Aging: Losing Something, or Gaining Something?

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Everyone wants to live a long life, but no one wants to grow old. So is old age really nothing more than a slow letting go, or are there things we can only see once our hair turns grey? Two thousand years ago, Cicero gave one answer to that question. Nine hundred years ago, Yusuf Has Hajib gave another. And today, each of us who looks in the mirror gives an answer of our own.

It's morning, and you're leaning toward the mirror in the pale bathroom light. Toothbrush in hand, your mind already on the day ahead. Then you see it: at your temple, standing out from all the other strands, a single white hair. You pause for a moment. Pull it out, or pretend it isn't there? It isn't really the hair that stops you. It's everything it heralds. The lines at the corners of your eyes, the breath that quickens at the top of the stairs, the old friend whose name you just can't recall. That one white hair holds a quiet question: What am I losing? And right behind it comes a question we ask far less often: What is coming to me along the way?

Humanity has been asking this question for thousands of years. But today it takes a sharper form than ever before: Is old age a disease? This is no longer just a question for philosophers. It is being debated in laboratories, in investor meetings, and around the tables where health policy is made. To some biologists, aging is simply the sum of damage piling up in our cells, of shortening chromosome tips, of repair mechanisms breaking down. In other words, not nature's inevitable calendar, but an engineering problem waiting to be solved. Those who hold this view argue that if we don't call aging a disease, we will never even try to treat it. The longevity companies drawing billions of dollars in investment from Silicon Valley are built on exactly this idea.

For a time, the debate even found its way into official documents. While preparing the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases, the World Health Organization considered placing the term "old age" in one of its codes. The objections were fierce. Many physicians and researchers on aging warned that this amounted to treating older people as sick simply for being old, and that real, treatable illnesses would end up being brushed aside as just "old age." In the end the wording was changed, replaced by a far more careful definition, something like "ageing-associated decline in intrinsic capacity." This battle over the placement of a single phrase reveals the heart of the matter. The name we give to old age shapes how we see the people who are living it.

And this is where the tension comes from. If old age is a disease, then the old person is a patient, and an entire life becomes a chart of losses. But if old age is not a disease, what do we make of the losses people truly suffer? Isn't dressing up aching knees, a fading memory, and friends departing one by one as "maturity" its own kind of denial?

Here, science draws an interesting distinction. The psychologist Raymond Cattell proposed thinking of intelligence in two layers. The first he called fluid intelligence: solving a new problem quickly, spotting an unfamiliar pattern, holding several things in mind at once. This ability peaks in young adulthood and then slowly declines. The second he called crystallized intelligence: accumulated knowledge, vocabulary, the skill of recognizing and weighing situations. This layer holds steady well into later life, and often it even grows. A twenty-five-year-old programmer can master a new programming language in a week. A sixty-five-year-old judge, meanwhile, can read an entire case from the hesitation in a single sentence spoken by a witness. Both are intelligence, but of entirely different kinds.

So when we ask, "Are we losing something?", we are asking the wrong question. Of course we are losing something. The real question is this: Does something arrive to take the place of what we lose, and does what arrives make up for what has gone? One of the first thinkers to ask this question systematically was an aging Roman who, two thousand years ago, took up his pen as his country stood on the brink of civil war.

The year is forty-four, before the birth of Christ. The Roman Republic is in its death throes. Marcus Tullius Cicero is sixty-two years old. He has recently lost his beloved daughter Tullia, he has been all but pushed out of politics, and he spends his days at his country houses outside the city. And it is in these dark days that he writes a short, almost cheerful little book: Cato Maior de Senectute, or On Old Age.

Cicero does not speak in his own voice. He hands the floor to Cato the Elder, an elderly statesman who had lived a century earlier and was famous for his sternness and his honesty. In the book, Cato is eighty-four. Two young friends ask him how he manages to carry old age so lightly. Cato gathers the reasons people find old age miserable under four headings, and weighs each one in turn.

