Aging: It's all the rage

Lately it's seemed to me that aging has been claiming a growing share of professional and public attention. For example, there’s been a whole spate of interesting new research on aging. Not just biological decline (how to protect yourself against heart attack and falls) and not just fantasyland images (“You, too, can play rugby at 90!”). No, it’s actually about the average aging person, someone rather like, well, my friends and me! And on another plane entirely, a trove of movies have come out that deal with aging in a non-trivial, non-catastrophizing, non-patronizing way. This whole trend is a sign of a phenomenon my partner has long predicted: the baby boomer effect has followed us right into old age.

The baby boomer (hereafter, BB) generation is sort of like the pig moving through the snake—with the snake being a graph of the age distribution in the population—in  2010, the BBs were over 26% of the population. Given this huge demographic, it’s not surprising that whenever the BBs enter a particular life stage, that stage suddenly becomes all the rage in advertising, entertainment, research (especially that for public dissemination), self-help books, and other trend-setting / trend-following circles. Commercials plead to, sales people stalk, service providers cater to, books dissect and cajole, entertainment focuses on, and researchers enroll them.

This phenomenon has had particular salience in my life because I’m right on the front edge of the BB generation. I’m not technically one of “them”—the BB generation officially began with folks born in 1946, so I was a year too early to make the cut. But I grew up with BBs dominating all the social trends, and I benefited mightily from some of them. In truth, I was not usually aware of this. I never particularly noticed that my age group was such a focus—the fish doesn’t know it’s wet. But if I think about it, I can see that for most of my life, whatever “we” were into shaped what the culture focused on. There were just so many of us!

Still, old people are generally not so interesting in a fundamentally capitalist society—the old are a vanishing market, after all. Fashion designers don’t care much what old people like to wear or what’s comfortable for our downwardly-mobile body shape, and advertisers (except for pharmaceutical companies) seem pretty disinterested in old people, our tastes in, say, recreational activities. But enter the BB effect. For this generation, as perhaps for no previous generation of aging people, lots of concerns, commercial and otherwise, are interested in our interests. Now, it’s not that no one ever cared about old people before, but it’s different now, precisely because there are so flipping many of us.

Consider, for instance, how recently folks were complaining that there were no (zero, zip) decent movie roles for old women. (Old men could still get roles, usually starring opposite much younger female leads.) Yet in the past year or so, there have been a whole flock of movies specifically about people (including women) growing old. These include a very recent splash of stories about people heading off to some idyllic retirement home—a glamorous hotel in India (“The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”) or a retirement home for former professional musicians (“Quartet”). On the other end of the scale are starkly realistic movies like the Academy Award-nominated French film, “Amour.” Old people (including old women) also show up in meaningful roles in movies that deal only obliquely with age—Judy Dench in “Skyfall” comes to mind. The range of experiences these films depict varies from joyful and enlivening to tender, poignant, and heart breaking—much like the range of experiences that actual old people have. Again, it’s not that movies never before depicted the lives of old people (think “On Golden Pond,” “Harold and Maude,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “The Trip to Bountiful,” “Away from Her,” “Bucket List”). It’s the density of them now. “Marigold Hotel” had barely faded to BlueRay when its clone, “Quartet,” and its counterpoint, “Amour,” appeared.

Not to be outdone, researchers also have us BBs in their sights. As in art, this work seems no longer to pack us into neat cartons (demented or extraordinary) but to actually comprehend the varieties of experiences that aging people have. A couple of intriguing recent studies:

1.       Cohorts and well-being

Here’s the most interesting study I’ve come across in a while. OK, one of them. It’s about the impact of cohorts on the experience of aging. In this research, “cohort” refers to a group of folks who share important experiences in common. Your age cohort, for instance, is folks born around the same time you were. The baby boomers are a cohort; we share a set of social and historical experiences that have influenced how our lives have progressed. Geographic location, economic status, race/ethnicity, sex/gender, sexual orientation, economic or educational  status … all of these things can influence who constitutes your cohort under particular circumstances.

Not surprisingly, different cohorts have different experiences that might influence how they age. Imagine, for instance, a study of whether older people are more frugal than younger people. You could study groups of, say, people in their 40s, 60s, and 80s and conclude from your results that older (80s) people are more frugal. But that would ignore the fact that people now in their 80s were young children during the Great Depression. They grew up in an era when frugality was a stark necessity. If you concluded that it was age that made them skinflints, you’d be missing the point. Or at least one of the points.

So, the folks who did this study I’m talking about now were curious about widely conflicting findings about age and psychological well-being. Basically, some studies have found that folks’ sense of well-being is fairly stable across age, others have found that it increases, with a slight decline in old age, and still others have reported a U-shaped trend, with relatively high levels of well-being in younger and older ages and a drop in mid-life. The folks who did this study wondered if cohort differences might be muddying the results. So they teased out the cohort effects—i.e., the time and circumstances under which people were born and grew to old age—and the result was fascinating.  

They found that all of the cohorts showed increasing well-being as they aged. But there were notable differences between cohorts: cohorts that are now older started with relatively lower levels of well-being, so their increased happiness still left them short of that experienced by people in younger cohorts. So, although everyone got happier with age, people who were born later started from a level of well-being that was markedly higher than the starting point of earlier cohorts. Their early advantage likely came from many sources: better health care, better educational opportunities, perhaps less economic or social stress early in life, etc. The amazing thing (to me) is that researchers haven’t sorted this out before. But that’s another story, all about funding and “publish or perish” environments, and such. Another time.

2.       Successful aging

This one was another tweak on usual methodologies that led to interesting new findings. Most studies of “successful” aging have used concrete measures that assess things like freedom from chronic disease and physical disability, along with measures of intellectual functioning and social engagement. But one group of researchers wondered about how older people themselves feel about the success of their aging process—noting that they might be in a better position to decide what constitutes success, factoring in their unique personal circumstances and particular goals. (Duh!)

Their results were really interesting. First, they found that older people didn’t think perfect physical health was either necessary or sufficient for successful aging. Far more important in their holistic sense of their own lives were psychological factors like optimism, resilience, well-being, and the absence of depression. In fact, resilience and the absence of depression were as important in their judgments of their own successful aging as was physical health.

Here’s one really intriguing finding: one of the factors most strongly associated with self-rated successful aging was old age. That is to say, older old people rated their aging as more successful than did younger old people. I can think of a few possible interpretations of this: When you get really old, that in itself indicates that your aging was “successful.” Or, alternatively, if you experience your life as personally successful, you tend to yourself better and therefore live longer. Or, resilience, optimism, and an absence of depression provide a buttress against the potential risks of aging. Or, people who live longer also have generally better lives and feel like they are aging successfully. That is, neither one causes the other; instead, both long life and a sense of well-being come from some third factor. Or maybe all of those play a role. Anyway, it's a striking finding, in my book.

Wow, this got longer than I meant it too. Especially considering that my main point was made in the first paragraph: the baby boomers have changed society as they have moved through it. Now that we’re old, society gets to follow us here, too. In the best of worlds, this will turn out to be valuable for the generations that follow us.