Live Long, Die Short (34 page)

So far, that doesn’t sound much different from what most older adults of today might list as their criteria for where they will live. The difference is that
the choices will be made with more purpose
. Indeed, knowing that these choices are much more significant for how they age, how independent they will remain, and the overall quality of their aging experience, our new older adults will move beyond the mere criteria of recreation, beyond long-held views of what retirement should be, and beyond the recommendations of friends and family. They will instead seek out opportunities for meaningful friendships and social connection: connection that enhances rather than diminishes the number and quality of social experiences, that involves people of all ages, including young adults and children, and that enhances their knowledge of the world and builds genuine compassion and sense of community.

Our new older adult will be drawn to a living situation that stimulates physical activity. We are all influenced by our surroundings, and those where the culture is one of movement—walking, biking, swimming, adventure travel, volleyball, yoga, fitness classes—will be of paramount importance to the older adults of the new future. Even when there are physical issues, an environment where possibilities and accommodation for such issues is the focus will help older adults flourish.

Our new older adults will want to be surrounded by opportunities to learn new things. Much as it is at a university (indeed, a university, where growing is the currency, is an excellent model for the successful older adult community of the future), the norm will be to discover and grow. Stagnation, rigidity, prejudice, and the exclusion of new ideas, technologies, and opinions will not thrive in the successful community of the new older adult. The self-imposed caricature of the older adult with negative overtones will fade as more people understand the deleterious effects of such deprecating dialogue, and as peers become less tolerant of it.

Lastly, the living situation of enlightened older adults will stimulate and offer robust opportunity for meaningful living and purpose. Whether through the influence of their peers or acknowledgment on the part of the greater community that older adults are a powerful resource, our successfully aging older adults will be surrounded with a milieu of personal responsibility, accountability, and respect for their status. Like village elders
of the past, older adults living in such an environment will be sought out for their valuable solutions to the society’s challenges. It will matter less whether these characteristics are in retirement communities, NORCs (naturally occurring retirement communities), or in subsets of the greater community. It will be the culture of social connection and growth that matters most.

Our emerging, enlightened older adults will evolve out of the recreation, entitlement, or self-absorption stereotype and will look to characterize this phase of their lives with purposeful engagement. Their hours will be spent seeking growth, whether physically, mentally, socially, or spiritually. Some of their activities will appear to be unchanged from those of today’s older adults, yet they will differ because they will be chosen for specific reasons, for the specific benefits they offer to our new older adults’ aging experience, and for their contribution to overall successful aging. Many will elect to continue to work for pay, but more and more this choice will reflect a conscious decision to contribute or find purpose beyond the financial compensation.

Social connection will be fun, yes. It will fill otherwise lonely hours, but most importantly, it will enhance brain and immune function, and make decline less likely. Physical movement will also increase the likelihood of remaining independent longer. Our new older adults will want opportunities to grow intellectually. The meaning of lifelong learning will expand beyond classes at the local college to new skills: in music, language, writing, art, woodworking, understanding diversity, teaching, mentoring, and educational travel. A community where this is the norm rather than the exception will be attractive to our new older adults, who realize that the brain is a magnificent untapped resource. Time spent helping other living things in their journey through life will offer satisfaction, as always, but our enlightened older adults will also realize that the quality, and perhaps even quantity, of their own lives will be enriched.

I cannot speculate specifically on how the successful aging-savvy older adults will spend their money; however, it is clear from the above descriptions of
where they will choose to live and spend their time that they will seek and value
experience
. Whether it’s an opportunity to grow physically, mentally, socially, or spiritually, the value of resources to enhance such growth will rise. Rather than looking for bragging rights, or pursuing unexamined desires of their younger years, our enlightened older adult will seek out those commodities that will help them to become all they can be, that help them satisfy core needs for a meaningful life as defined not by the media, or advertising, or ambition, or stereotypical views of what older adults want, but by an honest look into what it means to be authentic in older age, and by a knowledge of what it takes to age successfully.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his thought-provoking 2000 book
The Tipping Point
, writes of epidemics of change: “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.”
⁶
Gladwell goes on: “We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly.” Sudden change is the basis for his ideas on the “tipping point,” which is “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.”

Katie Sloan, in addition to holding several leadership positions at the International Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, is chief operations officer and senior vice president of LeadingAge, an organization whose members are not-for-profit retirement communities. In addressing retirement-living executives about the future, Sloan threw down the gauntlet and challenged the industry to be prepared for a new older adult: “There is an attitudinal fault line around shifting expectations. We need to listen hard and actively because what we learn will define our success in future years.”
⁷
Fault line indeed, for the demographic pressure is rising and it will let go with cataclysmic results.