The first is that old age pulls a person away from work, away from an active life. Cato answers with the image of a ship. On board, some sailors climb the masts, some run about the deck, some bail out the bilge. The helmsman, though, sits quietly at the stern and simply holds the tiller. No one calls him lazy, because his work is less noisy, but more important. Great deeds, Cato says, are not done with muscle, speed, or agility, but with wisdom, with standing, with sound judgment. And these do not diminish with age. They grow. Second, old age weakens the body. Cato does not deny this. But he suggests that just as we want the strength of a bull in youth, in old age we should want what befits old age. Every age has a strength of its own; rather than mourning what is gone, we should make use of what remains. He tells us that he himself learned Greek in his old age, seizing on the language as if quenching a long thirst.

Third, old age deprives us of pleasure. Here Cato's answer takes on its sharpest form: this is not a loss, but a gift. The passions of the body cloud the judgment of youth, driving us toward greed, anger and regret. Old age turns down that noise, and leaves behind the quiet pleasures of conversation, of reading, of working the soil, of tending vineyards and gardens. It is no accident that one of Cato's favorite pleasures is farming; the seed falls to the earth, grows, and bears fruit. It is the joy of someone who knows how to wait patiently.

The fourth, and the heaviest, is the nearness of death. And here we find what may be Cato's most beautiful image. The death of the young, he says, is like a flame put out by a flood of water; the death of the old is like a fire that goes out on its own once its fuel is spent. To pick unripe fruit from the tree, you have to force it; ripe fruit falls of its own accord. Cato does not romanticize death; but he invites us to see it as the natural completion of a life.

Read today, Cicero's defense may sound a little too optimistic. Not everyone has vineyards and gardens, or a distinguished career in the Senate behind them. Cicero knows this too, and he gives Cato an important line: the greatest protection in old age is a good life built in youth. In other words, old age is not something that suddenly befalls us; it is the top floor of a structure we have spent years building.

Now let us travel some five hundred years back from Rome, and thousands of kilometers to the east. The state of Lu, in China. In the Lunyu, the book known as the Analects, compiled by his students after his death, Confucius sums up his own life in a single paragraph. That paragraph may well be the shortest autobiography in human history.

At fifteen, he says, I set my heart on learning. At thirty, I stood on my own feet. At forty, I was freed from doubt. At fifty, I understood the path that Heaven had laid out for me. At sixty, my ear learned to sift what it heard; nothing I heard could shake me any longer. And at seventy, I could follow the desires of my heart, without ever straying from what is right.

That last sentence deserves a moment's pause. Confucius was a thinker who spent his whole life urging people to follow rules, rituals and moral discipline. Yet the final stop he reaches is not a list of rules: it is a state in which desire and virtue are no longer separate things. The young person forces themselves to do what is right, suppressing what rises from within. For the sage of seventy, that struggle is over; whatever he wants is right, because at the end of a long cultivation, his desires themselves have been transformed.

When we set Cicero and Confucius side by side, we notice an interesting difference. Cicero defends old age; he shields it against its accusers, weighing each loss one by one and showing how it is made good. Confucius does not even feel the need for a defense. In his telling, life is already a staircase climbing upward, each step higher than the last. Loss never even comes up.

Modern psychology lends surprising support to this optimism. Research by the Stanford University psychologist Laura Carstensen has shown that older people, on average, experience fewer negative emotions than the young, and regulate their emotions better. Carstensen explains this through our perception of time: when a long life stretches out ahead of us, we turn toward meeting new people, gathering knowledge, investing in the future. But when we sense that our time is limited, our priorities shift; we turn toward deep relationships, meaningful moments, the present. Researchers call this "the paradox of aging": in the very years when the body declines, the heart often grows lighter.

But the paradox has another side. Confucius's staircase does not lead upward for everyone. Sometimes, at the very place we believe we have risen to, we look back, and only then do we feel the weight of what we have left behind. That feeling, the weight of white hair and the longing for youth, is voiced in all its nakedness by one of the first great philosophical works written in Turkic.

