activities with the same people as they did in middle age. Although there is some selective age-related withdrawal, active engagement remains a key to life satisfaction and positive meaning in later life. In addition, participation in intellectual and political leisure activities may have protective benefits for cognition during later life (Kareholt et al., 2010).
Leisure is not simply what we do with “leftover” time, but a multidimensional quality of life.
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Social structures, not age itself, determine the uses of time in later life. According to surveys of time use, as people age, they spend varying proportions of time in paid work, family care, personal care, and free time. Most of the variation comes from a decrease in time spent working, not from any demonstrable effects of aging. People who are still in the labor force after age 65 have time use patterns similar to those of younger people. Retirement frees up time—findings from the 2018 American Time Use Survey indicate that people 75 years of age and older engage on average in 7.8 hours of leisure time daily, more than any other age group (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019a). After taking into account household labor, most of this gain in time is taken up by watching TV, reading, relaxing and thinking, and socializing. Some leisure activities decline with age, but others remain the same. A study of leisure found that the number of people starting new activities does diminish as we get older (Iso, Jackson, & Dunn, 1994). In addition, certain activities show a marked decline in participation rates: For example, moviegoing drops from 38% in midlife to 17% after age 65. Involvement in indoor fitness shows a decline, and travel diminishes significantly among people over age 75. Other activities, such as outdoor gardening, show only modest declines, and still others, such as TV viewing, watching sports, and engaging in informal discussion, show no age-related decline at all. Church participation and community activities tend to be maintained. Age-related declines appear to come partly from barriers to physical exertion or access. Activities based in the home, such as reading or socializing with familiar people, remain strong until well into advanced old age. However, we must keep in mind that subgroups among older adults display markedly different patterns. For instance, the young-old can generally be categorized as the active-old, a group of increasing interest to advertisers and marketers (Furlong, 2007). Also, there may be variations in the leisure time pursuits of older adults in different minority groups (for example, the rate of church participation).
Patterns of late-life leisure have important implications for the economy in an aging society. Americans over the age of 50 offer a huge and growing market for business. They command more than half of all discretionary income and account for 40% of consumer demand. Older consumers are quite heterogeneous, varying by family status, ethnicity, education, geography, and social class. As we will discuss in Controversy 12 on the new aging marketplace, the “gray market” is stratified by age. The young-old are much more likely to be interested in travel than the old-old. Old-age leisure is often advertised as a consumption good or a status symbol, but leisure is also a means of affirming one’s identity, a vital dimension of our phenomenological life world at a time when other roles may be lost. Leisure time activities, then, are an important part of our personal world of meaning and also part of a shared horizon of socioeconomic transactions that shape the meaning of leisure over the entire life course.
Explaining Patterns of Leisure
A study of activity patterns in old age sheds interesting light on different theories of aging, such as activity theory, disengagement theory, and continuity theory (Toepoel, 2013). The Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging found that most Ontario residents ages 45 to 85 engage in familiar activities and maintain stable activity patterns, as continuity theory would predict (Singleton, Forbes, & Agwani, 1993). However, the Canadian study also found that education and income are big factors. Retired people who have more choices because they have more resources are also likely to change their patterns of activity more often.
We also find some support for the idea of disengagement as people age, but not as a global generalization or stereotype. Disengagement, in other words, is not a universal pattern, but is highly selective, an example of selective optimization with compensation (Baltes & Baltes, 1990). As long as leisure activities remain accessible, people will go on doing what they find worthwhile and meaningful as long as they can. When physical impairments impose obstacles, most people adapt to optimize whatever resources they still have. Most people do not simply disengage altogether from meaningful activities.
Other explanations for the decline in leisure participation can also be found. For a segment of the older population with limited income, travel or cultural activities may be economically out of reach, perhaps an example of how social inequality accumulates over the life course and affects outcomes in later life (Ferraro & Shippee, 2009). But those with limited income may pursue activities outside the marketplace, for example, informal socializing with others. Another cause for constricted activity is declining health or age-related decline in vision, which might limit participation in fitness or sporting activities as well as driving. Even among those who remain healthy, loss of companions for leisure activities can be a limiting factor. As a result, decline in leisure, as we might expect, is most severe among the oldest-old.
In conclusion, it is important to note here that recent Pew Research Center data suggest that older adults spend, on average, half of their waking hours alone, not including time spent on personal care (Livingston, 2019). As such, participation in leisure activities may be an important buffer between older adults and loneliness and isolation.
Religion and Spirituality
According to recently published Gallup data, 72% of U.S. adults consider religion to be important in their lives; 50% are affiliated with a church, mosque, or synagogue; and 38% attend services weekly (Brenan, 2018b; Jones, 2019). It is worth noting that each of these figures has shown a declining trend over the past two decades, consistent with findings from the Pew Research Center that Americans are becoming less religious. Interestingly, 90% of older adults surveyed for the 2012 Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project indicated that they are “religiously affiliated.” For comparison, 67% of adults ages 18 to 29 report being “religiously affiliated,” perhaps an example of a cohort difference. On the one hand, it seems natural to expect that interest in religion might increase with advancing age given the association of old age with increased mortality. On the other hand, the continuity theory of aging reminds us that, as people age, they tend to maintain earlier patterns of practice and belief.
But religion is more complicated than responses to a poll or attending a worship service might indicate. To understand the role of religion, we need to distinguish formal religious behavior from subjective attitudes toward religion, what we might call an inner attitude of spirituality. Across many different dimensions, religion and spirituality continue to play vital roles in the lives of older adults and help them find meaning in later life (Atchley, 2009).
Religious Involvement Over the Life Course
Religious involvement in old age displays a pattern that some investigators have called multidimensional disengagement. What this means is that as people grow older, they may withdraw from some activities, such as attending church, but at the same time show an increase in personal religious practice, such as Bible study or listening to religious TV and radio. The number of people who report praying “once a day” or “several times a day” increases steadily from age 55 to the highest levels among those over 75. By contrast, other empirical studies show declining frequency of church attendance after age 75, perhaps reflecting frailty and physical limitations among the old-old. Older people seem to disengage from some organized religious roles, but make up for this loss by intensifying their nonorganizational religious involvement—for
