How old do you think you are !

20th of March was Age without limits action day

The crew of space shuttle Discovery mission STS-95, including John Glenn. On this flight, Glenn became the oldest person to fly in space. The nine-day mission supported a variety of research payloads, including experiments designed to investigate similarities between aging and the side effects of space flight.

Does “I am too old to learn a new sport” sound familiar ? Or maybe “too old to go dancing, to change job, to learn a new language, to make new friends, to date someone or to learn new skills ? ”

Clearly not what John Glenn at 77 was thinking whilst orbiting the earth for 9 days on the Discovery nor did such concerns prevent Diana Nyad at 64 to swim the 110 miles between Florida and Cuba in 53 consecutive hours.

So why do we “age limit”?

Ageism affects how society perceives elder people but it also affects how we see ourselves : we start to believe what we hear. Distorted age representation in the media, genuine age-related discrimination and perceived social pressure have the knack to play with our self-confidence. Interestingly, recent research has proven that self-limiting beliefs reduce a person’s life expectancy by an impressive 7.5 years.

There is also a nasty little feature we all lean towards : confirmation bias. It means we are going to seek to prove our beliefs by retaining only facts that align with them. So if we encounter a 50+ year old struggling with computers, our brain will use it to prove our prejudice that older people “struggle with technology”. The fact that Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO is 63 years old or that famous Grace Hopper…