Old Age

Old Age

‘You’re only as old as you feel’. ‘Age is just a number’. ‘Young at heart’.

You can hear platitudes like these any day of the week in any English-speaking country. But how realistic are they? How have our attitudes to old age and death changed as global – and especially First World – demographics have shifted? In 1900, only one in a hundred people lived to over sixty-five; by 1990, that figure had risen to 8%; and, by 2020, a fifth of the world’s population will exceed that age. In most developed nations, the average life expectancy has reached at least seventy-five for men and five or more years on top of that for women.

Reductions in infant mortality have played a major role in this but that’s not the whole story. The number of centenarians has rocketed from 23,000 in 1950 to fifteen times that number today, although global population has only increased by 250% in the same period. Of course, the development of effective vaccines and antibiotics, healthier diets and more exercise have played their part. In short, in the western world, we might say that adverse living conditions no longer cut life short.

Instead, we die of a running down of our biological mechanisms or, in other words, exhaustion of our body parts. Or so most people think. Others have suggested that we die at three score years and ten as a way of preventing overpopulation, that we are somehow genetically programmed for death. These views are challenged though by some genetic scientists, who believe our systems are made for survival, not death. Other academics believe that our soma cells – those that decay and die – have not needed to adapt to longer life cycles because, until recently, there’s always been something out there that was going to kill us long before our cells packed up. Afterall, animals in their natural habitat usually die young because they cannot find food or water, are eaten by predators or killed in fights with others of their own species. It’s one of the few advantages to zoos: animals live longer there.

So, we might expect that our life spans would increase as our soma cells adapt to less risky environments. This will not happen overnight but may take a century or two to increase average human age.

But what’s the point of living even longer? After all, longer life span does not mean greater physical activity or health, at least at the moment. For many of us, our last years are marked by more frequent and more serious illnesses. There seems little reason to live longer with Alzheimer’s Disease, chronic physical complaints that make life unpleasant, or even loneliness. However, there are species that show no signs ofageing and manage healthy, active lives right up to the days before death.

The challenge that we face is, then, to concentrate on health span, rather than lifespan. More money needs to be diverted from increasing longevity to tackling the most common diseases of old age. But, on its own, that’s not enough. Another challenge is changing our attitudes towards old age. Although the European Union is at last changing the pension age, so that both women and men need to work longer before they get an income from the state, employers need to hire more older people. The idea that one is too old to get a new job at fifty must go.

This was not always the case. At the beginning of the twentieth century, men worked as long as they were healthy enough to do so and died a year or two later. But when the state began to pay pensions, of course with the best of intentions, old age had a natural starting point. Nowadays, retiring early is a sign of wealth, it shows that one has been professionally and financially successful. As middle class jobs grew in number in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, the standard retirement age dropped so that many managers, teachers and accountants gave up work in their fifties, just at the same time as they could expect to live to their late seventies and eighties. This has now become an extremely expensive burden on the state, not only because of pensions but also due tothe loss of skilled people from the workforce.

And, of course, very few people have enough money saved to finance two or three decades of retirement. Only a very small proportion of the population has the savings to travel, take up hobbies, buy new cars and all the other things they got used to while they were working. At least not for twenty or thirty years with no salary coming in.

So, while it’s true that scientists have done a great job of prolonging life, we need to think more about how we are going to make those extra years worth having.