The elderly, just like people a few years their junior, can possess many qualities such as kindness, rudeness and stubbornness. One major quality they lack however, just like everyone over the age of 10, is being cute. I think finding an old person cute is a relatively new reaction that people seem to have developed over time. I however, definitely do not feel this emotion when I see an old person getting by in life. Yet, it seems all too common for people to find it cute that an elderly person still has a sense of humour, that they are still married or even that they still smile (for all we know, like a baby, an attempt to get rid of bad wind can often be mistaken for a smile).
I’m sure many people will find it cute that my Nan is playing operation, but WHY?
Finding the elderly cute is patronising. Most people find babies cute and I find having a similar emotion to the elderly weird. When older people are more composed, or like their former selves people seem to find this ‘cute’. But what is so amazing that someone is just the same person that they were 10 years ago? If anything, the fact that they have the same wife, still watch the same programmes and like their tea a certain way is more unadventurous than cute. Calling the elderly cute, I find implies that in their old age they have regressed, and people find it endearing when they still see glimmers of the person they were when they were middle-aged. But it should come as no surprise that the elderly can be just like everyone else, because surprisingly they are, just older.
I think I am one of the few people that are looking forward to getting ‘old’. There’s no exact age for when you count as old, but I think it is around the age of 70. I am looking forward to retirement, where I hope it will be a bit like university life, which consists of enjoying doing nothing. Except, hopefully by retirement age I will have a lot more money than I did at Uni and so can enjoy it much more. I also look forward to being able to say almost anything I want, and people letting me, just because of my age. I imagine I will be ranting just like this but in the extreme. But, I would hate for anyone to find me cute, just because I have managed to not get myself killed yet. Whilst being really old can be an achievement, it is because of the things you might have done, not because somehow your withered face is almost as cute as a babies’.
By seeing the elderly as cute I think we have lost some of the respect that the older generation used to have. Rather than pillars of the community, we now view them as cute old people that don’t really understand what we are saying to them, so it is fine to call them cute as if they aren’t even there. I find nothing cute about a withered, wrinkly, grey, deaf old man or woman. Rather, I can admire them, or look up to them, but never look down on them as cute. I hope that when I am old I am feared and never thought of as cute.
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