Dispelling age-old
misconceptions
BY LAURA CARSTENSEN
It is, arguably, the most
important adaptive change the human species has ever
witnessed: the creation of old age. In less than a
century, approximately 30 years of life have been added
to our life cycle. Old age has become, for the first time
in the history of the human species, a usual stage in
life.
Yet, old age is a time in
life that few people look forward to. Most of us are
uneasy about it and this uneasiness is fueled by alarming
statistics that appear regularly in our newspapers and on
our television sets. We have come to associate old age
with dementia, poverty, physical frailty, depletion of
Medicare funds, indeed, bankruptcy of the federal
government.
I will not deny that old
age as we know it presents formidable challenges to
individuals and societies. But I also argue in part
because old age is new that it is a life stage cloaked
in myths and misconceptions. Simply put, much of what we
hear about old age is not true, that it is all and only
about loneliness, depression, intergenerational wars.
Like every stage in life, old age does have its problems
in fact, I'd agree with the popular contention that
there are more problems associated with old age than
earlier life stages. However, a lot of so-called
knowledge about old age is actually speculation. We know
less about the last 30 years in life than we know about
the first five. Human culture has created old age and now
it is essential that we create a new culture to support
it.
There are three
"tacit" myths about aging:
- There is a fountain
of youth, or the search for eternal youth and the
avoidance of death.
- Aging is all downhill
and all differences are interpreted as age
decrements.
- c Gender doesn't make
a difference. (Most discussions about aging are
gender blind. Societal practices place women at
greater risk for virtually all of the problems
associated with old age.)
There is nothing you can
do to stop the aging process. But old age can be an
interesting and emotionally rewarding stage of life if
social structural barriers are lifted and we create a
culture of old age. Few have escaped stories about the
graying of America. The number of older members of our
society is growing faster than ever before in human
history. In 1910, 4 percent of the population was over
the age of 65; today that figure is about 12 percent; by
2030 more than one-fifth of the population will be over
65.
To be blunt, in earlier
times it didn't really matter what old age was like. Now
it matters to all of us, young and old alike. The
nature of old age holds relevance for the functioning of
entire societies. The demographic changes we are
witnessing will affect families, work, health care,
education and public policies. Some changes will be
negative, some positive just think of the reduction in
crime and sexually transmitted diseases!
Why this change? In a
word: culture.
Finding biological
explanations often rooted in evolution is hot these days
in the social sciences biological change as primary,
with culture as a thin veneer. But in one short century
we have added 30 years to life expectancy. Evolution
pales next to this advance. It has been engineered
through science, through collectively shared
understanding of the spread of disease and collective
efforts to improve sanitation, limit the number of
offspring and prevent disease in our children. It is not
that we are living longer and longer once we are adults.
Rather, the vast bulk of this change is due to a dramatic
reduction in infant mortality. In 1900, half of all
newborn infants died before the age of 5. Today the vast
majority of infants born in this country will live out
their maximal life spans.
Myth #1: The
fountain of youth
Human beings are
distinguished from other animals in that they anticipate
their own death. Throughout recorded history we have
searched for that fountain of youth. The search continues
today under the label of "life extension." A
huge number of people are taking megadoses of vitamins,
striving for very low body weight and consuming the
services of cosmetic and surgical industries aimed at
staving off the aging process. Many more of us share the
feeling, just under the surface, that if you work at it
hard enough, you can avoid old age, you can stay young.
Let me quote Woody Allen: "To Americans, death is an
option."
In recent years, as
marketers have begun to recognize the demographic
changes, they have begun to portray images of old age in
which older people are vital and active. Long-held images
that showed frail elderly are changing overnight and
suggesting that youth can be preserved indefinitely.
There are many positive
consequences of this portrayal. There is just one
problem: If successful aging is defined as maintaining
youth and living long, we all fail. There is no good
evidence that life can be extended beyond a fixed limit
that we are now approaching. Experimental studies in
which selective inbreeding has been used to develop
particularly long-lived strains of animals have failed,
usually producing instead strains with shorter life
expectancies (something to do with limited variability).
