Gerascophobia
It's not uncommon to feel nervous or anxious about getting older: change is uncomfortable and strange, and society tends to celebrate and romanticize youth and the young, while subtly or overtly elbowing-aside the aged.
An ever-present, abnormally potent sense of dread focused on aging, though, is called "gerascophobia," and this is a real-deal, clinal phobia that can cause debilitating panic in those who suffer from it.
In some cases this phobia is focused on the outward, aesthetic manifestations of age: wrinkles, skin blemishes, muscle-sagging, and all the other common (and normal) indicators that one's body is no longer working through one's procreationary prime, and is instead hustling toward or through middle age or later.
Some sufferers will seek out plastic surgery and other such balms in order to feel more youthful, and to—in their minds at least—reclaim the external validation accumulated by those in their late-teens and twenties.
Others who receive this psychological diagnosis are focused on health-related issues, including the potential to fall down and break a hip, to be bed-ridden and sickly, or to die alone, tucked away and no longer catered-to by society, left behind, inadequate, useless, and/or purposeless.
These fears are not based on destiny or reality: many people remain active, healthy, socially engaged, and productive throughout their entire lives.
But it makes sense that people who see loved ones degenerate physically and then socially (perhaps as a consequence of that physical degeneration) might fear the same outcome for themselves. Pop cultural manifestations of the same may elicit a similar response.
Again, this is not an uncommon or pointless concern, but it becomes clinical when these worries overwhelm one's focus and diminish one’s capacity to do other things; when fear about the future negatively influences their experience of the present.
It's not inherently harmful to worry about the future and then make positive changes based on those concerns. It is considered to be psychologically not-good, to the point of being worthy of diagnosis, though, if those worries deplete your capacity to enjoy life.
This fear doesn’t reach phobic levels for most people, as many of us eventually come to terms with aging and its consequences, but it's a potent enough anxiety that there's a whole film genre dedicated to the “horror” it can trigger in viewers.
"Psycho-biddy" horror films, sometimes called "hagsploitation" films, focus on extreme, werewolf-like mutations suffered by women who have aged and become unhinged, and sometimes even violent as a result of that aging.
This is a very gendered genre, and gestures at the fact that in many cultures women face more pressure to maintain a veneer of youth as they age, lest they be recategorized as "hags," rather than desirable people.
The unfortunate implication here is that a woman's youthfulness (and ostensibly their visual and sexual appeal) is the only thing that makes them valuable, which reinforces the central theme of this phobia for some people: the desire to remain in good social standing so as to not be nudged to the ignored outskirts of societal approval.
Anyone can experience this fear, then, but different groups and individuals will experience it in different ways, with different details and focuses (individually relevant and socially reinforced) for their anxieties.
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