In a thread on our FB group – Advantages of Age, Babyboomers and Beyond – I posted a meme as a minor provocation. It said: WE ARE OLD. DAY PARTIES AND BRUNCH ONLY. DO NOT INVITE ME OUT AFTER 9PM. I’LL BE IN BED. I gave a little snort of an acknowledgement as I put it in the group.
I was aware that our members range from early 50s to late 80s so there would be a wide-range of answers. Most of them replied defiantly that they were still going out in the evening – from the 76-year-old woman who is in a skittles team and regularly walks through her eerily empty British town at 11:30 pm, to the couple of 65-year-olds who live in Germany and go often to an electro, jungle, drum n’bass club, stay until 5am, have a snooze in the car, then drive for two hours to get home. And then there is the artist in his 80s who has a snooze at 5pm, carries on working and sometimes goes for a walk at midnight. All hail these feisty AofAers bucking the ‘stay in’ cliché about elders.
However, the response I resonated with the most was a 73-year-old woman who said she did like to go out in the day more now and preferred one-to-ones than big social groups but that she didn’t see this as ‘giving in to being old’ but rather creating a new daytime adventuring spirit. Sharing these kinds of (sometimes vulnerable) viewpoints is all part of the AofA community’s foundational roots. Olders are not a homogenous group of people who have slipped suddenly and fatally into a state known as pensionerdom where we all put on slippers and head for the water bottles. And it’s so good to know each other’s views and nuances around these perspectives on age and ageing. Knowing how someone else approaches getting older can really help re-invigorate one’s own attitude and ideas.
Suzanne Noble, serial entrepreneur and blues/jazz singer, and I co-founded the social enterprise Advantages of Age in 2016 because we couldn’t bear the way the media were treating older people – in other words, us (at that point a group of five older women who gathered regularly in Suzanne’s hot tub) as though they were the unsexy, sagging, half-dead dregs of society. That didn’t sound like us at all as we were all involved in creative projects and still being out there in the world.
Advantages of Age was born with the mission to challenge the media narrative around stereotypes and ageing. And although some forward steps have been made over the last nine years, the Granny headlines, the patronising attitudes, the ageist policies in companies when you’re Over 50 and often become unemployable – are still prevalent and hence we need older people to gather together to demand change. And we need a community – that meet not just on FB but also at our events like the Advantages of Age Awards 2025 on November 20th, and writing for our pro-ageing Substack magazine as well as picnics, parties, and creating performances and films.
The utter and diabolical worship of youth on all our social media and in society in general with all its let’s be young whatever our age, age is just a number kind of attitudes is pernicious for us, olders. Either we go in the ‘forever envious of the young’ direction or we create a community where embrace ageing and all its difficulties too. Our aim is to encourage our cohort – we have 5,000 members – to live life fully and exchange support for each other.
It’s very moving when someone in the FB Closed Group – which has men and women members – decide to share with us all exactly what’s going on in their lives. Recently I created a post about ‘age-adaptation’ and asked if our members were doing it and how they were doing it. There were some replies that refuted the premise, in other words, they supported the idea that we could cultivate positive mindsets and that would stop us falling into the old age trap, the giving in to age trap. Which is useful but is not the whole story. Others gave wonderful examples of how they age-adapt. One woman told us about her health and what had happened: "Adapting doesn’t mean doing or being less-than. That is such a negative and reductive way to look at things. It can mean finding different ways to do the same or different things – all or any of which give you a sense of wellbeing and help you to thrive. I’m not in the business of ‘thinking young’ I much prefer to think ‘I’m alive and it’s today and I am here!' I’m speaking from my own experience of ongoing recovery following a (non-lifestyle related) brain haemorrhage and stroke earlier this year. I used to run a lot. Now I find that high impact exercise brings on headaches and that my brain just doesn’t cope well with being shaken about. It’s still healing. Instead, I walk a lot, swim a lot, and have been strength training (weights and resistance) for the past two months. So far, my balance has improved, I’m sleeping better and my ability to perform complex tasks is getting improving all the time. More importantly, I’m feeling better and more confident because I’ve been able (with help from a great PT who is working with my limitations but enabling me to grow stronger safely) get moving again, albeit in a different way from before. Adaptability is a super power as far as I’m concerned!"
Sharing very down-to-earth information like that forms the bedrock of our community. And it is vital for our own wellbeing. As well as discussion about the ups and downs of clearing out our dead parents’ houses or discussions about whether we camp at music festivals or not, or which music we like, how much we love Grace Jones, whether we still entertain friends in the evening or now it’s more going out for lunch, or what we think of the term pensioner. Of course, we detest it. Community makes you feel seen and heard as an individual as well as being a resource to rely on in terms of connection and fascinating stories. There are so many older people out there. In fact, I only have to put a question into the group like "What are you up to this weekend?" and I think we are all thoroughly riveted by the replies. From visiting S&M clubs in Berlin to dancing as part of Sadler’s Wells’ older performances to writing poetry to watching Riot Women or actually being part of a Leicester project called Riotous Collective and playing in garage bands to renovating a house in France on their own and much more. It’s important to stimulate and inspire each other.
Which is also a function of the Advantages of Age Awards 2025 where we celebrate pro-ageing organisations and individuals in order to create more awareness of all the innovative groups out there. Every time I send an email out to let someone know that they’re a finalist, I’m so heartened by the response. These are wonderful small organisations or individuals like Yuli from Bellacouche where shrouds are handmade in Devon – Yuli was so delighted to be shortlisted, she immediately signed up to come along. One of the significant factors in the Awards is that people are coming from all over Britain to help us create this ageing revolution. I can’t wait.
You can find out more info about the awards on advantagesofageawards.com and buy tickets here.