Toward the end of the year ten sixty-nine, in the lands of the Karakhanids, a man from Balasagun completes a work that has taken him eighteen months. His name is Yusuf. He presents his book to Tabghach Bughra Khan in Kashgar, and the khan rewards him by making him an official of the court; that is why history remembers him as Khass Hajib. The book is called Kutadgu Bilig, the knowledge that brings good fortune, the wisdom that gives happiness. It is a book about the state, about justice, and about the good life. But within it there are also lines written not in the voice of a courtier, but in the voice of a man growing old. Yusuf, early in the book, while explaining why he wrote his work, suddenly turns to his own life and laments his lost youth. He says that youth came and went like a guest, that he searched for it but could not find it. He writes that his raven-black hair has turned white as a swan's feather, that his once upright body has bent, that what was taut as a bowstring has curved like the bow itself. These images are not mere ornament. In the eleventh century, a Turkish poet experiences what we feel when we look in the mirror one morning: a change as jarring as darkened hair turning into a white swan.

But Kutadgu Bilig does not remain inside this sorrow. When we look at the work as a whole, we see that Yusuf also regards old age through another lens. The book is a dialogue built around four central characters: the ruler Kuntoghdi represents justice, the vizier Aytoldi represents fortune, the vizier's son Ogdulmish represents intellect, and the reclusive dervish Odgurmish represents the end, that is, the close of life and what lies beyond it. Odgurmish is the character who reminds us of the transience of the world. When he is summoned to the palace, he does not wish to go; for him, life is short, the world is an inn, and a person is merely a traveler.

In Yusuf's world, old age is the age of exactly this awareness. The young man believes the world is permanent, believes himself immortal. The white beard is where that illusion comes to an end. In many verses of Kutadgu Bilig, we hear of the value of knowledge and experience, and of the need to seek counsel from those who have seen much of life. Beside a ruler there should be not only young and ambitious men, but also people who carry the years on their backs, who know when to stay silent and when to speak. Words gain weight only when a lifetime stands behind them.

This idea lives on in other forms deep within Turkic culture. In villages and nomadic camps from Central Asia to Anatolia, the word "aksakal," meaning "white beard," describes not simply a man with a white beard, but the elder of the community, whose word is respected, who settles disputes, and who is consulted on decisions. In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, even today, there are councils of aksakals at the neighborhood and village level. Here, age is not a loss but a rank.

About a century after Yusuf, a legend told of Khoja Ahmad Yasawi, who lived in Turkestan, reveals the bond between old age and meaning even more sharply. According to the legend, when Yasawi reached sixty-three, the age at which the Prophet Muhammad died, he considered it disrespectful to walk the earth any longer than the Prophet had, and he withdrew into an underground cell he had dug for himself, spending the rest of his life there. This should be read not as a historical document, but as a hagiographic tale. Yet such tales, too, tell us what a community values. Here, old age is seen as the time to withdraw from the world, to know one's measure, to surrender to something greater than oneself.

There is a tension between the lament in Kutadgu Bilig and this legend. One grieves for youth slipping away; the other willingly turns away from the world. But both know the same thing: old age is where a person comes face to face with the time they have lived. In youth, time is an abstract notion; it seems as if it will never run out. With white hair, time becomes concrete, measurable, something that can be felt. That is why Yusuf's swan-white hair is both a mourning and an awakening.

But what if the community no longer recognizes the value of this awakening? What if no one is left to listen to the aksakal's words? It is true that in the old world, the white beard was a rank. But in the modern world, that same white beard is increasingly becoming a cloak of invisibility.

In nineteen seventy, in Paris, sixty-two-year-old Simone de Beauvoir publishes a thick volume. Its title is La Vieillesse, that is, Old Age. Most of us know Beauvoir from the book she wrote twenty years earlier, describing how women are pushed into the position of the "other" in society. In Old Age, she turns that same sharp gaze on a different group. In her view, modern society turns the elderly into an "other" as well; and it does so so quietly that no one even notices.

