Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Five Myths About Aging You Can't Afford to Believe
If we're going to develop a clear-eyed view of our futures, as a prelude to making old age better and longer-lasting, we're going to have to get rid of as many myths about aging as we can—and there are plenty. In fact, there is a very good chance that much of what you think you know about aging is wrong.
The entire aging process is fraught with unappealing stereotypes and discouraging myths, probably because few of us see aging up close until we're fully immersed in it ourselves. American society is so age segregated that the few older people we do know are usually our grandparents or elder relatives—a small and decidedly unrepresentative sample whose very status as close family often blurs the nuances of their personalities and their lives. We often appreciate just the roles they fill, not the people they are.
After all, how many of us have subtle and complex understandings of the older people in our families until we're older ourselves? I certainly didn't ask a lot of questions of my older relatives when I was young. I loved them, but didn't really try to get to know them as individuals. For their part, older relatives may not spend much time disclosing the details of their personal lives to the younger generation; a family's focus is usually on the young ones. Until my Aunt Mabel was in her nineties, I assumed she had been single all of her life. In fact, she had had a short and turbulent marriage when she was young woman. Until I was middle-aged, I didn't know her sister had been found dead in a hotel room, and I still don't know the circumstances that surrounded her death. I didn't know that my grandfather was the person in his small Nebraska town to whom everyone turned whenever they needed any sort of appliance or radio repaired. The man apparently had an instinct for electricity. Maybe it is no coincidence that his son, my father, grew up to study electromagnetic fields. But I didn't make these connections until I was aging myself.
In the absence of personal knowledge, we may expect all older people to be cut from the same cloth as the few we happen to know. I suspect that this is why aging stereotypes tend to run to one-dimensional polar opposites, either based on happy times at holidays with beloved older family members, or on negative interactions with people who seem extremely irritable or sick. Worse, when we imagine what we'll be like ourselves when we're older, we tend to extrapolate from our limited family experiences, and that's not always a pretty picture—it depends on whether your particular Aunt Betty baked cookies or had dementia. Time after time, I've given talks about aging and people in the audience tell me either that they believe a particular finding because their grandmothers are just like that, or they refuse to believe it, because their grandmothers aren't like that at all.
Few of us see the scope, the range, or the complexities of older lives. For purely selfish reasons, this is problematic because it makes it hard to know where we're headed ourselves, and to consider the vast range of possibilities ahead. The truth of it is that older people's life paths are anything but binary; there's a good deal of shading between saintly granny and sour grump. Their lives are also anything but bland. In fact, in terms of personality and life experience, older people are the most diverse part of the population. My dad likes to say that all babies are alike—as infants, they have little opportunity to differentiate. But with every decade of life, every twist in the life path makes people more individual, less likely to have been shaped by the exact same set of experiences as anyone else. Consequently, as a person grows older, chronological age tells us less and less about what they will be like. It makes no sense to embark on discussions about aging societies by reducing older populations to their lowest common denominators.
As a practical matter for people who want to plan happy, healthy long lives for themselves, or for a society that wants to engineer them for everyone, these myths don't just seed doubts, they are impediments to change. They create worries that cloud the imagination and blunt hope, even if they never pan out. They create social stresses and divisions between generations that don't really need to exist. They promote anachronistic expectations about old age that, as a species and a society, we have simply outgrown, and that are out of step with the way real people live today. Much of the time, they paint such a grim picture of the future that we dread thinking about it, never mind planning for it!
Let's start by getting rid of five of the worst myths:
* The "Misery Myth" that older people are sad and lonely
* The "DNA Is Destiny Myth" that your whole fate is foretold in your genes
* The "Work Hard, Retire Harder Myth" that we should rush to exit the workforce
* The "Scarcity Myth" that older people are a drain on the world's resources
* The "We Age Alone Myth" that how we fare in old age is entirely an individual matter, and not a function of society Myth #1: Older People Are Miserable The biggest myth on the menu is that older people are inevitably unhappy, lonely, and dejected. If you've been dreading the passage of time because you worry that your happiest days are behind you, take heart. I've spent the last thirty years investigating the psychology of aging, and my research consistently shows that, in terms of emotion, the best years come late in life.
