What It Means to Be Old

I subscribe to The Atlantic and have done so for years. It would accompany me on long trips to Asia where I would fall asleep at one page, wake up later, and start reading where I left off. Spending 13 hours in a plane to Norita requires some type of brain stimulation. And then from there another 4-5 hours to your destination on the mainland. It was either that or a double bourbon to knock me out to sleep. I am older now. I can still reminisce about those month-long trips into Asia and Europe. Interesting article. To me at least?

“As 100-year lifespans become more common, the time has come for a new approach to school, work, and retirement.”

I doubt I will ever see 100 years of age. Compromised from my time in the USMC.

America Needs to Radically Rethink What It Means to Be Old, The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch

July 1977: A 105-degree afternoon in Phoenix. I’m 17 and making deliveries in an underpowered Chevette with “4-55” air-conditioning (four open windows at 55 miles per hour), so I welcome the long runs to Sun City, when I can let desert air and American Top 40 blast through the car. Arrival, though, always gives me the creeps. The world’s first “active retirement community” is city-size (it would eventually span more than 14 square miles and house more than 40,000 people). The concentric circles of almost-identical tract houses stretch as far as I can see. Signs and bulletin boards announce limitless options for entertainment, shopping, fitness, tennis, golf, online casinos, shuffleboard—every kind of amenity.

Sun City is a retirement nirvana, a suburban dreamscape for a class of people who, only a generation before, were typically isolated, institutionalized, or crammed into their kids’ overcrowded apartments. But I drive for blocks without seeing anyone jumping rope or playing tag (no children live here). I see no street life, unless you count residents driving golf carts, the preferred form of local transportation. My teenage self wonders: 

Is this twilight zone my eventual destiny? Is this what it means to be old, to be retired, in America?

In its day, Sun City represented a breakthrough in American life. When it opened, in 1960, thousands of people lined up their cars along Grand Avenue to gawk at the model homes. Del Webb, the visionary developer, understood that the United States was ready to imagine a whole new stage of life—the golden years, as marketers proclaimed them.

A cultural revolution was in full swing. Social Security and private pensions had liberated tens of millions of older Americans from poverty and dependency; modern medicine had given them the health to enjoy what was then a new lifestyle: leisure. In 1965, Medicare ameliorated the old-age fear of medical bankruptcy. In 1972, President Richard Nixon and the Democratic Congress, outbidding each other for the senior vote, increased Social Security by 20 percent and indexed it to keep up with inflation. With these two programs on fiscal autopilot, the entitlement state was born, and the elderly were its prime beneficiaries.

When I gazed at Sun City, I was seeing the embodiment of the U.S. government’s greatest 20th-century domestic achievement: the near elimination of destitution among the elderly. By 1977, the poverty rate among those 65 and older had fallen from almost 30 percent in the mid-1960s to half that level. In 2022, it was 10.9 percent, according to the Census Bureau, slightly below the poverty rate for those ages 18 to 64 (11.7 percent)—and very significantly below the poverty rate among children and youth (16.3 percent).

“The struggle chronicled in this book—the struggle to build a secure old age for all—has been in many ways successful,” James Chappel writes in Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age. For most seniors, life is “immeasurably better” than it was a century ago. But he and Andrew J. Scott, the author of The Longevity Imperative: How to Build a Healthier and More Productive Society to Support Our Longer Lives, agree that the ’60s model of retirement needs updating in the face of new demographic, fiscal, and social realities. What comes next?

For clues, Chappel, a historian at Duke University, looks to the past, tracing the 100-year evolution of Americans’ notions of aging. He proceeds from the clarifying premise that aging is as much a social phenomenon as it is a biological one and perhaps even more so.

“There is no ‘natural’ way to age. We have to be taught, by our cultural and political and religious institutions, how to do it well.”

Today’s conceptions of old age and retirement are modern inventions. In 19th-century America, Chappel writes, “the presumption was that ‘old age’ was not a long phase of life that began at sixty-five, but a short one that was marked by disability and decline … Basically, older people were to seek contemplation and tranquility.” In the mid-1800s, the average 30-year-old could expect to live only about 30 more years. That began to change as the fruits of industrialization and science ripened. As more people lived to become old, social activists mobilized for pensions, led by Civil War veterans.

Now forgotten, the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association argued in the 1890s for pensions as a form of reparations for the formerly enslaved. No one today will be surprised to learn that this group was suppressed, its proposals were buried, and its leader, Callie House, found herself in jail on trumped-up charges.

