One of the topics that we discussed in class was how people think of old age in
comparison to the actual experience of being old. In my personal life, I’ve always have had a
neutral stance on aging. I think that while there are many physical disadvantages to aging such as
being more vulnerable to injury, you gain advantages in other forms such as gaining more
knowledge and decision-making ability because of experiencing more life. I’m not sure if this
counts as one of the many paradoxes of aging but it seems like it. Another idea that was
discussed in class was how to measure success in terms of aging and having “successfully aged”.
I feel like defining success in general is a point of contention. My own thoughts of success
include improving and increasing one’s own interpersonal connections by making them more
numerous but also making the more intimate among other milestones. I feel like as long as
people as if they have improved relative to themselves in the past, then that is valid grounds to
constitute being successful. A theory for aging successfully was Socioemotional selectivity
which referred to younger adults focusing on knowledge-based goals whole older adults focusing
on emotional goals. It makes me wonder if a potential reason for this theory is if having
experienced a life of desire for achieving knowledge based goals is very mentally taxing and as a
result influences older adults to fulfill themselves in more intimate ways emotionally. In my
eyes, I’ve personally equally valued knowledge based goals to emotional based goals but a
reason for that was because my childhood had some difficult phases of social awkwardness and
bullying. I think an interesting thing brought up in class was how most participants in aging
studies are WEIRD which stands for western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. It is
moments like this that remind me that the world is in many aspects Eurocentric, and wealth
centric, underrepresenting minority groups in very minimally subjective areas such as science. It
makes me wonder if adding participants that are not WEIRD in psychological studies sciences
would result in significant scientific findings.