Putting the Fun Back in Aging

“You don’t stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.” -George Bernard Shaw

The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki said, “Life is like stepping onto a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink.” The older I get, the more I see the humor in this, because, as the old line goes, “It’s funny because it’s true.”

As our nation gets ever grayer, there is increasing emphasis being placed on the process of aging. Let’s be honest, a lot of the news is not only not funny, but also downright frightening. Must it be this way? When did getting older become synonymous with getting serious? If laughter is the best medicine—and no one needs medicine more than we whose bodies are falling apart—it makes perfect sense that finding the fun in aging is essential to doing it well.

As a card-carrying member of AARP, I find there are many things about getting older that strike me as funny. As a psychotherapist who regularly sits with others who are also on the train to Oldsville, I find many people miss the humor in life because they think the joke is on them. For these folks, fun is something one grows out of, and many cannot even remember the last time they had a good laugh.

Western culture, with its youth-addicted mindset that sees aging as an insult, only contributes to the ever-increasing morose view of what, in the rest of nature, is the inevitable movement of the life cycle. Clearly, it’s not comedy when the most mature among us are marginalized and dealt with in polite tones of indifference, but even here lies the ultimate irony: today’s banner carriers of the "younger is better" crowd will be tomorrow’s consumers of social security benefits, brain training apps, and whatever new drug is getting ready to replace Viagra.

Rather than waiting for something to come along and tickle our arthritic funny bone, we can use our time-honored wisdom and bring fun back into our lives. The good news is that being more light-hearted does not require more effort. Getting old means having less energy, so what’s the point in having to work harder? Leave that for the young.

We can start by putting the brakes on some of the things creating barriers between ourselves and experiencing joy:

1. Stop trying to find your “purpose” in life. The apparent separation between life and you is simply a distortion of perception. You are life’s purpose, and the attempt to find that which is already there is, quite frankly, somewhat comical.
2. Stop making lists of every body part that no longer works like it once did. It’s hard to smile when your focus is on the fact that the muscles that make smiling possible are not as toned as they once were.
3. Stop talking about “the good old days.” Nothing spoils the fun of a present-moment experience like still living in the past. Be honest, the good old days were filled with stress, worries, ulcers, and headaches. Whoopee!
4. Stop reading books that tell you how to stay young. Despite what the current bestseller says, aging is not an affront to nature and the notion that you’re doing it wrong is hysterical.
5. Stop comparing yourself to the Joneses. If you’re lucky, you’ve already forgotten who these people are and, if not, realize that they’ve gotten older, too.

Now that we’re no longer building those psychological barriers to having fun, it’s time to get practical. First, take this quick test: When was the last time you had a good laugh? If your answer was during the Carter administration, you need an emotional Heimlich to dislodge the seriousness stuck in your throat. So here goes:

1. Take out the old photo album and chuckle at the number of hairstyles you’ve gone through and how, at the time, you thought “Damn, I look sexy!”
2. Put on an old TV series, preferably a drama, and guffaw at what we used to think of as good acting.
3. Go ahead and play that favorite tune from when you were an angst-driven, young adult and giggle at how serious you thought your life was back then.
4. Watch almost any movie involving aging actors and chortle and their attempts to keep up with their way-too-young sexual partners.
5. Pick up almost any magazine with a smiling senior celebrity talking about how to stay young and smile back, realizing that with any good photo editor, you too could look years younger.

The adage of, “He who laughs last, laughs the best,” should be the mantra of a generation that has seen more than its share of tears and heartaches. This does not mean that we stop being responsible and become “old fools.” It simply means that we’ve reached the point in our lives where a sense of humor can replace the failing senses of smell, taste, touch, sight, and sound and it’s ok to act foolish now and then.