Still, the movement to end dependency and penury in old age gathered force and triumphed with the enactment of Social Security in 1935, the crowning achievement of the New Deal. Although its initial design favored men over women, white people over Black, and industrial over agricultural workers, it laid the foundation for the concept of retirement that made 65 officially old. Senior citizen replaced aged in the lexicon, and seniors became a self-aware identity group. The decades that followed brought rapid expansion of elder benefits and programs, and with it a far-flung social infrastructure: senior centers and retirement communities; continuous-care and assisted-living facilities; educational and recreational opportunities, such as Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes and Elderhostel (now Road Scholar); and, not least, AARP (originally the American Association of Retired Persons), a marketing juggernaut and among the largest and most powerful lobbying groups ever.

But today, Chappel argues, progress toward a healthier, more secure, and more inclusive concept of old age has stalled, largely because the U.S. government has stalled. Though private activism and inventive experiments continue, “they will always be insufficient in the absence of aggressive state action.” A parsimonious “or an unwilling to spend money or use resources” Congress looks for budget cuts while conservatives push to privatize Social Security and Medicare. Just as worrisome, in Chappel’s view: Older Americans have embraced the idea that they are the same as younger people, except older. A vision blurring the distinctive needs of elders and undercuts their identity-based activism. What’s called for, he suggests, is an ambitious expansion of the welfare state to cover unmet necessities, such as long-term care.

This raises some questions. For one, who will pay for expensive new government programs? Social Security and Medicare are rapidly headed for insolvency and already hold the rest of the federal budget in a tightening vise. “The entire long-term deficit growth is driven by Social Security, Medicare, and the interest cost of their shortfalls,” Brian Riedl, a budget analyst with the Manhattan Institute, a center-right think tank, has written. Chappel breezes past any such fiscal concerns.

Even more puzzling, he does not pause to consider why further subsidizing the elderly should be the country’s top public-policy priority. He notes in passing that children are poorer than seniors, but he waves away the subject of generational equity, saying that “security is not a scarce resource” and dismissing as “vicious” a 1988 New Republic article, by the late Henry Fairlie, arguing that to seriously address competing social priorities, “we must shake off the peculiar notion … that old age is a time in which people are entitled to be rewarded.”

Chappel is not a policy wonk; as history, his book is valuable and authoritative. Perhaps it is not a historian’s job to answer philosophical questions about generational equity, political questions about hard choices, or fiscal questions about affordability. Still, one wishes he had at least teed them up, because they are unavoidable. Fortunately, Scott addresses them in The Longevity Imperative. An economist at London Business School, he identifies two longevity revolutions. The first is already here. For all its implications, it is simply: Most people grow old.

Of course, old age as such is not new, but until quite recently, comparatively few people lived to see it. Life expectancy at birth was 18 years in the early Bronze Age, 22 in the Roman empire, and 36 in Massachusetts in 1776. It’s 77.5 years in the U.S. today, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Those averages include child mortality, which partly accounts for shorter lifespans in earlier epochs. Even excluding child mortality, though, the improvements in longevity are astounding.

Since the 1880s, so-called best-practice life expectancy—how long you’ll live if you do everything right and receive good health care—has increased, on average, by two to three years every decade. By now, the average American 65-year-old can expect to live another 18.5 years. Eighty is the new 68, inasmuch as the mortality rate of 80-year-old American women in 2019 was the same as that of 68-year-old women in 1933. An American child born today has a better-than-even chance of living to age 95. The first person to live to age 150 may have already been born.

Yet that triumph poses a challenge. The first longevity revolution “was about getting the majority to reach old age; the second will be about changes in how we age,” Scott writes. Will those additional years be vigorous and healthy? Or will they be with chronic illness and frailty? Will society capture the creative and productive potential of its rapidly expanding older population? Or will ageism and archaic conventions waste that potential? Scott makes an optimistic case that the second longevity revolution presents an opportunity to “rethink the way we live our whole life. Right now, though, we are not set to reap the benefit of these longer lives.”

The core problem today, he argues, is that lifespan outruns health span. In other words, not all of the years we add are healthy ones.

The time has come for an ambitious, all-of-society effort to close that gap. Health-care priorities should shift more toward prevention, which today receives only 3 percent of U.S. health-care spending. Public-health measures should help further reduce smoking, alcoholism, obesity, and social isolation. More research dollars should flow to slowing the biological aging process, as well as treating frailty and disease.