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Changing our perceptions of aging

Two pieces -- from very different perspectives -- about efforts to change the way we think about the elderly.

In the first, Portfolio's "Odd Numbers" blogger Zubin Jeleveh looks at a recent working paper that attempts to define "elderly" not by number of years lived, but rather by mortality risk and remaining life expectancy. By the standard definition, the number of elderly people in the US will roughly double by 2030, representing one out of every five people in the population. But if you define elderly as having a 1.5 percent and above risk of mortality, the number of people in the category would grow by only 20 percent. The bottom line here is that if the average life span continues to stretch, maybe 65 really does become the new 55. And that would have all sorts of implications about the way we might view older workers and programs such as Social Security.

The second piece follows the Smart Set's Jason Wilson as he goes through a program intended to increase empathy with the elderly:

I’m told that my tribulations are common, and I’ll likely be labeled a complainer around the senior center. Aging is not for sissies, I’m told. But here’s the big difference. Twenty-five minutes ago I was a relatively fit 37-year-old. Not a triathlete, but certainly someone who didn’t need help opening a pill bottle. Now I am suddenly old and feeble. Allow me to be perfectly candid: It really sucks.

There's an interesting bit at the end from a professor at Rutgers who requires her students to go through the aging simulation:

Earlier, when I finished my Rutgers simulation with Wood, I asked how healthy, young undergraduates generally react to their sudden aging. Wood makes her students write a two- to three-page paper in which they reflect on their experiences, and she tells me that the reactions have clearly changed over the years.

“In the past,” Wood says, “I’d get responses such as, ‘Now I understand why Grandpa is so grumpy.’ But over the past two or three years, the responses I’ve been getting in class have been very different. Now they say, ‘I don’t want to be like this when I grow old. I’m going to start taking better care of myself. I’m going to quit smoking. I’m going to go to the gym. I’m going to eat better.’”

Wood sees this as a definitive generational difference in young people raised by Baby Boomer parents. “I don’t know if it’s a belief that they have control over their destiny, or the attitude that if they really want something bad enough it will happen,” she says. “There’s a downside to that. It leads to thinking that if people are handicapped, or overweight, or old…well, then it’s just their own fault.”

-Greg Dahlmann