Although the aging of the nation has, of course, occurred gradually, the response to it will not. The societal shift, more a cultural shift, is, I believe, imminent. Rising healthcare costs associated with chronic disease and aging, the financial challenges facing the nation, the growing awareness that much more is possible as we age, the “retirement” of the lead boomers, a growing disenchantment with an acquisition approach to happiness and fulfillment, the accelerating divisive and mean-spirited public discourse—all this and more has created the perfect storm for a dramatic shift in how
we as a society view, appreciate, and incorporate older adults. The conditions for dramatic change as articulated by Gladwell are at hand. The
stickiness
—i.e., the notion that the change has the ability to attract attention—is there, I believe, in the idea that we all can age in a better way, slowing decline and living a life characterized more by growth and purpose than by loss. The
context
—i.e., the situation that favors the change—is clearly present, with an aging society facing an oppressive burden of chronic disease, and the failure of the postindustrial period to improve all of society. These conditions are, I believe, about to spark an eruption within our society that will turn our world upside down: older adults will no longer be the problem but will be part of the solution; being old will give a person a revered status; the focus of media, marketing, and policy will be more inclusive of older adults.

Some will be positioned to accept this shift and will thrive. Providers of services attractive to growth-hungry, engaged, health- and independence-minded older adults will flourish. More traditional, intractable, ageism-infected organizations will wither. Senior-living providers poised to become destinations for individual growth will explode. Those rooted in nursing-home, paternalistic, and medical-model approaches will be doomed. Senior centers that become centers for healthy, successful aging will survive. Those unable to evolve beyond an entertainment, “keep busy” approach will disappear. Those who sell products that enhance experience, providing opportunities to grow physically, mentally, socially, and spiritually, will succeed. Those that focus on the response to decline will not. We can already see minor adjustments toward a paradigm shift in the media: more older adults in ads, portrayed as active and engaged, more older adults as pundits on talk shows. Such adjustments are the bell cows of a coming stampede.

As Dychtwald’s “Age Wave” approaches, older adults will be more visible. They will also be …

• more abundant
  
• healthier
  
• more active
  
• more engaged (work, volunteerism, activism)
  
• more targeted by media
  
• more politically active
  
• more powerful (richer, more outspoken)
  
• living in mainstream communities rather than retirement communities
  

Older adults will be more valued …

• for the above reasons
  
• as mentors (a return to the elder as consultant)
  
• as consumers
  
• as national-policy contributors
  

Older adults will seek …

• serious roles in society
  
• multigenerational contact
  
• significant social engagement
  
• opportunities to learn
  
• opportunities to grow
  

Older adults will resist …

• ageism of any form—subtle or overt
  
• language and terms associated with a decline-only concept of aging
  
• marginalization within society (in politics, healthcare, the professional field, and media)
  
• all traditional stereotypes of aging
  
• group characterization
  
• pandering
  

Those that have the privilege to know, have the duty to act
.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN

W
henever I’m struggling with a new initiative and getting pessimistic about whether we can pull it off, my friend and colleague Dave Gobble smiles and says, “Four-minute mile, Roger,” and just like that, I’m focused on the solution again. Prior to 1954, no one had run a mile in less than four minutes. In fact, esteemed physiologists went on record to say it was not possible for a human to do such a thing. In that year, Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3:59.4. Two months later another runner broke the four-minute barrier. Today, high school students have run the mile in less than four minutes. In fact, the fastest time is currently around 3:43, a full seventeen seconds off the supposed four-minute barrier!

Much too often, barriers to our own growth are self-imposed. It’s comfortable to ascribe our limitations, or our unwillingness to attempt growth, to impossibility. The parents of adolescents know this mind-set all too well. We know this. When we are forced to confront the reality that something is indeed possible, we are also forced out of our comfort zone. We grow, or we don’t. As Yoda says, we do or we don’t do. There is no try.

So, now the cat’s out of the bag. We know that how we age depends primarily on us, on our lifestyles, on the choices we make every day. We know that so much more is possible as we age. We know we can continue to grow no matter what life deals us. We know that the four-minute mile of aging was a culturally imposed barrier built by low expectations, forced disengagement, loss of reverence, low societal value, and overall ignorance. The barrier has been smashed by the MacArthur Study and two decades of subsequent research. Much of the decline associated with aging can be prevented. Much of the burden of an aging society can be avoided. It’s not only possible, but it has been repeatedly demonstrated.
¹

Our own goal with Masterpiece Living—of actualizing the research findings and providing tools and environments to assist older adults in modifying and refining their lifestyles in order to age in a better way—has been realized and is growing more powerful with each refinement, with each new community partner, with each new analysis of our data. A true
movement
is under way. The four-minute barrier of ageism, complacency, ignorance, and paternalism is fraying. Yet we have only scratched the surface. Taking the next step toward an enlightened approach to aging and a national policy on aging will not be as easy as breaking the four-minute barrier. Often the barriers are perched on very high ground—moral high ground.

The senior-living industry provides us with a powerful example of lofty barriers. In the late nineteenth century, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, many older Americans, having been transplanted to the city for work, now lacked the social support structure they had previously found in their villages and towns. If the husband were to die, the widow was often immediately destitute, homeless, and penniless. Religious and charitable organizations, seeing the need, founded almshouses, or poorhouses. These were not desirable places to end up, yet they grew with the growing need. The Social Security Act of 1935 helped evolve these almshouses into senior-living businesses, since now many residents had some ability to pay. The Medicare Act of 1965 further changed senior living into what we see today.