October 1: Not "our elders," but you

Every year, toward the end of September, the posters begin to appear. A town hall announces "a moving tribute to our elders." A community center prepares an afternoon tea with a musical performance. A television news broadcast closes with footage of a dance and a voiceover speaking of tenderness. It is the preamble to October 1, the International Day of Older Persons (the UN's Spanish name for it is "Día Internacional de las Personas de Edad"), and almost everything about it is done with good intentions.

And yet, if you are of a certain age and see yourself reflected in those images, you might feel a slight friction. A small discomfort, hard to name, like an itchy tag on the collar of a shirt. This article is about giving it a name.

The friction is in the possessive. "Our elders" is said with affection, but listen to what it truly says: that you belong to someone. That you belong to your children, to your neighborhood, to the news, to the entire country; to everyone except yourself. No one would think of saying "our forty-somethings." The first person is not given up without noticing, and on that day, precisely that day, it is worth reclaiming it.

A day that does not ask for applause

The United Nations established this day on December 14, 1990, in a single line (paragraph fifteen of resolution 45/106, among twenty paragraphs on action plans and trust funds), and every year gives it a theme. The one for 2026 deserves to be read slowly: "The Age of Longevity: Rethinking Systems for Longer Lives." Look at where the demand is pointing. It does not ask older people to stay active, or positive, or young in spirit. It asks that systems (healthcare, housing, employment, culture, cities) update themselves to a reality that is already here: lives much longer than those for which they were designed.

The change of direction matters. For years, much of the discourse around aging has functioned like an exam: age well, take care of yourself, participate, don't fall behind. This year's theme turns the board around. You are not the one taking the exam. The structures surrounding you are, and for now they are not doing great.

The numbers explain the urgency. People over 60 years old numbered about 541 million globally in 1995; by 2025 they exceeded 1.2 billion; by 2050 they will reach 2.1 billion. It is not an oncoming wave. It is the sea we already live in.

Who you are, according to the numbers

In Spain, the portrait is drawn every year by the CSIC. The 2025 report says this: nearly ten million people are 65 or older, one in five. More than 650,000 are over 90, and in 2024 there were close to 16,000 centenarians. Someone turning 65 today has, on average, nearly 22 more years ahead of them: more time than what separates birth from finishing a university degree. Two decades are not an epilogue. They are a continent.

The same report also disproves some persistent stereotypes. Between ages 65 and 74, seven out of ten people use the internet daily. The image of the older person lost in front of a screen increasingly fails to describe the person standing before us.

And a fifth of the population does what citizens do: they vote in every election, support associations and book clubs, care for grandchildren and very elderly parents, volunteer, work, create, pay taxes, and debate politics at the dinner table. None of that is a tribute. It is a country functioning, with its older adults included, not set apart.

The prejudice almost no one confesses

In 2021, the World Health Organization did something that had never been done before: measure age prejudice on a global scale. Its Global Report on Ageism relied on a survey of 83,034 people across 57 countries, and the result is rightly unsettling: one out of every two people surveyed showed moderate or high ageist attitudes. It is not the ailment of some distant country: the survey spans very different regions of the world.

Ageism rarely shouts. It slips into gestures that even seem kind: the doctor who explains your diagnosis while looking at your daughter, even though you are right there; the employee who raises their voice without anyone asking them to; the stranger who calls you "grandpa" without being related to you; the form with font size that no one designed for your eyes. In Spain, they have begun calling these micro-ageisms, and their sum is not small, because they almost never arrive alone.

In addition to being unjust, it is costly. The WHO report indicates that in the United States alone, ageism generates approximately 63 billion dollars a year in excess healthcare costs: one out of every seven dollars spent on the eight most expensive health conditions of people over 60. Treating someone as less capable ultimately costs everyone money. Ageism is not a discourtesy: it is discrimination with a price tag.

Words do things

Let us return to the possessive, because words are not cosmetic; they establish who speaks and who is spoken of, who decides and who is decided for. "Our elders" turns a citizen into someone under guardianship. "Grandparents," spoken in general, reduces an entire life story to a kinship that, moreover, not everyone has: one is a grandparent to someone, not a grandparent to all, and many 70-year-olds are not grandparents to anyone, nor do they need to be.

There is a simple test for any phrase about old age: replace "elders" with any other adult group and see if the sentence survives. "A moving tribute to our women." "Activities to help our middle-aged neighbors feel useful." The ear detects it instantly. With age, however, we have been hearing it for so long that it no longer registers.

Beneath the titles

There is a question that no tribute ever asks, and it is perhaps the only one that matters on that day: who are you, beyond the roles you have played? Mother, father, grandmother, boss, teacher, son. And beneath all of that?

That question opens the second stage of Thenomba's Senior journey, that of anthropology, and it is no coincidence that it arrives so early on the path: in an era that confuses value with utility, the first step is to remember that a person is not the sum of their labels, neither the ones they chose nor the ones placed upon them. The verbs that this stage proposes to conjugate (to be, to think, to love, to create, to coexist) have something in common: none of them accept someone else's possessive. We have already written here that retirement can be experienced as a grief of identity, the day when "what do you do?" is left without an automatic answer. The way out of that grief is not a new and better label. It is the first person.

The counterpoint: the right not to be an example

Having said all that, it is wise to watch the back door. Because the caricature of the frail elder has spawned an equally narrow counterpart: the exemplary retiree who runs marathons, starts businesses, and learns Chinese: old age turned into an advertisement. If the only respectable older person is the admirable one, we have not dismantled the prejudice; we have simply changed its disguise.

Social research has been pointing this out for years. In 2015, Martinson and Berridge reviewed 67 academic articles in The Gerontologist critical of the "successful aging" paradigm, and their conclusion fits into a single line: any normative model of good aging by definition excludes someone. The one who is sick. The one caring for an ill spouse. The one who is simply tired. The CSIC's own report forces us to be honest: of the nearly 22 years ahead at age 65, the average spent in good health is around ten. Full citizenship cannot depend on physical fitness. One is a complete citizen on the padel court and in the waiting room, with a full calendar and with an empty morning. That is why the 2026 theme points in the right direction: what needs to rise to the occasion is the system, not you.

What to do with October 1

You can go to the afternoon tea, of course, and enjoy it: the party is not the problem. The problem is the role they sometimes reserve for you in it. So, if next October 1 you feel like doing something (or any other day, since the calendar is not a requirement), there are actions that change the script. Attend the town event as a participant and not as background scenery, and take the floor if there is a turn to speak. Gently correct the possessive when it appears. Ask the town hall what has been done during the year, besides the tribute. Write that letter to the local newspaper you have been pondering for a while.

And perhaps, in between, ask yourself the question that the occasion never asks: who are you beneath the titles, including that label of "our elders" that this article has tried to peel away. The best imaginable October 1 would be one in which none were needed: one in which the town square, the council meeting, and the conversation counted on you that day, and also on the 2nd, the 3rd, and all the rest. Until then, the day exists to remind us of it. Not as applause. As a reminder that the first person does not expire.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.