In this chapter of Elderescence, Sarnia de la Maré explores how sensation changes after midlife — including increased sensitivity to texture, sound, temperature, and pace. The essay reframes ageing not as sensory decline, but as refinement, arguing that subtle pleasures become more meaningful as the body becomes a finer, more attentive instrument.
Topics include ageing and the nervous system, sensory sensitivity, pleasure after midlife, embodied intelligence, and rethinking the ageing body in contemporary health culture.
A full transcript of the essay is available for listeners who prefer to read alongside the audio.
Chapter 2
The Sensory Body After Midlife
There is a persistent myth about ageing that insists the senses dull with time. That touch becomes blunted, sound fades, pleasure weakens, and the body gradually withdraws from the world of sensation.
Yet for many people, the opposite is true.
What changes after midlife is not the ability to feel, but the nature of feeling itself. Sensation does not disappear; it refines. The body becomes less tolerant of excess and more attuned to nuance. What is often described as decline is, in practice, a form of discernment.
In youth, the body absorbs sensation with relative ease. Noise, speed, texture, and intensity are tolerated, even sought after. The nervous system is resilient to overload, and stimulation is often equated with vitality. Loud music, crowded spaces, abrasive fabrics, hurried movement — these are endured, sometimes enjoyed, often unquestioned.
As the years pass, the body begins to edit.
Many people notice an increased sensitivity to texture, sound, temperature, and pace. Certain fabrics feel intrusive rather than neutral. Layered noise becomes exhausting. Extremes of heat or cold are more sharply registered. Rushed movement and conversation feel abrasive rather than energising.
These changes are frequently framed as loss. As signs of fragility. As evidence that the body is becoming less capable of engaging with life.
But sensitivity is not the same as weakness.
Sensitivity is information.
A body that registers more detail is not malfunctioning. It is paying closer attention. The nervous system, shaped by years of lived experience, becomes less interested in extremes and more responsive to fine distinctions — small shifts in pressure, subtle changes in temperature, the difference between tension and ease.
This refinement alters the landscape of pleasure.
After midlife, pleasure often becomes quieter but deeper. It no longer relies on spectacle or intensity. Subtle experiences — the feel of well-made fabric, the exact warmth of water, the cadence of breath during movement, the tone of a voice rather than its volume — take on greater significance.
These are not indulgences. They are calibrations.
The body is no longer chasing sensation. It is receiving it.
This is why subtle pleasures often become more meaningful with age. A single stretch may feel more nourishing than an intense workout. One piece of music may resonate more fully than an entire playlist. Stillness may offer more satisfaction than constant stimulation.
This is not boredom, nor withdrawal from life. It is resolution.
The ageing body is often described as worn — an instrument losing its reliability, its responsiveness, its strength. But many bodies after midlife behave less like damaged instruments and more like finely adjusted ones. They respond best to precision rather than force, to care rather than intensity.
A violin is not weaker than a drum. It simply requires a different touch.
So does the sensory body after midlife.
Elderescence does not deny that the body changes. It asks instead what kind of change is actually occurring. A body that requests slower pace, better materials, clearer sound, and more thoughtful movement is not asking for less life. It is asking for better signal.
The sensory body after midlife is not fading.
It is tuning itself — so that pleasure, when it arrives, arrives clearly.
