Around 40, an outdated operating system kicked in.
You probably know the one — clunky, fear-based, strangely contagious. It whispers (or shouts) that getting older is a problem to solve, a decline to mask, a burden to bear.
It was uploaded from the culture, reinforced by friends, and alive and well in my own internal monologue. Most people I knew joked that “aging sucks” — and it scared me how casually we accepted it, unaware of the harm.
But something in me resisted. I had seen another way.
My mom and her friends aged with vitality, curiosity, and a sense of forward motion. I remembered how she answered whenever someone asked how it felt to be 65, then 70, then 85. She always said the same thing, simply and clearly after a moment of true reflection:
“I don’t feel any age. I feel like myself.”
That stayed with me. It lives in me now — this knowing of selfhood untouched by age.
I became a pain-in-the-ass questioner.
Really — were wrinkles inherently ugly? Was it absolutely too late for…?
Three things cracked it all open.
First, Ashton Applewhite’s TED Talk, Let’s End Ageism. It was a red-pill Matrix moment. Kaboom! I saw how deeply I’d absorbed ageist beliefs and how painful that was — for me, my friends, my clients — hell, for the world. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.
Second, I dove into research. I followed every thread, read all the books. I came to see that ageism completely misses the secret sauce of aging — the natural expansions that come from the declines everyone is so afraid of. Eventually, I co-created a conversational card game called Older: A Renewable Life and developed a theory I now call Aging Freely. Suddenly, aging wasn’t something to endure — it was a beautifully choreographed threshold into wonder, renewal, and inner freedom.
And third — surprisingly — I picked up a camera.
I started photographing hibiscus flowers: buds, blooms, withering petals, and dead ones. It flipped my world. I wasn’t falling in love with the flowers — I was falling in love with impermanence.
My heart raced. Butterflies in my stomach. I felt that deep pull because impermanence is what gives aging its depth. Its breathtaking beauty.
Each stage of the flower’s life became holy to me — a bit like being on LSD at the peak, when everything reveals its wholeness. I saw how impermanence, when embraced instead of resisted, opens a joy that lives deep in us, waiting for us.
I stopped fighting aging. And in that surrender, something inside me expanded. There was no clinging — just the fierce, loving arms of the present moment engaged with my history kindly.
It felt like coming up for air after being held underwater too long.
Then I read Chip’s Learning to Love Midlife. It felt like finding a best friend who already knew what I was thinking — and said it better.
When I reached the part about wisdom being “metabolized experience that leads to distilled compassion,” I repeated it like a mantra. A koan. I knew I had to get myself to MEA.
But I didn’t have the money.
One day, sitting on the couch staring at the MEA website — one spot left in the workshop Owning Wisdom — I had a completely irrational thought: Check your bank account.
I already knew what was in it, but I checked anyway.
That morning, five thousand dollars had arrived — from my sister’s death benefit.
I clicked out of my bank app and into the course. Signed up on the spot.
Being at MEA was like basking in life while growing fast. I honed my vision of aging freely. I found courage. I gave myself permission to take the leap of following my curiosity with my aging work.
The Hero’s Journey was skyrockets.
I saw patterns that had me swimming in molasses at times — and then the path ahead, clear and lit — with a new community that lifts me.
That’s why I now call myself an Aging Enthusiast and Wonderment Catalyst — a title I was dared to try on while at MEA.
For me, aging freely is about shedding the old code that keeps us distant from ourselves and upgrading to something more alive.
It’s an invitation into the relationship we’ve always longed for — the one aging, in its quiet wisdom, is offering us:
I am the love of my life.
To age freely is to belong to life.
To trust it.
To be with it.
To be ourselves.
So here’s my invitation:
Ask yourself the questions I pose in my TEDx Talk —
What if you had never heard anything negative about aging or death?
How might you treat yourself differently?
How might you live differently?
Let that land.
Because your answers don’t just reveal ageism.
They reveal where you are on the journey — from unconscious conditioning to conscious liberation.
From fearing aging… to aging freely.
It’s a choice.
-Kat
Kat Miller is an Aging Enthusiast and Wonderment Catalyst. Through Age Freely—her work as a speaker, counselor, podcast guest, and co-creator of Older: A Renewable Life, a conversational card game—she helps people and culture break free from internalized ageism, make friends with impermanence (a hibiscus flower started that), and move with the dance of decline and expansion. Her TEDx talk: Aging Sucks — Or Does It?