When does the 'slowing down' phase start?
Rushing through life without a pause is the norm and it's not good for us
Part of the problem with ageing for women nowadays is there is no prescribed route.
There is no slowing down or expectation to slow down.
If anything, the expectation is to put your foot down on the accelerator. No comfy cardigan and a subscription to Reader’s Friend. No Arrow word puzzles whilst slurping on a Murray Mint. Is that why my gran felt eighteen and I feel so old? For one of my books a while back (How to be a Boss at Ageing) I spoke to journalist and author Sali Hughes, and she summed up how dramatically the landscape of ageing has changed:
“For our grans’ generation, you cut your hair off at forty, and got a cauliflower hair-do at fifty. Look at yourself as an example – you’re three years shy of fifty and have a seventeen-month-old daughter, and you’re writing a book!”
The fact that I was writing a book cheered me up, because writing is something I enjoy and a reason to feel optimistic. And, yes, it feels liberating to have choices nowadays and higher expectations generally. But the flipside is that choice brings pressure to pursue all those choices and to keep up with the culture of busy-ness and productivity which seems to insist that every person fills their time with meaningful activity. Technology has become so addictive that we can’t stop checking in on the world, on our status, on Vinted, on WhatsApp, on school admin, on LinkedIn (groan- what is actually up with it? Why is it so dull?) etc.
It’s no accident that most of the women I know locally who are of similar age have taken up running. We run because we don’t want to stop and think about what’s going down, what’s actually happening around us but also because we want to be productive, not lazy, to work hard.
The pressure becomes more intense when the time frame you have to work in becomes ever smaller. Our grans didn’t worry too much about whether they were producing interesting social media content or whether they’d managed to launch a new business or whether their kids were as clever as all the other kids or whether they had a satisfying sex life with their partner. I’m not saying life for them was more relaxing – of course there was a tidal wave of sexism that was hard to deal with and women were trapped in their homes while their partners went off strutting about with shoulder pads on or sat in the pub like the Two Ronnies – but it sometimes feels that the continuation of youth and the lack of a clear pathway in terms of what happens when we age, means we just keep trying to keep up with younger people. We keep striving and trying and we are coming up short because we’re comparing ourselves to people half our age. Or we’re looking at people who are our age and seem to be making no concessions at all to ageing so look the same and act the same and have the kind of punishing regime that would make a twenty-year-old fall over from tiredness.
It’s really fucking annoying to read this shit.
Here’s a sample of the kind of tosh I’m talking about – those articles where they profile someone who is very successful in their forties, and show what they get up to each day:
5am: Get up and do forty-five minutes of HIIT training with my personal trainer.
5.45am: Read work emails and then do a conference call with our New York office.
Get a B vitamin shot in my arm.
7.00am: Get dressed in my cashmere running kit, drink a smoothie and have a
breakfast Zoom with my team.
7:30am: Work on my laptop whilst running at the same time and developing my
health and wellbeing app. blah blah blah.
10:00am: Teach my children meditation and Latin.
12:00am: Eat a plate of almonds and drink water.
1:00pm: COLLAPSE INTO A POOL OF TEARS AND TIREDNESS AND HAVE
TO PHONE AN AMBULANCE TO TAKE ME AWAY AS I CAN’T STAND
THIS SHIT ANYMORE.
We’ve all read this kind of guff (okay, maybe not the last bit) and we’ve all thought about why our own lives don’t measure up to this kind of punishing regime. As we reach our late forties and then go into our fifties, the notion that this kind of lifestyle is desirable, or even feasible, is ridiculous. Us old birds must cut ourselves some collective slack. We must acknowledge that it’s okay to age, that we don’t have to punish ourselves or deny that it’s happening; that we can’t do everything and achieve everything, but can perhaps crystallise what matters most to us (so, it’s out with people pleasing and doing what other people say we should do and in with doing what we want and caring less about what other people think).
We should also feel within our rights to reject the culture of busy, busy, busy, because it doesn’t serve us. It doesn’t actually serve anyone apart from a capitalist society that wants us to consume and produce all the time. We spend much of our time avoiding the death chat, but when we see it happening around us and it becomes a possibility, then our perspectives get shaken up. We have all started thinking about what really matters. Perhaps our lives flashed before our eyes a little. That busy, busy culture looks a bit foolish doesn’t it? Like everyone is a participant in one of those 24-hour charity dancing marathons and is about to collapse in a heap. So, there is a lesson about slowing down and being more mindful, about recalibrating and considering what matters most.
In this lull before I start my next job (once I find it), I am realising the speed at which I’ve been living. I’ve have been rushing for about 4 years straight now. I haven’t stopped. Can you stop? Can we collectively try and stop?
Sit with me and wait a while. How does that feel?