Your World ; Opinion
Living longer requires fresh, innovative thinking
The Resolution of a Lifetime By Laura L. Carstensen
Assuming you are a typical American, you are about 2 inches taller than your great-grandparents were at the same
age even though you are genetically no heartier
than your ancestors were 10,000 years ago. You
are stronger, healthier, smarter and living an average of 30 years longer than Americans were
at the turn of the last century. That’s because
scientists, educators and activists in the 20th
century changed culture, the crucible that holds
science, technology and large-scale changes in
behavior. We are living longer because the food
supply is steady and debilitating diseases are
prevented before they ever occur. Improved
sanitation reduces the spread of contagious
diseases, and education is available
to all school-age children. Information flows ubiquitously from written
and electronic sources.
In order to make good use of these
added years, we need to change culture again, just as radically as our
ancestors did. We need to invest
in science and technology because
we’ve only begun to solve the problems faced by people who are living longer.
And we need to change the way we live. We
mustn’t hold on too tightly to old scripts that
evolved to guide us through lives half as long.
Instead, we can begin to ask what added years
of life offer. We could create an entirely new
stage in life, an encore stage—as my friend
People are
happiest
when they feel
embedded in
something
larger than
themselves.
and colleague Marc Freedman maintains in his book
The Big Shift—that we use to
pursue meaningful work that
improves society. Or we could
stretch out all stages of life,
making not only old age, but
childhood, adolescence and
middle age longer, too.
Rest assured, the demographic changes that
are now under way will change virtually ev-
ery aspect of life. Our task is to thoughtfully
and proactively redesign it. What should life
scripts look like when most people spend as
many years as “old people” as they do rear-
ing children? How should families operate
when there are four or five generations
of a family alive at the same time? How
should societies work when more people
are over 60 than under 15?
Laura L. Carstensen is the founding director of
the Stanford Center on Longevity and the author
of A Long Bright Future.
BOOK EXCERPT
; In Our Prime By Patricia Cohen
My mother watched me
play in the sand when
she was in her 20s. By
the time she reached middle age, I was fin-
ishing up graduate school and traveling. I
married at 39, became a parent at 40, still
thought about what I wanted to do when I
grew up. Considering how dramatically the
experience of middle age had shifted in one
generation, what was it like even further
back? When average life expectancy was
40, did people think of 20 as middle age?
Now that it is pushing past 80, has the tradi-
tional 40-year-old starting line moved for-
ward? The idea of middle age has evolved
from its invention in the 19th century to its
current place at the center of American so-
ciety, where it wields enormous economic,
psychological, social, and political power.
This stage’s advent has created new con-
ceptions of our selves, our business oppor-
tunities, and our avenues of social control.
From In Our Prime by Patricia Cohen © 2011
