years of age. They did not look at how life continues to develop after that point. They tended to say life was going toward decay and illness from this point and not worthy of studying. Vaillant and a few others have discovered that it is just the opposite for many people.
Vaillant offers the best evidence of what makes for healthy aging. Part of what he does in this book is to chronicle his own changing attitudes toward aging as he interviewed most of the people still alive in these studies. Early in the book he quotes Betty Friedan who, in her seventies, wrote, “We have barely even considered the possibilities in age for new kinds of loving intimacy, purposeful work and activity, learning and knowing, community and care…. For to see age as a continued human development involves a revolutionary paradigm shift.” (The Fountain of Age)
Vaillant’s book reports on three groups:
1. “A sample of 268 socially advantaged male Harvard graduates born about 1920.” This is the study he has been the most involved in personally over the years, publishing a couple of books on them earlier in his career. He was ready to stop writing about them or studying them once they hit their mid-sixties until a member of this group challenged him to go further and not give in to the stereotypical view of aging as a downhill slide.
2. A group of “456 socially disadvantaged Inner City men born about 1930.”
3. “A sample of 90 middle-class, intellectually gifted women born about 1910.”
We refer to this book more in Chapter 6, but here is a summary of four of his findings on retirement and aging as a rewarding experience.
• First, people kept adding new friends to their lives. If study members had not added a new friend to their lives in the last ten years, they were not usually aging well. What this meant is that they had not replaced social contacts at work with involvement in other activities that allowed new friendships to develop.
• Second, they knew how to play, whether it was competitive activities like bridge or some other more physical activity that got them out and about in life. The focus was not on “being the best” but just being involved in fun activities.
• Third, they were involved in a continuing form of creativity.
• Fourth, they had a pattern of life-long learning.
Vaillant quotes one man (in his 80s) who typified what he meant about these four retirement activities.
In the last ten years we have made a great many (40-60) new friends, about 30-40 of whom we feel very close to. We have been welcomed into a play reading group, a bowling group and into the local yacht and beach club. These folks brought food and flowers, etc. during my recent illness. Several came over voluntarily to perform tasks that I could not do such as getting stuff put away when the hurricane threatened and getting our vegetable garden ready for winter. We have felt extremely close to these folks for four to five years. I also think that I am closer to my brother and sister-in-law and to my wife’s brother than I was in 1990. (pg. 225)
Other research is bearing out Vaillant’s findings about the new life people discover in retirement. This is not based on income, race, or social standing. The successful retirees are across the board. People at each socio-economic level do well in retirement along with those who don’t do so well.
In addition to the four areas of growth above, Vaillant lists six personal qualities that he found in the people who were aging well. Almost universally, they:
1. Cared for others
2. Tolerated the “indignities of old age” with grace and accepted their dependency on others as needed
3. Remained hopeful about their possibilities in life and were realistically autonomous in pursuing them
4. Had a great sense of humor and found things to laugh about nearly every day
5. Got sustenance from memories of the past as well as engaging in new learning
6. Maintained intimate contact with old friends as well as family
In an earlier report (in the 1990s) on his study of Harvard men, Vaillant said one surprising result was that the men who had the best relationship with their siblings were also the healthiest men in his study. This is not a surprise to us. Good family relationships, or improving relationships, are a sign of the kind of emotional maturity it takes to age well. Those who go into older age still feeling bitter and cut off from other family members generally do not age well, as Ron often observed in his therapy practice.
The Characteristics of Happiness
The nature of one’s character is central to the question of happiness. In the first ten years of our working life, over forty years ago, we lived in the inner-city neighborhoods of two middle-sized cities in the eastern United States. We lived among and worked with some very poor people. We ourselves were in a low income bracket. However, we were happy and knew many happy people. We met people of character who were not depressed by their relative poverty or run down by their living conditions. They were never going to have the luxury of planning a life in retirement in quite the style of most of you reading this book. However, because they lived a principled life, and had strong virtues of character, they were sure to be happy in their old age.
Certainly, having an adequate level of income is one factor in happiness. We cannot discount this. Studies indicate that as a retired couple in the U.S. moves toward having a minimum annual income of about $50,000, they report being increasingly happy. After that level, the relation between income and reported happiness slowly begins to level off.
Other factors that research indicates are important include a sense of meaning in life, having good relationships with important people in our lives, and doing things that we define, in our own terms, as pleasurable. Some form of spirituality seems to be important to most people, but many atheists report high levels of happiness. Happy people have high levels of gratitude, live hopeful and optimistic (rather than cynical and pessimistic) lives, and engage in the challenges of life around them, rather than withdrawing from life.
Altruism is another characteristic. Many of those who report being happy seem to have embodied some version of John F. Kennedy’s famous statement, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” In other words, they are not looking for people to do for them, but they are looking for what they can do for others. This is one aspect of good character.
Character, Happiness, Planning, and Retirement
It might seem that we are making retirement sound like work. That may be true to the extent that being a better person and living a better life requires work. However, the payoff of happiness and satisfaction with one’s life makes it worthwhile.
The psychologist Erik Erikson, who studied the human life cycle, described the time of retirement as a psychological battle between integrity and despair. One aspect of retiring is a tendency to look back at what we have done with our lives and ask, on balance, “Has it been a life of integrity? Can I feel good about my life?” If it has not been a life well lived, then we are tempted to despair, feeling as if we may have wasted our lives.
In the Third Age, we are still creating our lives. Life is not over. Part II of this book has some life review exercises. Doing these will give you clues for how to proceed with your planning in this new part of life. Of course, this stage of life is not simply about looking back. Retirement is a transition to a