Human studies show that the elimination of diseases
improves the quality of life but hasn't added much in the
way of years to life in adulthood. Rather, it appears the
elimination of the leading killers in old age will simply
reduce the variety in the ways that death occurs.
Subsequently, many
scholars and advocates of the elderly are beginning to
fear that these new positive portrayals of old age may be
as pernicious as the established negative ones because
they apply middle-age standards to old people. When
people become sick, or simply experience reliable
cognitive changes we see in old age, they are in danger
of feeling that they failed by virtue of having survived
into old age.
We are all going to
experience some of the declines associated with aging. We
are all going to get old and we are all going to die.
That's not a threat. The knowledge that our years are
limited may be what makes life precious.
Myth #2: Aging is
all downhill
There is an overwhelming
tendency in the sciences to document the deficiencies and
to focus on the problems associated with later life, to
chronicle the "wrinkles" of age. Young and old
are compared and where there are differences, we assume
there is decrement. Aging people today all of us
anticipate decline.
There is nothing wrong
with studying problems of old age. Compelling evidence
suggests that we will experience declines in physical and
sensory functioning (hearing, vision, taste), as well as
cognitive abilities (perceptual speed, memory, verbal
fluency). Those are obviously decremental changes.
However, if we focus only
on the problems associated with aging, we will not
identify potential strengths. Restricting empirical
questions exclusively to ones concerned with loss will
inevitably obscure gains. As a society, we cannot afford
to ignore the tremendous resources that older people
offer.
I believe that there is
considerable growth that occurs with age and we social
scientists overlook it too frequently. We overlook the
gains because we are so focused on loss. Here is an
example from my own work: The phenomenon that first
captured my attention was the drop in social contact
observed in older adults. Any way you cut it, older
people interact with others less than younger people.
This is the most reliable
phenomenon in social gerontology you get it if you
follow the same group of people over time; you get it if
you compare age cohorts.
At first I, like others,
explored "deficit models." Were older people
depressed and thus withdrawn, socially anxious,
cognitively impaired? Lots of hypotheses and none were
supported. In fact, in one study in a nursing home we
found that the people with the best cognitive performance
on our tests interacted with others the least.
In talking with older
people, I kept hearing the same comment. Asked about
their social lives, people said that they "didn't
have time for those people." I never heard older
people say that they didn't have time for close family or
friends, but they said regularly that they had no
interest in exploring new friendships and social
partners, because they didn't have time. Some of these
people were obviously not busy especially those living
in nursing homes. Then I realized that when they referred
to time, they meant time in life.
I began to consider the
idea that older people were taking a proactive role in
their social worlds, pruning it so that only the most
important people remained. Over the years, and after many
studies, I developed a theory called "socioemotional
selectivity," which argues that under time
constraints, emotional aspects of life are illuminated.
Goals shift from those aimed at novelty or information
seeking to those related to emotional meaning. According
to the theory, older people are not suffering from
limited opportunities to pursue social relations with
others. Rather, they are investing carefully and
strategically.
More recently, we have
been focusing specifically on age differences in
emotional experience. We postulate that the complexity of
emotion deepens under conditions that limit time. And
because age is inextricably correlated with time left in
life, age is associated with changes in emotion. Even the
most mundane of daily events elicits powerful emotions.
That good-bye kiss to a spouse as you leave for work. The
visit from a friend you haven't seen in many years.
Events that at one time were simple and straightforward
now evoke mixtures of emotions happiness, sadness,
joy, fear and pride all in the same moment. We suspect
that emotional experience in later life may be richer
than ever before in life.
Myth #3: Aging is
gender blind
It is extremely important
to raise questions of gender whenever we discuss aging,
yet only rarely is gender mentioned at all. On the
contrary, age is presumed to be the great equalizer
men and women, rich and poor, regardless of background,
escape old age only through premature death.
