functioning most affected by aging. In addition, cognition has a greater effect than the other types of psychological functioning on the ability to perform the activities of daily living (ADLs) (Klimczuk, 2016). Those who experience memory impairment may not be able to keep up with needed medications or remember to turn off the stove when they’ve finished cooking. People who lose their judgment or become more impulsive may make extremely foolish decisions about how to spend their money or whom to trust. What’s worse, they may lose the ability to recognize their own mental shortcomings.
The picture for most older people, however, is considerably more positive. Although memory, reaction time, and basic information-processing and problem-solving abilities appear to decline with normal aging, other cognitive functions seem to remain stable or even improve. Wisdom and knowledge about the ways of the world, for example, are typical strengths of older people. In addition, training and practice in problem-solving skills, memory techniques, and other cognitive strategies can noticeably improve the abilities of older people.
It is important to remember the influence of life history and context as well. Older people who never learned a foreign language, for example, might have a more difficult time doing so in retirement than would an older person who had been bilingual from childhood. A person who worked as a carpenter in middle age might later be able to solve simple geometry problems faster than someone who worked as a nurse simply because the retired carpenter had been called on to solve geometry problems all his life.
Older people also remain adaptive and learn ways to cope with losses in cognitive functioning. For example, other people may help them compensate for cognitive losses through a social process dubbed “interactive minds” or “collaborative cognition” (Baltes & Staudinger, 1996). Imagine that a young relative has asked two older adult sisters about their parents. One may start out with the story of how their parents met but be stymied by the issue of who introduced them. The other sister may say, “Remember, it was their friend from the old neighborhood. What was his name? He always used to bring us butterscotch candies.” “Oh, I know who you mean,” says the first sister. “The man who played the accordion.” The other sister then remembers his name: “Yes, Mr. Catano. His family lived next door to Mother’s family, and he was in the band that Dad played in.” Similar teamwork helps older people function cognitively much better than they might on their own. That is one of the reasons that losing a spouse, another relative, a close friend, or some other central member of one’s social network can be such a problem for an older adult.
Another form of cognitive adaptation is “selective optimization with compensation” (Baltes & Baltes, 1990), which can be seen as one possible definition of “successful aging.” The idea of selective optimization is that older people gradually narrow the scope of the capabilities they seek to maintain to those that are most useful, just as we all do throughout life. For instance, a freshman college student may begin studying engineering, but by the time she begins to pursue a career, she may decide to specialize in the microchips that make appliances work and forget about becoming knowledgeable about hydraulics, engines, or other aspects of engineering.
The idea of compensation is that people seek new ways of accomplishing things that become difficult or impossible because of losses in functional capacity. An example of selective optimization with compensation is the case of pianist Arthur Rubinstein. As Rubinstein grew older, he reduced the music he played to those piano pieces he knew best and then practiced just those pieces more often (selective optimization). When it came time to play the faster passages, he would slow down his playing speed just beforehand to maintain the apparent difference between the slower and faster passages (compensation).
Although much research remains to be done on cognitive capacity in old age, particularly among the oldest-old, it is safe to say that the old stereotype of feebleminded seniors is not only counterproductive but also inadequate as a description of cognitive functioning in later life. Older people do seem to experience some cognitive challenges, but the losses through normal aging are gradual and for the most part can be accommodated. What is more, older people often have other cognitive gains to offer. Their experience of living gives them an understanding of the world and an ability to apply its lessons that younger people typically have not had time to develop.
Conclusion
As long as there have been old people, there has been ambivalence about old age. The psychological basis for ambivalence is understandable. Why shouldn’t people feel uncertain dread at the prospect of vulnerable old age stretching before them? In contrast, why shouldn’t they look forward to a time when it seems possible to finally drop the burdens of coping with the complications of life? We see the same ambivalence today, but the truth is different from what popular images often convey. Old age in our day cannot easily be characterized. Especially in early old age, just past retirement, most people remain active and capable despite their removal from economically productive roles. Inevitably, the human body declines and dies, but normally, even in middle and late old age, humans retain more capabilities than they are often given credit for.
Industrialization brought growing rationalization and bureaucratization of the life course, a greater rigidity that took the shape of stronger demarcations between youth and adulthood and between adulthood and old age. At the same time, rapid developments in medical science and cultural values have begun to erode the concept of distinctive life stages. With rising longevity, more people are living to old age, and older adults as a group are becoming a larger, more influential proportion of the total population. Today, because the entire life course is changing, the meaning of old age is ambiguous.
The problem of understanding what it means to be old in postindustrial society can be compared with a parallel problem in the biology of aging: Why does physical aging occur? There seems to be no reason for organisms to live much past the age of reproduction. Old age, in short, should not exist. Yet human beings do live long past the period of fertility; indeed, human beings are among the longest-living mammals on earth. But the challenge is not just to discover why we live so long—or even how to allow people to live longer. It is to understand how we can make the final phase of the life course more meaningful—for our elders and, eventually, for our future older selves.
Toward a New Map of Life
We can think of the stages of life as a kind of map of unknown territory through which we must travel. Until recently, some regions of that territory, such as the midlife transition, were completely unmapped and unacknowledged. Other regions, such as adolescence, have been delineated or cultivated only in the past century, although now they seem familiar and predictable. The symbolism of life stages was once easily understood in societies where a map was thought to depict a common geographic or social space that was stable and enduring, the same for each generation. This familiar ideal of life stages reappears in popular forms of lifespan developmental psychology, such as the theories of Erikson and Levinson. The ideal seems to correspond to a fundamental and universal fact about human psychology: the need to define the predictability of life. Now, however, some observers are coming to call into question this whole approach to the life course. Perhaps the metaphor of a map is mistaken.
Today, at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, we no longer have confidence in a shared timetable for the course of life. The timing of major life events has become less and less predictable at all levels of society. As a result, we may need a new map of life corresponding to the changed conditions of demographic circumstances, economics, and culture in a postindustrial, global society (Laslett, 1991; Phillipson, 2003).
The meaning of aging has changed in contradictory ways. Optimists believe that medicine will soon permit us to displace aging-related disease and decline until later and later in the life course, a pattern known as compression of morbidity. Yet economic forces seem to move in the opposite direction from biology as some individuals accumulate financial assets during a lifetime of working.
