Given our increased longevity, the very concept may be losing its meaning
AMERICAN CULTURE is awash in feel-good aphorisms about aging: “60 is the new 40”; “Age is just a number”; you know the drill. These are fine messages for T-shirts and greeting cards, but do they really reflect your experience of aging? They certainly don’t reflect mine. When we’re talking about age—seriously, I mean—we ought to be embracing quite a different message—one that, in its way, is even more positive. Better yet: It’s actually true.
First, a few facts. In the last 100 years, life expectancy at birth in the United States has risen by about 20 years. Granted, that good-news story has darkened quite a bit lately, with the COVID pandemic and drug overdoses claiming the lives of too many Americans. Even so, the expected life span of a baby born in the U.S. today is 77.5 years. For 1923 babies, it was 57.2.
But wait. If you’ve lived long enough to qualify for AARP membership—and dodged the accidents and ailments that tend to befall younger people—your odds of living a good, long life are even better than a day-old baby’s. According to the Social Security Administration, the expected life span of a modern American 50-year-old is 80.4. For 75-year-olds, it’s 86.4.
So, forget all that blather about which age is the new 40 or the new 30. Let’s talk about the great gift of our extended longevity that Americans are experiencing right now—in unprecedented numbers and, for many, in good health. What can we do with those extra 20 or 30 years? And what can those years do for us? Because the longevity bonus doesn’t just mean that we’ve got more time to enjoy our lives. It means we’ve got more time to change and grow. As a wise man once put it, “Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person that you always should have been.” I’ll save you the time it would take you for a Google search. It was David Bowie.
With time, you become more appreciative of the world around you. The psychiatrist Oliver Sacks wrote poignantly about this phenomenon the year that he turned 80. “One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty,” he wrote. Sacks felt himself “freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.”
Nobody’s saying it’s all upside, of course. After a half-century on Earth, most of us wake up every morning with aches and pain, from injuries or just time’s wear and tear on the body. It takes energy and resilience to overcome our duly allotted quotient of pain and face the day as if your knees didn’t hurt and your back doesn’t twinge. But every time you manage it, you add to your store of resilience. You become more committed to whatever you’re doing. To hear Bowie tell it, you may even become more yourself.
Robert Love
Editor in Chief
AARP Publications