Self-Centered Aging versus Selfless Aging

When I was a teenager stepping slowly into adulthood, I often wondered what truly happens when one becomes old. Life, as I observed it, appeared to follow a fixed and relentless trajectory—education, job, marriage, family, possessions. Alongside this ran an unspoken but powerful current of comparison: first with classmates and colleagues, later with cousins, siblings, and finally with those closest to us. The race never paused. There was no finish line, only shifting reference points.

During this long and breathless run, I held onto a quiet hope. I believed that with age and experience, people would eventually see the futility of endlessly amassing wealth and status. I imagined that maturity would bring a widening of vision—that people would recognize real wealth in humane relationships, empathy, and a deeper connection with the world beyond themselves.

What I witnessed instead was deeply unsettling.

Many of those I observed—people entering their sixties, seventies, eighties, and even nineties—did not grow more open or expansive. Quite the opposite. Their world began to shrink. Their emotional universe narrowed to their own children and grandchildren,that too selective, and often even that circle was governed by control, possession, and expectation rather than generosity. The curiosity for life, society, and humanity at large seemed to recede. This reversal shocked me. It dismantled assumptions I had quietly carried for years and filled me with an unexpected fear about my own old age.

This experience stood in stark contrast to what Bertrand Russell so beautifully described about aging:

“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.

An individual human existence should be like a river—small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”

 What I see unfolding around me feels like the exact reverse of this vision.

Instead of widening, interests become narrower. Instead of ego dissolving, it becomes more rigid and inflated. Instead of merging with life, existence contracts. Old age, which should have been a calm widening into wisdom, often resembles a drying pond—still, stagnant, enclosed, burdened with ego and self-centeredness. The river does not meet the sea; it evaporates in isolation.

This raises a deeply troubling question: why does aging, which should soften us, often harden us instead? Is it fear—of irrelevance, of death, of loss of control? Is it a lifetime spent equating self-worth with accumulation and comparison, leaving nothing else to fall back on when the body weakens? Or is it society itself, which glorifies productivity and possession but offers no moral or emotional education for letting go?

If aging does not teach us humility, compassion, and universality, then what is it teaching us at all?

This quiet transformation—from striving youth to self-centred old age—feels like a tragedy not just for individuals, but for humanity itself. Elders should have been our bridges to wisdom, our living reminders of impermanence and grace. Instead, many become prisoners of their own shrinking identities.

What is happening to this beautiful world, and to its most reflective phase of life?

And more importantly—how do we ensure that our own river does not dry up before it meets the sea?