Just What is Successful Aging, anyhow?
There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.
-Sophia Loren
In our culture “successful aging” really means no aging at all; which at its deepest-root is the denial of death. Rowe & Kahn wrote an accessible book about the topic based on the MacArthur Foundation Study, with the same title (Successful Aging, 1998).
The authors defined successful aging as having 3 components:
1. Avoiding disease
2. Maintaining high cognitive and physical function
3. Engagement with life
Successful Aging or the Imitation of Youth?
The concept of successful aging in popular culture, as well as in many areas of gerontology, has been linked with stability and continuity—that is, things don’t change. Midlife values, activity patterns, and expectations are erroneously carried into old age. This denies the very meaning and character of old age and sets this unique time of life up for failure and disappointment when expectations aren’t met.
Successful aging isn’t built on immortality; George Benard Shaw’s advice to the young was “do not try to live forever—you will not succeed.” And psychologist Carol Ryff noted that when Ponce de Leon went in search for the fountain of youth, he missed the point! Successful aging means aging well—which is different from not aging at all.
2 Factors Predict 80% of Longevity Survivors
Your biography becomes your biology and the authors found 2 key factors predicting 80% of longevity survivors (living >65):
1. Nonsmoker
2. The degree of complexity involving choice in your daily behavior
The longer I live the more convinced I become of the essential nature of active engagement with life and a certain degree of complexity in daily behavior in old age. Clinically I witnessed elders who take on “sick careers” exchanging midlife tasks (i.e. raising kids and career), for hospital visits, trips to the pharmacy and the occasional acute hospital admissions; not to mention complaining to anyone in earshot about the ailments of aging. Disease and decline become the focus and now provide “purpose and meaning.”
Aging well within one’s age doesn’t deny the realities of old age (no happy gerontology here); instead an external focus on a purpose larger than oneself with right intention will go a long way towards aging successfully.
Here’s an inspiring example of “successful aging” (see video): P.E.T. Project
See
Successful Aging (1998) by John W. Rowe, M.D., and Robert L. Kahn, Ph.D.
3 Comments for this entry
Magdalene Jaeckel
I am 87 now, and I feel that I am aging well. I have always been conscious of healthy and balanced living, physically as well as spiritually. This becomes even more important as you age, because your physical strength is diminishing, so you have to pace yourself and cannot cram too many activities into one day. You recognize what is really important. You want to serve your community; you want to cherish your friends and family; you need to get enough exercise; you have to maintain your interest in good books and the arts. It makes life rich and exciting. One thing that means a lot to me is that I have joined a group of active adults who are working together on building a co housing community in our town. We are friends now and will be neighbors soon. We will be ‘aging in place’ and support each other on the way. Check out our website. Come and visit us and enjoy one of our informal meetings and great potlucks! Of 30 apartments there are only 7 left now, although construction has not started yet but will start this month. Magdalene Jaeckel
Patrick Roden
Magdalene, you are doing everything right! When are you going to write your book?
Thanks for the comments, I appreciate it; and learn from you.
Best, Patrick
adam griff
I think your are absolutely right that engagement and a sense of purpose are critical to successful aging. But often it is an idea lost in aging-in-place. Too often, the “place” merely means your home, but it should include a more expansive idea of rooted-ness and belonging. Its not merely about preserving independence but one’s identity and sense of self — in work, in family, in your neighborhood and community, however you define that for yourself.
To enable and maintain this engagement means successfully managing the complexity of life as we age — to keep life challenging and interesting without letting it become impossible. As you say it, it’s not trying to keep things from changing as you age, but engaging the changes of aging.
But lastly this is not just an internal struggle as we grow old, but society’s as well with the elderly. We don’t want to see aging around us; we segregate it; institutionalize it. We want any physical changes in others to be hidden as much as possible. Few women over 60 regardless of how good shape they are in will wear a short sleeve shirt on a hot day. It’s about accepting the change in others as well as ourselves.
adam griff
sarahcare.com
Often, families in despair send loved ones into institutional care be becomes