to dominate nature, and now, finally, its technological transmutation is no longer science fiction and has become the target of research in Silicon Valley.

If we add to this that in the global North the premises of the market are the fulfillment of desires, what is going to prevent the erasure of age?

At the moment something very unsubtle: reality.

Mature people pretend to appear young, usurping social protagonism from true young people sunk in the precariat.

We are not in an effective

, but in a symbolic

that strives to appear what it is not.

Aesthetic operations, sports, second marriages, cosmetics,

clothes ... The older man becomes

, but there comes a time when this is no longer possible, and thus the older man becomes a simulacrum of the simulacrum: the old man who imitates the mature man, who sometimes in turn imitates the young man.

It is called “active aging”: trips, university for the elderly, collaboration with NGOs… The youthful appearance and compulsive occupation are the imperatives with which we try to disguise age.

However, the pandemic has brought this house of cards to the ground.

Starting at age 60, it has reminded us that we are vulnerable;

even now, when figures are not given by age, from that age range onwards the statistics and the crudeness of morbidity are maintained.

For not remembering the early days of confinement, the collective horror —whose consequences we have not assumed morally or socially— of all those elderly people drowning, dying alone in their rooms in the residences.

Old age is a fact, but it is also a cultural creation, and as Simone de Beauvoir reminds us in her book

, "the meaning or lack of meaning that old age has within a society puts it entirely in question, because through it the sense or non-meaning of the entire previous life is revealed”.

Old age, although

socially excluded, replicates the social standard of compulsive industriousness to believe, to pretend, that it is still active.

Is this the model of desirable old age?

Or, rather, is this the model of society that we want to be replicating even in old age, when perhaps we could free ourselves from its imperatives and once again be masters of our time, since it eludes us?

Old age, biologically incontestable, is also a cultural construction.

The elder's obsession with not being one, and his marginalization when he can no longer hide that he is, constitute a gerontophobic social coercion for which we are responsible.

And while scientists seek to prolong life, it would be good to rethink the vision we have of old people, because as the poet Jorge Camacho masterfully describes in his Esperanto poem

:

The future of all young people is that old age, which socially should not be understood as a burden that we relegate, something to disguise as long as possible, but rather as coming of age, perfect maturity.

Rosa María Rodríguez Magda

is a philosopher and writer, author of

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