What Does It Mean to Be Old Nowadays?
Recently I had a rather uncomfortable realization that I am older than either of my grandmothers were at my parents' wedding. To my mind, they were both old, and not just because I was looking at their ages from a much younger perspective. In the photographs in my parents' wedding album, both of them look very much like elders, with wrinkled skin and a generally weathered and worn appearance.
While I no longer am apt to be mistaken for a high school girl (something that happened even after I'd finished my library degree and had been working as a librarian for several years -- someone sent to the reference desk complained that "there's nobody there but that high school girl"), I still don't have the wrinkles and lines both my grandmothers were already showing when they were six years younger than I am now.
And I'm not the only one who's noticing that we're not just living longer -- we're staying effectively younger longer. Which raises the question of whether it's time to rethink what it means to be old.
The retirement age of 65 was originally set because it was an age that many workers didn't reach. By the time people did reach that age, they were typically not just old, but also frail, declining to the point that they not only were not longer physically able to work productively, but also were becoming increasingly dependent upon family or other caregivers for many of their basic self-care activities, and typically were ailing to the point that even a trivial illness was apt to carry them away.
Today we see people living independently well into their 70's and 80's, and while we do have some frail elders who look like the stereotypical "little old men" and "little old ladies," many of them look more like middle-aged people. In fact, now that I look back, I realize that a lot of the people whom I thought to be "old" when I was a child were probably in their late 50's or early 60's at most -- but they already had wrinkled skin, gray hair and stooped posture that make a person look old.
A good bit of it is better nutrition and health care in early life. The last several generations have avoided the childhood illnesses that not only carried away a fair number of a given generation's children, but also left the survivors weakened in various ways that would result in their aging faster. Also, for the last several generations in the industrialized West, the biggest nutrition issue has been the proliferation of junk food and ultra-processed food crowding out more nourishing whole grains, fruits and vegetables and actual meat on the bone.
The decline in smoking also has had its effect. Even in the early oughts, we had a neighbor who looked like someone in her sixties, but was actually in her early fifties -- but had been smoking since her teens, and it had taken a toll on her appearance. OTOH, I'm wondering how the use of other drugs, legal and otherwise, by recent generations will take a toll on the health and appearance of the current generations of rising adults.
And there is the reduction of the sheer amount of manual labor that was previously just a part of life. More and more, machines are doing the lifting and the lugging. When my grandfather was farming, he pitched hay and bucked bales by hand. Nowadays, a modern dairy farm is apt to have a small front-end loader (typically called a "bobcat" even if it's not actually of the Bobcat brand) to handle the process of moving hay bales (which are often huge round bales) and straw for bedding. When my great-grandfather was a carpenter, hammers and saws were worked by hand. A modern-day carpenter is apt to use a circular saw for most basic cutting, and a pneumatic nail gun for driving nails. Less wear and tear on the body means less aging -- but it can also mean less fitness as it substitutes for effort.
And the general increase in public health helps too. More people have clean water and sanitary sewers, and our air is cleaner, especially now that tetraethyl lead has been removed from gasoline (it's also been suggested that the decline in violent crime is at least partly from a reduction in environmental lead levels resulting in less damage to growing brains).
The Social Security Administration has been moving retirement ages steadily older, expecting people to work longer. However, there do still seem to be several points at which people, even those who have taken care of their health, experience periods of sharp decline. For women, this typically correlates with menopause and the changes in hormonal levels that come with it. I'm thinking it's not surprising that I developed hypothyroidism shortly after menopause. And as I'm rapidly approaching sixty, I'm noticing that I simply don't have the stamina I used to. I can no longer rob sleep on an ongoing basis to keep up with an overload of work. I can do a night or two of short sleep rations, but if I don't make it up, my body simply takes it back -- and there's only so much caffeine can do to force back weariness.
Yet my mind feels as if I still ought to be in my late twenties or early thirties, with plenty of time ahead of me to build a career and a life for myself. And then I'm reminded that I just can't push myself the way I could back in those days, and it hurts.
While I no longer am apt to be mistaken for a high school girl (something that happened even after I'd finished my library degree and had been working as a librarian for several years -- someone sent to the reference desk complained that "there's nobody there but that high school girl"), I still don't have the wrinkles and lines both my grandmothers were already showing when they were six years younger than I am now.
And I'm not the only one who's noticing that we're not just living longer -- we're staying effectively younger longer. Which raises the question of whether it's time to rethink what it means to be old.
The retirement age of 65 was originally set because it was an age that many workers didn't reach. By the time people did reach that age, they were typically not just old, but also frail, declining to the point that they not only were not longer physically able to work productively, but also were becoming increasingly dependent upon family or other caregivers for many of their basic self-care activities, and typically were ailing to the point that even a trivial illness was apt to carry them away.
Today we see people living independently well into their 70's and 80's, and while we do have some frail elders who look like the stereotypical "little old men" and "little old ladies," many of them look more like middle-aged people. In fact, now that I look back, I realize that a lot of the people whom I thought to be "old" when I was a child were probably in their late 50's or early 60's at most -- but they already had wrinkled skin, gray hair and stooped posture that make a person look old.
A good bit of it is better nutrition and health care in early life. The last several generations have avoided the childhood illnesses that not only carried away a fair number of a given generation's children, but also left the survivors weakened in various ways that would result in their aging faster. Also, for the last several generations in the industrialized West, the biggest nutrition issue has been the proliferation of junk food and ultra-processed food crowding out more nourishing whole grains, fruits and vegetables and actual meat on the bone.
The decline in smoking also has had its effect. Even in the early oughts, we had a neighbor who looked like someone in her sixties, but was actually in her early fifties -- but had been smoking since her teens, and it had taken a toll on her appearance. OTOH, I'm wondering how the use of other drugs, legal and otherwise, by recent generations will take a toll on the health and appearance of the current generations of rising adults.
And there is the reduction of the sheer amount of manual labor that was previously just a part of life. More and more, machines are doing the lifting and the lugging. When my grandfather was farming, he pitched hay and bucked bales by hand. Nowadays, a modern dairy farm is apt to have a small front-end loader (typically called a "bobcat" even if it's not actually of the Bobcat brand) to handle the process of moving hay bales (which are often huge round bales) and straw for bedding. When my great-grandfather was a carpenter, hammers and saws were worked by hand. A modern-day carpenter is apt to use a circular saw for most basic cutting, and a pneumatic nail gun for driving nails. Less wear and tear on the body means less aging -- but it can also mean less fitness as it substitutes for effort.
And the general increase in public health helps too. More people have clean water and sanitary sewers, and our air is cleaner, especially now that tetraethyl lead has been removed from gasoline (it's also been suggested that the decline in violent crime is at least partly from a reduction in environmental lead levels resulting in less damage to growing brains).
The Social Security Administration has been moving retirement ages steadily older, expecting people to work longer. However, there do still seem to be several points at which people, even those who have taken care of their health, experience periods of sharp decline. For women, this typically correlates with menopause and the changes in hormonal levels that come with it. I'm thinking it's not surprising that I developed hypothyroidism shortly after menopause. And as I'm rapidly approaching sixty, I'm noticing that I simply don't have the stamina I used to. I can no longer rob sleep on an ongoing basis to keep up with an overload of work. I can do a night or two of short sleep rations, but if I don't make it up, my body simply takes it back -- and there's only so much caffeine can do to force back weariness.
Yet my mind feels as if I still ought to be in my late twenties or early thirties, with plenty of time ahead of me to build a career and a life for myself. And then I'm reminded that I just can't push myself the way I could back in those days, and it hurts.