With the exception of dementia-related diseases, which by definition have organic roots, mental health generally improves with age. Older people as a group suffer less from depression, anxiety, and substance abuse than their younger counterparts. In everyday life, they experience fewer negative emotions than people in their twenties and thirties—the people we stereotypically think of as the most happy—yet just as many positive ones. Moreover, older people manage negative emotions better than younger people do. When negative feelings arise, they don't linger the way they do in the young. Many people, even social scientists, are shocked by these findings. They challenge our implicit understanding of happiness, which is that it flows from the esoteric qualities of youth: health, beauty, power. But if these naturally recede with age, why are older people so content?
This has been dubbed the paradox of aging, but I maintain there is more logic than paradox. The answer lies in something we might commonly call life perspective; a more technical term that I and my colleagues have introduced is "socioemotional selectivity." I'll discuss our theory about this concept in greater depth in chapter 4, but the crux of this idea is that human beings are unique in their ability to measure the passage of time against a sort of internal "life span clock," keeping track of where they are in the life cycle. When we are young, time seems expansive, and we focus on acquiring knowledge, seeking novel experiences, and enmeshing ourselves in a large network of friends and colleagues. As we age, we sense the clock winding down and our attention shifts to savoring the time that is left, focusing instead on depth of experience, closeness, a smaller set of goals, and a highly selected group of loved ones.
This change in perspective seems to bring with it a new way of evaluating what is worth one's time, attention, worry, or wrath. For many, this translates into a greater tendency to let go of life's negatives, and to focus on the positives. My mother managed to nail this perspective with a single sentence in an e-mail she sent me last week: "Still having terrible winter weather, but isn't that full moon beautiful?"
For most older people, simple pleasures expand in importance. Sticky interpersonal situations don't seem worth the trouble. Good times are cherished, and there is greater recognition that bad times will pass. People are more likely to forgive when time horizons are limited. Even the very experience of emotion changes with age; feelings grow richer and more complex.
Indeed, social circles shrink over the years, but it's not an indicator of loneliness. Usually this shedding of connections is felt as a beneficial change, as people distill their social roster to their most valued friends, weeding out the coworkers and casual acquaintances who took up so much time and effort before. Older people report being more satisfied with their social relationships than younger people do, particularly prizing their relationships with their children and other younger relatives.
Marriages deepen, too, starting around the time that the last of the couple's children leaves the nest; in fact, many couples reach honeymoon levels of satisfaction when the kids move out. One of my favorite findings about long-term marriages is that even unhappily married couples report that, after many years together, they are happier than they used to be. It's actually the relatively early years of marriage, particularly the points at which the kids are either toddlers or adolescents, that take the biggest toll on marital contentment.
Mind you, it's not that young and middle-aged married couples don't enjoy parenting or love their children—they do. Rather, children tend to produce tensions between mothers and fathers. Young parents suddenly have less time for enjoyable activities with each other and find themselves in frequent conflicts over how to care for the baby. Even in homes where the parents strive to be egalitarian, a more gendered division of labor arises. Fathers may feel left out of the close bond that forms almost instantly between mother and child, and feel pressured to work increasingly hard outside of the home to provide for the new family. Stay-at-home mothers often feel burdened and left out of the world.
Once the children are grown and launched from the home, couples reconnect. I try not to smile when the college students I teach at Stanford express concern about how their parents are doing now that they're gone. I find it endearing that they worry about how their parents will ever manage without them, but I gently reassure them that "empty nest syndrome" is atypical. I can put it less gently here: children make parents very happy_._._._when they're living somewhere else.
