commuters who could perfectly well afford to pay their own fare. In the US it is entirely normal to call people ‘Seniors’, and to offer them Senior discounts, for a period of what could, these days, end up being 30 years. Yet much of that period will be spent as Young-Old, not Old-Old.
What if, instead of defining people by how many birthdays they’ve enjoyed, we define them by how many years they have left? Obviously, that’s hypothetical. None of us can know individually when we will meet our end. But we do know the average. And if we apply that average, things look different.
If we defined old age as having 15 years or less left to live, we wouldn’t call many baby boomers ‘old’ until they hit 74. Up to that point they’d be middle-aged. This is a crude measure. Not everyone will be in good health at 74: some will need support. But it’s still a useful thought experiment, which has been carried out by a group of demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna.
The Austrians wanted to challenge the use of 65 as the onset of old age in Europe.15 First, they ran the numbers for remaining life expectancy. Next, they drew up a list of characteristics which we usually associate with being ‘old’, such as reduced mental agility and dependency on others. On this basis, across four different countries – Norway, Japan, Lithuania and the US – they concluded most baby boomers remain middle-aged until their mid-seventies.
The insight that chronological age is a poor way to classify who is ‘old’ came originally from the Canadian-American demographer Norman Ryder, who realised in the 1970s that expected lifespan is a better indicator than age of our need for state support: which is, after all, what the state is interested in.
‘If you don’t consider people old just because they reached age 65, but instead take into account how long they have left to live, then the faster the increase in life expectancy, the less ageing is actually going on,’ explains demographer Sergei Scherbov, leader of the Vienna study. ‘Two hundred years ago, a 60-year-old would have been a very old person,’ he tells me. ‘Someone who is 60 years old today, I would argue, is middle-aged.’
Scherbov is now working with the UN to redesign traditional measures of ageing, using what he calls ‘characteristic-equivalent ages’. In 2015, for example, the average Japanese woman of 65 could expect to live another 24 years. But the average woman in Nigeria had to be much younger – 46 – to get 24 more years life expectancy. To be equitable, their pensions would need to start at different ages.
Evolving lifespans should make governments careful about what signals they send, to encourage people to save enough. ‘You don’t need to tell a 25-year-old when their retirement should be,’ says Lord Turner. ‘If you tell them there is a fixed retirement age, you are not telling them that things are uncertain. It would be better to tell them, look right now you’re in a pension scheme which retires at 65, but that may change with life expectancy.’ Lord Turner has suggested making the pension more generous from 70, and means-testing other benefits before that age.16
Our Stereotypes Are Out of Date
Institutional signals of this kind are one reason why we have not caught up with the reality of Extra Time. Another is the media. We journalists are deeply confused about age.
In 2018, The Times gave a double-page spread to a French lady called Mylène Desclaux,17 who had published a book about how to be sexy at 50. The breathless article advised women never to give a birthday party after 49, to avoid wearing reading glasses which might give the game away and to change their first name if it sounded too dated. In other words, lie. At 50! What would she suggest women do at 70, I wondered?
If 50 is old to some journalists, 65 is beyond the pale. Sub-editors love to bung ‘pensioner’ into headlines, making the subject an object of pity no matter what the story. ‘Plucky Pensioner Patrols Crime-ridden Streets Armed Only with Torch’ was a recent headline in Cape Town, South Africa. ‘Plucky Pensioner Chases Bag Thieves’ was another in England’s Swindon Advertiser, about a 69-year-old who sprinted after a wallet thief. The implication, as usual, was that anyone brave and fit enough to do this at 69 was extraordinary. In fact, the multitude of stories entitled ‘plucky pensioner’, from all over the world, suggests to me that courage, energy and strength are not uncommon among people who are, in fact, in extended middle age.
The media also has a strange tendency to move from the active to the passive when describing the elderly. ‘She had a fall’, we report of a grandmother, rather than ‘she fell down’. We would never say that of George Clooney. So why do we demean older people in this way? Unconsciously, our language turns people into sub-humans, lesser beings. My mother used to loathe being called ‘dear’ by strangers: she felt she’d fallen into some void, some category of oldness which robbed her of her identity.
I’ve fallen into the same trap myself, by focusing on age when it was irrelevant. When I interviewed Margaret Atwood, bestselling Canadian novelist and author of The Handmaid’s Tale,18 I asked her how she felt about having 1.6 million followers on Twitter at the age of 77. Atwood, who is one of my heroines, shot back sharply: ‘It’s 1.75 million!’ I felt ashamed. She went on to say, ‘A lot of them are robots. You know they are robots when they send you a message saying, “I miss your great big dick”.’ That was her graceful way of telling me to stop being so bloody patronising. What was I thinking?
‘There is a casualness of ageism,’ says Professor Martin Green, CEO of Care England. ‘People say things they would never say if the word “old” was replaced by “gay” or “black”. They say silly old people, shouldn’t be driving. But 19-year-olds are worse drivers than 80-year-olds.’
‘Everybody ghettoises the old,’ says the broadcaster Joan Bakewell. ‘But the old is us.’ Bakewell, 85, is a poster girl for ageing well. She looks fabulous and has lost none of her sharpness. But when she presented the TV programme Life at 100 in 2017, she had to keep challenging the production team for referring to older viewers as ‘they’. ‘There shouldn’t be that distinction,’ she says. ‘We are all in this together.’
Language matters. Baroness Sally Greengross, a formidable campaigner for older people, told me about a friend in her eighties who went to hospital and was admitted to the ‘geriatric’ ward. ‘But I’m not geriatric!’ she protested furiously, as they wheeled her away down the corridor. ‘Take me somewhere else!’
Women are thought to suffer ageism earlier, and more consistently, than men.19 That’s partly because we care more about how women look. The multi-billion-pound cosmetic industry, with its claim to reverse ageing, may be doing more harm than good. Personally, I see nothing wrong with trying to avoid wrinkles. But advertising does feed off the idea that we are in a constant battle against ‘old’. If anti-ageing is becoming synonymous with being anti-old people, we have a problem.
Becca Levy, Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Psychology at the Yale School of Public Health, has found that individuals’ own health is influenced by their perceptions of what ageing is like. Her team followed several hundred Americans over 50 for 20 years, and found that those who held more positive views of ageing lived an astonishing 7.5 years longer than their peers.20
Negativity is rife. Broadcasters, galleries and museums spend hours worrying about how to reach more youthful audiences – despite the fact that older people have more time and money, and are growing in number. We value youth, tech and energy over wisdom and maturity, or so it seems.
The extreme youth of Silicon Valley plays into all of this. In 2014, the median age of Facebook employees was 29; at Amazon and Google it was 30. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg famously quipped, ‘Young people are just smarter.’ Many of us unthinkingly bought his line – just as
