At 26, I’m still largely untouched by the wear and tear that life inevitably delivers. And yet, I’m inundated with reminders that my body is, supposedly, already on the decline. On my last birthday, the first text I received was from my dermatologist offering a discount on wrinkle-prevention treatments.

But the reality of aging I’ve witnessed tells a different story. My grandfather raced motorcycles until he was 75, and my grandmother has walked five miles every morning for as long as I’ve been on the planet. They’ve had their share of aging-related issues, but in my family, getting older means reconciling with discomfort without losing joy—and they’re not alone. Older adults consistently report higher well-being than younger ones, largely due to better emotional control and focusing on the positive.

Still, when I imagine trying to maintain my characteristic enthusiasm in the face of creaky joints or blurry vision, I can’t say I’m eager to step up to the plate. That’s why, when I heard about a suit that simulated being in the body of a much older adult, I wanted to take it for a spin.

The Sarasota Aging Sensitivity Suit (SAAS), also called the “empathy suit,” traces its roots to MIT more than two decades ago, when researchers created a suit that mimicked the musculoskeletal and sensory decline of aging. A documentary on the subject called Fast Forward was screened locally in 2021. Fittingly, Sarasota County is Florida’s first age-friendly community, as designated by the World Health Organization and the American Association of Retired Persons, and it has its own Aging System Coordination program to ensure older adults remain informed, engaged and connected. The aging suit helps the community understand aging by simulating a range of age-related conditions. While most people won’t face all of these challenges at once—at least to such an extreme degree—many do, particularly those without access to quality healthcare or the opportunity to take preventative measures earlier in life. Since 2023, the suit has been used everywhere from Art Center Sarasota to Suncoast Technical College by everyone from little kids to nurse practitioners.

The “empathy suit” caretakers were enthusiastic to let me try it, and the Senior Friendship Centers—a nonprofit space where older adults take classes from AI to Zumba—was my first stop. A trio of county representatives helped me suit up and made sure I didn’t faceplant while navigating an octogenarian-ish body. After all, most people have a lifetime to practice.

I was entering the world of someone decades my senior, but with my limbs starfished as they dressed me, I couldn’t help but feel like a toddler being readied for school. “Each layer adds a decade,” Kelly Ward, the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) fall prevention coordinator, told me. My back bowed beneath resistance cords; my body felt stiff, insensate. With goggles blurring my vision and hearing dulled with earplugs, I realized the suit doesn’t just slow you down—it scrambles your sense of self. I felt forcibly introverted, my mind straining to process the dulled stimuli through a body that had become terrible at translating it.

Suited up, I marched into the Active Older Adults fitness class, one of more than 75 events the center offers weekly. As Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” played in the background, I struggled to follow along with the rhythmic movements. Focusing on the instructor’s muddled narration and the person ahead—barely distinguishable through the macular degeneration-simulating goggles—I did bicep curls and stretched into seated half-moons. Sue Berger, aging system coordinator for Sarasota County, asked asked if I needed a break. Stubborn and now self-conscious about how much I was visibly sweating, I refused.

Afterwards, an attendee approached to ask what it was like inside the getup. I ignored my Fitbit’s relentless buzzing—still convinced I was mid-cardio—and, between quick breaths, explained that the goggles left the pink of her shirt visible but her face unreadable. Another woman, Gloria Lowe, overheard us and wanted me to know my description was accurate. She’s been living with macular degeneration for 19 years. “I’m blessed to be able to function, but I’m legally blind,” she told me. Lowe, whose mother and sister were both centenarians, says places like the Senior Friendship Centers—and Siri—keep her independent. In the absence of facial expressions and body language, which research suggests make up over half of effective communication, I had felt isolated and uncertain. Lowe, however, was articulate and responsive, with a warmth that immediately calmed me—something my Fitbit was still telling me I needed.

Back at my office, I attempted the stairs, grateful for the banisters but wishing the steps had contrast stripes on their ends to compensate for my lack of visibility. Knowing I was near the bottom but unsure of the final step, my foot searched cautiously in front of me like a makeshift cane.

Main Street offered no mercy, either. I found myself begrudging the lack of benches and cursing the short crosswalk timers, knowing that without my guides—and even with a pair of less restrictive goggles on—crossing safely would have been impossible. I was longing for my final stop, a place I had chosen knowing it would be antidotal to the day’s tolls.

The Bay Park sits across North Tamiami Trail, a sanctuary amidst the hustle of our city’s core. Here, with the cushioned walkway hugging the mangrove bayou and the wide promenade to the shoreline, I could finally move with some confidence, waddling determinedly to the water. Everything softened—the tension in my shoulders, the whirl of my mind trying to decipher the muddled input from my environment. The day’s efforts gave way to easy exchanges with curious parkgoers and a sense that my body could, at last, let go.

By the time I peeled off the suit after six hours—hair sticky on my neck, back beginning the ache it would carry for days—I wasn’t thinking about decline, but about adaptation. The people I’d met that morning were more physically and mentally engaged than many of my peers. And despite the chronic conditions and daily discomforts that come with aging, they were enjoying themselves. The joy they carried felt rich and deliberate. What had felt at the outset like a glimpse into limitation revealed itself instead as a lesson in recalibration of both body and expectation.

In a place like Sarasota, where generations so often orbit one another without intersecting, that recalibration feels especially urgent. Intergenerational interactions foster understanding, compassion and strengthen communities. Maybe that’s the invitation embedded in all of this: not just to experience what it feels like to grow older, but to actually spend time with those who have. If aging is inevitable, then so, too, is the opportunity to understand it better, together.