Can We Prepare Ourselves for a Good Old Age? The Social Dimension
We know that life expectancy has increased enormously in recent years. To put this into context, let us recall that official projections indicate that by the year 2069, Spanish women may reach 90 years of age. Not just a fortunate few—since longevity is no longer a privilege reserved for a small minority—but many women will reach that age. And not only will we live longer, but the gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy will continue to narrow. Ensuring that the added years are lived in good health should go hand in hand with the goal of being able to enjoy those years under good conditions, beyond physical health (which is, of course, essential). What do I mean by this? What determines whether those added years are truly good?
When the media talk about quality aging, they usually refer almost exclusively to individual habits: physical activity, avoiding sedentary lifestyles, paying attention to what we eat, staying hydrated. While all of this is very important, I am struck by the scant attention paid to the social dimension or to the realm of public policies. The environment, for example (as I insist here), is key to how we age; think about Alzheimer’s disease: although it is associated with age, we know that pollution can cause very similar brain changes, equally harmful. In other words, there are public health factors, as well as issues of equity and social inequality, that shape our aging process. Among these factors, we must also consider how we relate to one another, how we inhabit our surroundings, and how we treat each other. However, although these structural dimensions are decisive, how we prepare—or fail to prepare—for old age also plays a role.
In this lack of preparation, one of the structural (perhaps structuring) problems is that there is no socialization for old age. In childhood, adolescence, or youth, we are prepared to work and to “be productive,” for adult life, but there is no equivalent process that prepares us for aging or for life beyond work. This is partly because the dramatic increase in life expectancy is recent, and partly because we tend to think we will deal with it “later.” Added to this is a deeply internalized and fierce ageism: we hold such a negative view of old age that we try to keep it as far away as possible, so we do not think about it. We know that we will age—if we are lucky—but it is hard for us to recognize ourselves in that reality, and so we do not think about our own future. Yet we need a kinder and more realistic view of aging in order to age well.
Aging, in reality, is a continuous process: every day we are a little older than the day before. We can understand this process as a loss or as a gain. Let us think, for example, about women: our relationship with our bodies, with our image, and with our abilities at age 40 is very different from what it was at age 20. Over the years, we tend to gain confidence and self-assurance, tools to deal with conflicts, and the ability to set boundaries—or to stop caring about certain things, which is a tremendous gain. Of course, new difficulties arise, but aging also brings learning, strengths, and freedoms. I insist: the alternative to aging is dying, so if we understand it as a stage of continued survival accompanied by learning, aging… is not so bad. Once we accept that aging is part of the life process, we can ask ourselves what actions facilitate a high-quality old age.
How, then, can we prepare ourselves for old age? Beyond the typical issues that a health magazine might point out, there are other, more subjective, more… internal elements, so to speak, such as self-perception and the limiting beliefs we carry with us. Our old age may come with certain limitations, but many of the barriers we encounter or will encounter are not so much in the body or the physical realm as in the mind—in what we think—forgetting that living many more years also opens up the possibility of doing many more things throughout life.
Within individual preparation, I would highlight the care of our social and emotional networks. In our daily lives, we very often relegate the social dimension to second place. We have so many obligations and so much self-demand—especially women, socialized to be “superwomen”: supermothers, superworkers, supercaregivers—that relational life, beyond the strictly familial, is forgotten and pushed into the background. Very little is said about this, about emotional well-being as something to be cultivated throughout the entire life course. We should pay attention to this aspect, because the dimension of relationships, friendship, and mutual support is at the heart of emotional well-being throughout life, including in old age. If we anchor ourselves solely in our obligations—work, caregiving, family responsibilities—when these disappear and stop structuring our daily lives (when we stop working, when children leave home), we may feel completely disoriented. And then that feeling of not finding our place appears. The place to which we anchor ourselves cannot be only what we produce or whom we care for: we also have to learn to care for ourselves and to build bonds that sustain us at every stage of life.
Within sociability, we continue to observe major difficulties in relationships between generations. The intergenerational dimension is still very underdeveloped, and we often design policies and services from a perspective that does not properly understand the needs of old age, of Middle Ages, or that assumes the needs of one age group are in opposition to those of others. Sometimes, behind this lack of adequacy lies prejudice, assuming that older people will not adapt to what other age groups need, forgetting that they are pioneering generations who have lived through very intense social, economic, technological, and political changes in a very short period of time—and that they are adapting at a considerable pace.
The conquest of old age, let us remember, has taken place in a context of very rapid change. We have gained many years of life in a very short time, but social structures continue to lag behind, moving more slowly. Human beings find it difficult to adapt to profound changes, especially those that challenge very basic norms we learned in childhood. Those norms are difficult to change, but it is not impossible. The key lies in reflecting on what kind of life we want as we gain years and in assuming that aging begins right now. It is not just about living many years, but about being able to live them in a way that is appealing to us, achieving old ages that are livable and dignified. And in this sense, individual preparation for better aging must become a collective project, so that more people can understand old age as a space worthy of being conquered and experienced.
