The Performance of Being Old
There is a peculiar phenomenon I keep seeing with increasing frequency: people declaring themselves “old” long before age has genuinely taken anything from them. What might once have been a simple comment about a stiff back has become a public performance of fragility, complete with exaggerated groans, theatrical complaints, and jokes that turn minor discomforts into personality traits. It is not humility or honest self-awareness. More often it is resignation that has learned to disguise itself as humor, a socially rewarded retreat from responsibility and vigor.
What frustrates me is not the reality of aging but the fiction people accept as truth. I care about using our God-given resources wisely, including time and strength and clarity. So when someone invokes the “I’m old now” refrain to avoid something well within their ability, I do not see realism. I see surrender. Many of the limitations people attribute to age are cultural stories rather than biological necessities. Fatigue often comes from inactivity. Aches come from disuse. Discouragement grows out of a narrowed imagination.
A Script More than a Season
Much of our modern idea of aging is theatrical rather than physiological. People absorb a cultural script that dictates what thirty should feel like, what forty should look like, and what sixty should inevitably become. Age becomes a role to perform instead of a reality to engage. And the script is hollow. It asks people to conform to stereotypes rather than respond to their actual capacity.
Convenience often sits behind the language of realism. What many call “being older” is often a quiet slide into ease, a retreat into routines that demand little and promise even less. The tragedy is not that bodies change but that motivation fades long before strength does.
Disillusionment Masquerading as Wisdom
Beneath the jokes lies a deeper story. People often lose not their physical ability but their spark, the inner electricity that once gave their lives energy and breadth. This loss is rarely caused by age. More often it comes from disappointment: a relationship that ended badly, an ambition that failed, or a difficult encounter with the limits of adulthood. Rather than risk that pain again, many adopt a posture of weariness. “I’m old” becomes a way of avoiding the chance to try again at the things that once brought them joy.
I recognized this temptation in myself in my thirties. A dullness began to settle in, the sense that the things I once loved were childish fantasies, the adult equivalent of sandcastles washed away by the tide. But the point of a sandcastle was never to survive. It was to be alive while shaping it. The joy was real while it lasted. Many adults forget this, and in forgetting, they shrink their world long before anything forces them to.
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
What concerns me most is the way resignation often precedes decline instead of following it. People slow down not because their bodies compel them to but because their minds have already accepted defeat. The result is a cycle. Reduced activity breeds weakness, which seems to confirm the decision to retreat. That weakness then leads to even less activity. It is a predictable, quiet drift into fragility that has more to do with expectation than age.
We see the effects everywhere. Conditions commonly associated with aging, such as metabolic disease or loss of mobility, often stem from habits rather than years. Meanwhile, those who are genuinely ill fight for every measure of strength. The ones who only imagine themselves fragile surrender long before the real battle begins.
The Cost of Shrinking Too Soon
The loss here is not only physical. People who shrink their lives prematurely forfeit opportunities to be enriched and to enrich others. They lose the joy of discovery, the depth of meaningful relationships, and the satisfaction of being useful. They give up the potential to bless others out of the strength they still possess. And perhaps most concerning, some seem quietly pleased with their self-imposed limitations because fragility offers convenience or lowered expectations.
But a convenient life eventually becomes a small one. Comfort cannot carry the weight of meaning.
A Better Vision of Strength
There is a richer, healthier view of aging, one grounded not in denial but in stewardship. It belongs to the person who continues to seek wonder, who refuses to reduce their humanity to cultural expectations, who sees every day as a resource entrusted by God. It is the seventy-five-year-old who still does her own groceries and treats ordinary conversations as opportunities for connection. It is the thirty-five-year-old who still finds joy in the music that formed him because wonder is not something we are meant to outgrow.
Faith shapes this vision for me. If strength, breath, and time are truly gifts from God, they must be received with gratitude and used with purpose. Scripture never limits the call to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength by age. The call to perseverance does not weaken with the passing years. To withdraw prematurely is not only unwise but unfaithful to the Giver of our days.
Why Generations Need Each Other
This is also why intergenerational life in the church is so necessary. When older adults are placed in isolated programs that resemble childcare in all but name, the church unintentionally reinforces the cultural lie that aging is a regression. But when generations share life, when the wisdom of age and the energy of youth meet in the same rooms, something stronger emerges. This is far closer to the biblical picture of a people growing together.
The Truth We Must Recover
If all of this leads to a single conviction, it is this: people are rarely as old as they believe themselves to be. If you have the energy to explain why you cannot do something, you likely have the energy to take at least a step toward doing it. A backache is not a summons to retreat. Disappointment is not destiny. The years behind you do not dictate the limits of the years ahead.
When we accept falsehood about our limits, we diminish both ourselves and the God who sustains us. But when we choose truth, we find that life, even with its natural constraints, remains far more open than we imagined.
You are not nearly as old as you think.
And life, in every season, is too sacred to surrender to resignation.