5 Things Men Fear Most About Aging

It starts with sex and goes downhill from there.

By Paula Spencer Scott, Caring.com senior editor

Worried about getting old? Who isn't -- except perhaps those who are already unmistakably there. Survey after survey shows the elderly are more content with life, less depressed, and less fearful of death than the young.

"I'm a lot more sanguine and comfortable about aging at 76 than I was at 56," says George Vaillant, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who codirects its Study of Adult Development.

In the meantime, though? Guys in midlife harbor plenty of fears when they peer ahead. (Women have their own, slightly different set of aging fears).

Among men's top fears about getting older:

Humor : Got Milk?

There once was a 94-year-old rabbi in the 1890's in a small shtetle in Poland whose worn-out body began to surrender. The shtetle doctor prescribed for him a shot of whiskey three times a day, to relax him.

However, not to be lured into worldly pleasures, he declined. But the doctor heard that the rabbi loved milk. So he instructed the rabbi’s wife to spike his milk three times a day.

Eventually, the elderly rabbi approached his final hour. As several of the townsfolk gathered around him at his bedside, the townsfolk asked if there were any words of wisdom the rabbi wanted to leave to the people in the town.

"Oh, yes," he replied. "Never sell that cow!"


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