Eleven years ago I started a writing project about people over 80 who work. Upbeat! Inspirational! Safe! I didn\u2019t realize it at the time, but it epitomized an approach that has dominated gerontology since the 1980s: \u201csuccessful aging\u201d\u2014also known as \u201cactive,\u201d \u201chealthy\u201d or \u201cproductive\u201d aging.<\/p>\n
For most of human history, aging was seen as a natural process largely beyond our control. Enter the successful-aging model, which posits something close to the opposite: eat right, stay fit, choose well, have a good attitude, be productive, and we can craft the old age we want. The model emerged to counter the prevailing narrative of aging as loss and decline, and it\u2019s deeply appealing.<\/p>\n
Something about this way of thinking made me uneasy, and I was lucky to get a gentle course correction early on from geriatrician Robert Butler, MD, the inventor of the term \u201cageism\u201d and one of the older workers I interviewed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you get up in the morning and get yourself dressed, you\u2019re being productive,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n
Or, as I put it more bluntly years later, \u201cIf you wake up in the morning, you\u2019re aging successfully.\u201d<\/p>\n
As I came to realize, healthy behaviors and \u201ccan-do\u201d strategies are terrific, but they can\u2019t hold aging at bay\u2014nor is that something we should aspire to. An active, healthy 65 is still 65, not \u201cthe new 50.\u201d Imagining otherwise is denial\u2014a high-end version that overlooks the very important role of socioeconomic class, along with race, gender, and just plain luck, in shaping how \u201csuccessfully\u201d we age. It leaves behind those who aren\u2019t wealthy or healthy enough to age the \u201cright\u201d way, and it feeds the delusion that we can stop the clock: the denial in which ageism takes root.<\/p>\n
The model is problematic in lots of other ways as well, as I learned from reading Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession: Global Perspectives<\/em> (2017), a collection of essays edited by Sarah Lamb. In the introduction, Lamb points out a central irony: although \u201csuccessful aging\u201d came into being to counter aging\u2019s negative image, this hyperpositive way of thinking \u201cis, in ways that can be hard to recognize, in some respects profoundly ageist\u2014resting on a deep North American cultural discomfort with aging, old age, and being old.\u201d<\/p>\n To age \u201csuccessfully\u201d is essentially to not age\u2014to stop the clock\u2014despite the fact that very few of us are going to drop dead without experiencing some kind of diminishment, whether physical, cognitive or social. As Lamb writes, glossing over those normal transitions not only makes it all the harder to learn from and adapt to them, it sets us up to fail.<\/p>\n In any case, why should aging be something to succeed or fail at? That\u2019s the why-didn\u2019t-I-think-of-it question posed by Toni Calasanti and Neal King in the book\u2019s first essay. We don\u2019t talk about successful infancy or teenagehood or adulthood, after all, and understand that those life stages come with both pros and cons.<\/p>\n \u201cNo other stages are treated as if they had no value unique to them, as if no positives resulted from entry into those stages, or as if we needed to justify their existence by minimizing what is unique to them,\u201d they observe.<\/p>\n Why should later life be the exception?<\/p>\n Calasanti and King also argue that urging people to take responsibility for their own aging ignores the inequities that give rise to ageism in the first place. \u201cIt does not confront the notion that old age is worse than middle age, that old people should find ways to be more like their younger selves, [and upholds] other life stages as the models against which elders will be assessed.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, the successful-aging model leaves ageism unchallenged or contributes to it.<\/strong><\/p>\n Click here<\/a> for part 2 of this three-part series and here<\/a> for part 3. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eleven years ago I started a writing project about people over 80 who work. Upbeat! Inspirational! Safe! I didn\u2019t realize it at the time, but it epitomized an approach that has dominated gerontology since the 1980s: \u201csuccessful aging\u201d\u2014also known as…<\/span><\/p>\n