It is true that both women
and men suffer the biological deterioration that advanced
age brings, and both males and females face ageist
stereotypes and misconceptions. Both males and females
experience loss with age. However, gender remains a
central feature of aging.
The world of the very old
is primarily a world of women. On average, women live 7
years longer than men. At 65, women outnumber men by 100
to 83; by 85, women outnumber men by 100 to 39. The
over-85 age segment is the fastest growing segment of the
population, generally across ethnic lines.
This could suggest that
women fare better than men in old age. In fact, however,
women are at higher risk than men for most of the
negative consequences of aging. Even the difference in
life expectancy provides questionable benefits.
Differences among the very old (over 85) are especially
notable. One recent study found that at that age twice as
many women as men were doing poorly, based on a composite
that included subjective well-being, sensory functioning,
illness, education and ability to engage in autonomous
functioning.
Women are also more likely
than men to suffer from chronic diseases and more likely
to live alone, to be institutionalized and to live in
poverty. Twenty-five percent of elderly Caucasian women
are poor. Among ethnic minorities, poverty is far more
widespread. Over half of black and Hispanic elderly
females either are not living with family or are living
at or below the poverty level.
One principal contributor
to the problems women face is marriage and its likely
consequence widowhood. Widowhood is usual for women.
Most women outlive their husbands mainly because women
marry older men. The average length of widowhood is 15
years. While 95 percent of people marry at some point in
their lives, by 65 only 35 percent of women are married;
by 85, 21 percent are married. And once widowed, women
are far less likely to remarry than men.
The problem is not the
psychological loss. The majority of widowed women adjust,
psychologically, notably well.
Rather, it involves the
process of becoming widowed.
Three explanations
underlie the disadvantages for married women. First,
throughout life, wives usually earn less than husbands,
so their own retirement income is less. They are also the
logical candidates for career compromises when the need
arises. Second, because part-time work rarely involves
retirement benefits, those compromises reduce the
likelihood that women will accrue private pension
benefits to supplement their already lower Social
Security income. Older women frequently retire from the
workforce in order to care for ailing spouses, parents or
siblings. Consequently, women receive approximately 24
percent less than elderly men in Social Security benefits
and have less private supplemental income. The Social
Security system penalizes women for the very work
patterns our society encourages because of the enormous
benefits they yield for husbands and children. Third,
health care costs and legal requirements for the spending
down of assets before government assistance kicks in are
the final blows. Even middle-class couples face these
problems. So toward the end of life, we are presented
with a striking irony. In many ways, women and men grow
similar in later life. Yet due to the culmination of
societal practices over a lifetime, they face maximally
different lives.
The labeling of older
women as a "special" or "needy"
population is problematic. Older women, by and large,
cope reasonably well. The problem is not a needy
population. Rather, the problem stems from massive
structural inequities.
Imagine the possibilities
if we create a culture informed by and supportive of old
age. It is essential that we ascertain the real gains and
real losses associated with aging. We cannot do this by
denying old age. We cannot do it by focusing only on
problems. We cannot do it by ignoring who old people
really are. Gender is central. Young women need to know
that whatever their marital status in middle age, they
will probably be single in old age. Women need to know
that exclusive dedication to nuclear families will not
serve them well at the end of life. Discussions of
retirement planning cannot be gender blind. Women and
men, but especially women, need to recognize in middle
age the importance of friends in old age to make sure
that they are there when they need them.
If we planned and prepared
for old age like we plan and prepare for middle age, we
could create a world in which the last stage of life
could be the most emotionally meaningful stage in life.
It should be the time in life when people have the
perspective that only the passage of time can afford to
assess life fully, to appreciate that bad times pass and
good times are precious, to reap the benefits of
relationships that have spanned a lifetime and to build
lives that fully reward every day. SR
Laura Carstensen,
director of the Institute for Research on Women and
Gender and associate chair of the psychology department,
specializes in research on aging.
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