In addition, the predictability and emotional support of a decades-long relationship offers its own comforts. Older couples report that they argue less, either because they've resolved their most troubling differences or learned to work around them. Grandparenting, which combines many of the joys of being around children without responsibility for their constant care, is an additional source of satisfaction.
If you're wondering which age group is actually the least happy, it's the twentysomethings. Despite being flush with youthful vigor and opportunity, they are the most depressed and stressed out of any age group. Part of this stems from their own perspective on where they are in the human life cycle—as young adults, with oceans of time in front of them, they are constantly faced with decisions to make about their futures, from who they will be to what they will do. Worse, they're acutely sensitive to what everyone else thinks about them and their choices.
You might think that such an open field of choices is a gift, but it is more commonly stressful, frequently overwhelming. People feel worse when the future seems diffuse, and better once they have made a choice or set a goal and started to work toward it. "How can I make this marriage work?" is, in some ways, a more graspable question than "Will I ever find the perfect mate?" Older people have reassurances that the twentysomethings do not; they've already made their major life choices, and they worry less about what others think of them. It's not that they're hardened, it's that they're more selective about whose opinions matter, handpicking only a few to esteem, rather than fretting about how they are perceived by everyone they encounter.
This is not to say that old age is an epoch of unrelenting warmth and good cheer; it has its share of hardships and disappointments. It's just that by the time people get there, they're more attuned to the sweetness of life than to its bitterness.
Myth #2: DNA Is Destiny Many people believe that aging is like Russian roulette: something will eventually get you, so you might as well live dangerously—drink, smoke, eat frosting straight from the can. In theory, this wouldn't be a terrible modus operandi if everyone was guaranteed a painless, instantaneous death: One minute you're living the high life, the next you're gone in a blaze of glory. Live fast, die young, right? It would certainly solve the Social Security problem.
But in reality, there are worse fates—with more lingering suffering—than death. One of the paradoxes of American longevity, at least of the way it's experienced now, is that medical science has become powerful enough to rescue people from the brink of death but remains largely impotent when it comes to erasing the effects of the lifetime of bad habits that brought them there. Once you've hovered near death's door, even the "saved" rarely return to a fully healthy state. I often wonder what would happen if people considered the idea that they might not die because of their risky health habits, but instead suffer for a very long time. My aunt Mabel, for example, had emphysema. I was surprised because I'd never known her to smoke. "How much?" I asked when she told me, at age ninety-two, that she'd been a smoker. "Pack a day, after I quit," she quipped. Yet, even though she really had stopped smoking more than three decades earlier, she was still being punished for it with every breath.
People tend to write off death as a consequence of dangerous behavior, because at least then suffering ends. Yet from a quality-of-life standpoint, the key factor isn't really when you die—the point at which you finally touch down on the other side of existence. It's how long you spend on final approach, circling the eternal airport. Considered this way, the most deleterious effect of extreme obesity caused by a poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle may not be sudden death from a heart attack, but rather decades of fatigue, breathing difficulties, and disability from conditions like diabetes and arthritis. Dangerous behaviors like drunk driving certainly can be lethal, but they can also lead to paralysis or chronic pain. Even lesser side effects of unhealthy habits add up when you realize they could be bothering you well into your eighties or nineties. Imagine half a century of smoker's cough.
Yet trying to acquire habits that promote long life can seem like a lot of work for a very uncertain reward. After all, people interested in boosting their longevity have been bombarded with an often contradictory list of directives to follow. We've been told to avoid fats_._._._except for omega-3 fats. We're supposed to drink red wine_._._._but not too much red wine. For a while we were supposed to take vitamin E capsules_._._._but now maybe not. On top of that there are the seemingly endless exhortations about good habits to adopt: try yoga, meditate, exercise your brain, switch to whole grains, eat foods rich in antioxidants. These are all fine ideas, and you can tell pretty quickly how these measures impact your well-being today. But how do you know if they're adding years to your life?