One of Beauvoir's most striking observations is that old age is not something felt from within. A person does not feel old, she says; the self inside always remains the same. It is others who tell us that we are old. We realize it when someone offers us a seat on the bus, when a young person speaks to us slowly and loudly, when no one asks for our opinion. Old age is first born in the gaze of others, and then we turn that gaze upon ourselves.

Beauvoir's analysis goes further still. In a capitalist society, she says, a person's worth is measured by their productivity. Someone who has left their working years behind becomes, by this reckoning, a burden. Retirement is presented as a reward, but more often than not it means being set aside. That is why, for Beauvoir, the misery of old age is a social problem before it is a biological one. How we treat the old is, in fact, a mirror of how we treat human beings throughout their entire lives. Robert Butler, an American psychiatrist, had given this attitude a name one year before Beauvoir's book appeared: ageism. Like racism and sexism, it means judging people solely by their age and forcing them into stereotypes. When we read the phrase "young and dynamic" in a job listing, when we assume an older person won't understand technology, when we brush off an elder's opinion as "old-fashioned," we are inside that stereotype.

This brings us to the nursing home, because that is where this debate becomes most concrete. In Türkiye, the share of the population over sixty-five has passed ten percent in recent years. That is a profound transformation for a society that has traditionally cared for its elders at home, where three generations lived under one roof. Urbanization, shrinking households, women in the workforce, migration all strain the old form of care within the family. Nursing homes, care homes and day centers are filling that gap.

It would be unfair to see the nursing home simply as a symbol of abandonment. For many older people, it means escape from loneliness, access to health care, and a community of their peers. For many families, it is the only way to provide proper care. The real question is not the building itself. It is whether, inside that building, a person is still seen as a subject. Do they decide for themselves what to eat in the morning, what to do through the day, whom to see? Are they listened to? Or are they merely a body to be looked after, fed and given medicine?

Beauvoir's answer to this is both simple and difficult. The only way to keep old age from becoming a pitiful parody of our former life, she says, is to go on pursuing ends that give our lives meaning: devotion to others, to a community, to a cause; intellectual, social or creative work. In other words, what will save old age is not clinging to the past but still having a future.

This sentence casts our entire journey in a new light. Cicero's Cato was learning Greek at eighty-four. Confucius described what he had reached at seventy not as a stopping point but as a state of being. Even as Yusuf Khass Hajib lamented his lost youth, he still had a work ahead of him to finish. What they all share is a view of old age not as an ending, but as a time still being lived.

When Erik Erikson divided human development into stages, he called the final one the tension between integrity and despair. A person nearing the end of life looks back and either accepts what they have lived as a whole, or is crushed under the weight of missed opportunities and mistakes they could not set right. For Erikson, the person who reaches integrity is one who can embrace their life as it was, and find a kind of peace even in the face of death. The name of that peace is wisdom.

But wisdom is not only an individual achievement. Whether a person grows wise or despairing in old age depends partly on how the people around them see them. The aksakal's word carries weight only if someone is listening. Cato's steering earns respect only if those on board know how much the rudder matters. When a society makes its elders invisible, it impoverishes not only those people but its own future, because sooner or later everyone will reach that age.

Perhaps the question we began with, "losing or gaining?", was framed a little incompletely. Much of what we lose as we age is beyond our control: speed, strength, sometimes health, the people we love. What we gain, though, depends largely on two things: how we have lived over the years, and whether the people around us still make room for us. The first is our responsibility. The second belongs to all of us.

And so the white hair you saw in the mirror that morning takes on a different meaning. Yes, it heralds a loss. But it is also an invitation: to build the years ahead starting now, as Cicero said; to hold on to a future, as Beauvoir said; and perhaps most important of all, to look at the older person beside us today with the same eyes we hope will one day look at us.

We've come to the end of today's episode of Nöron Felsefe. Until we meet again with a new story.