Psychotherapist Matthew Dempsey is back and in his latest video he's talking about why gay men, and also women for that matter, fear aging.
The root cause, Dempsey explains, is that we live in a culture driven by, more than anything, consumerism and marketing. The emergence of youth culture and a youth market meant that companies and corporations could easily identify who they wanted to sell things to. Which meant they could figure out a way to target buyers and turn a profit more easily.
The problem with youth-obsessed culture is that we unwittingly internalize the message that youth is the most important thing in life. Dempsey explains that we often find ourselves buying into the notion that, “When you're younger, you're more valuable”, because “it's where more attention and money goes.” The end result? “[We] want to reflect what we believe is most valuable because it's just human nature. We want to fit in. We want to belong. We want to know that we connect with others and that other people will see us valuable too.”
PREVIOUSLY: Matthew Dempsey and Broderick Hunter Find Out If ‘Masculinity' Makes a Man More Attractive – WATCH
Of course, Dempsey calls bulls*t on the idea that youth is the most important thing in life. The way to counterbalance the instinct to devalue ourselves as we age, he says, is to focus on “our passions, the relationships in our lives, because those are the things that actually make us light up so we can then cast away the dark fears that we're going to somehow age out of the ability to be loved.”
Watch, below.
