#136: Feeling the Old Age Paradox

October 27, 2017

If one is at, say, one’s 40th birthday, then one is not old.

No one would say that one is. Nor would one be old the next day. Or the day after. The reason is that one’s age status doesn’t change on the basis of one day more-or-less. However, if one adds, say, 12,320 days, making one 75, then on is old. But 12,320 days are just that many individual days no one of which is capable of changing one’s age status. The big group of days can’t have a property not owned by any of its constituents.

This means that at age 75 one has a property that one didn’t have when one was 40 and never acquired since then. How is this possible? It would seem that either we were old at 40 or we are not old at 75. We can’t have oldness at 75 without having acquired it at some point.

This is a paradox. Call it the “Old Age Paradox.” A paradox occurs when two equally compelling beliefs are incompatible. Most commonly, paradoxes involve an incompatibility between a belief of which one is intuitively certain and a belief which is the conclusion of some apparently sound argument. What makes it a paradox is that it seems that one must abandon one of the beliefs, but one is still equally committed to both. Psychologists call this state of mind “cognitive dissonance.” Students of philosophy will recognize the Old Age Paradox as an instance of the “Heap” or “Sorites” paradox.

I don’t think that this paradox is best for introducing paradoxes to young people, there are others in which the dissonance is much more obvious and immediate.

Yet, there is a feature to the Old Age Paradox that I don’t detect in others.

Logical paradoxes are mostly contrived, one doesn’t encounter them in the course of ordinary life. But the Old Age Paradox puzzles almost everyone who actually gets old whether philosophically inclined or not.

Of course, most everyone who gets old bemoans that fact. But it’s not this that I’m after here; it’s that almost everyone is puzzled with respect to when it happened.

I remember my mother telling me that when she looked in a mirror (in her 70s), that she couldn’t understand when it happened. There was the usual emotional component, but there was also a distinct, identifiable cognitive component. “I was young,” she said, “and now I’m old. When did it happen, how did it happen”? She really couldn’t understand how it could have happened without her noticing that it had. Yet, it had. Her puzzlement was exactly the one found in the Old Age Paradox.

I couldn’t answer her question then, and now I find myself puzzled in exactly the same way. And I still can’t answer the question.

The Old Age Paradox may be unique in being a natural and inevitable experiential moment built right into the human condition.