Barbara Ehrenreich

Aging the old-fashioned way

Barbara Ehrenreich is sick of all the pressure to age “successfully,” said Patt Morrison in the Los Angeles Times. A social justice activist who lived on a minimum wage for three months as research for her seminal 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich, 77, says our wellness obsessions and warped attitudes about aging go hand in hand. “Health is just the absence of disease,” she says. “Well, the rich want more than that. They want to be as perfect as they can be.” That mindset has taken over Silicon Valley, where tech moguls are seeking to double their life spans. “If you are one of the richest and smartest people in the world, death is an insult,” she says. “Why would you let that happen to you? You’re too special to die.” Even ordinary Americans, she says, have come to view death as “a kind of suicide,” the result of eating poorly, drinking too much, or some other lifestyle vice. The truth, Ehrenreich says, is that aging can be managed, but not defied. “It’s a process of increasing disability. Things get harder. Things go wrong. And there’s nothing to do except try to adapt to each new disability that comes along as best you can.” ■

March 8, 2019 THE WEEK