Rethinking Societal Norms in the New Map of Life

Michael Hughes  00:04

Hello, and this is Mike. I’m one of the hosts of the Abundant Aging podcast.

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins  00:08

And this is Beth on the other host for the podcast. And I think this is the first time, Mike, that you and I have appeared together on the podcast.

Michael Hughes  00:16

But it’s certainly not the last time, Beth, and we’re looking forward to some upcoming shows where you and I can really unpack some of the foundational tropes of ageism. And I think hopefully use that as a great foundation leading into our symposium in October, right?

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins  00:30

Absolutely. It’ll be October 4 2020 For this year, and more information and teasing about that, in the upcoming weeks. In the meantime, we’re taking a little bit of a summer break here, and I’m going to invite you to revisit some of the fantastic conversations that we’ve had over the course of the past year or so.

Michael Hughes  00:51

That’s right. So absolutely, make sure to stay tuned and listen to more of great content that you’ve already enjoyed. And please send us your ideas for future guests, future episodes, whatever you need to share, or whatever you’d like to share at abundant ag podcast.com. Looking

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins  01:07

forward to hearing from you and to providing new episodes coming a little bit later this summer. Thanks all for participating and, and listening and being with us here on the abundant aging podcast.

Michael Hughes  01:22

Thanks for listening, I’ll look forward to seeing you guys back in the fall on your truck with a new map. But the current map of life is that I’m a baby. I’m a toddler. I’m a child, I’m an adolescent. I am an adult, I’m middle aged, you know, do you see a future where it will just be adolescence for longer? Or will I be middle aged for longer? I mean, what do you think about that?

Laura Carstensen  01:51

Yeah, there’s a lot of thinking we need to do about where to put the 30 extra years we were handed. So far, we tacked them all on at the end, and only old age got longer. I’ve been asking people for years, if you could make any stage in life longer, or you could put added years anywhere you wanted, where would you put them. And no one has ever said I would make old age longer. But that’s what we have done so far. So we have used these years in the least imaginative way possible. And it’s a way that puts a lot of strain on societal institutions and families and individuals to prepare for these really long stretches of life. But I like the idea of moving away from stages. And using added years so that we have more flexibility, the model that you just described, which clearly is the prevailing model of human development as we go through stages. And the idea of stages, though, is that you never go backwards. You’re you’re you’re you’re not a child, and then you become a toddler. Again, you’re not middle aged, and then you become a young adult. But I think we might want to rethink that so that we use these longer lives to be able to have more flexibility, and what we do when so today, you’re not you’re not expected to be a student. When you’re 60. Why not? So we could begin to think of those things and explore. We think of that as, as a youthful kind of an exercise, go trekking around the world and see new things and explore places that you should do in your 20s. Well, why? Maybe, but maybe you want to do that in your 60s and do a little of it in your 20s and a little of it later. So I would like us instead of thinking of a way to come up with a new script that’s relatively rigid, to instead say, what are the different routes we can take with this new map of life?

Michael Hughes  04:00

And that’s it. So I’m a terrible interviewer because I should have just asked you at the beginning to explain what this new map of life is.

Laura Carstensen  04:10

Thank you, okay. When we founded the Center on Longevity in 2007, we founded it based on three different divisions. One was called Mind which included cognition, but also a sense of a motion of well being and purpose. One is mobility. But that was really functional health and the other was financial security. And we thought these are three legs of a stool and if we could share them all up, we’d be good to go. You know, people will do well in old age. I still think there’s a lot of truth to that. But what we found and the first, you know, decade of our work was that every time we went to work on a project within one of those areas, it drew on the others. You have a really hard time Gaining and sustaining financial security if you’re in poor health, or if you are cognitively impaired, and if you’re cognitively impaired, you’re more likely to suffer physically in other ways. So they weren’t cleanly divided. And, and the reason we had done that early on is we were encouraged by our friends and colleagues around the world and at the university to focus. I mean, I, I hear the voices still in my head saying LoRa, you have to focus, you know, you can’t do everything, you got to say I’m, we’re just going to do A, B, and C, and you can’t do it all. And I really took that to heart. And I believed it and followed it for a long time. And one morning, I woke up, and I thought to myself, we need to boil the ocean. With apologies to the climate scientists, we do need to do it all. And it’s because it’s all connected. And it’s not just as individuals connected, it’s also societal structures, again, social norms that tell us when we’re going to do things and not do things we need, we need to really rethink how we live our lives. And we can’t just say we’re gonna do something different financially, we can’t just say we’re gonna do it differently in terms of our careers, unless we think about other parts of that, like family, and education, environmental support for us, so we have to think about all of it. And it was that realization that really pushed us toward the new map of life. The other thing, the last the, the last sort of experience that I had in my colleagues had that really made us reconsider. Broadly, what we were doing is we had done a survey in conjunction with Time Magazine. And one of the questions we asked people was, what are your goals and dreams for living to 100? Top two responses where I hope I don’t have dementia. And I hope I haven’t run out of money. And I looked at those findings and thought, we need to raise that bar. Right? Of course, we need to do those things. But that shouldn’t be at the top of the list of our dreams, you know, we’re gonna go if we have to do that. Yes. But if we only have this kind of white knuckled approach, I hope I don’t have this, I hope I don’t, that doesn’t happen to me. Again, we miss the opportunity that’s right in front of us to do better, to do bigger things. And so we had a meeting in 2018. About half of the people we invited were academics from every discipline you can imagine from economics to medicine, psychology, sociology, on and on. And about the other half were from outside academics, people from industries like automotive industries, financial services, but also philanthropy, small businesses, people in education, public schools, and we brought them together. And we said, We want you to do two things. One is to imagine a thriving century long life. And the second thing is to begin to say, how would we get the majority of people there? First of all, we know we can have thriving 100 year lives because as you have noticed, also, a lot of people are already doing that. The question is, how do we build a world so most people reach 100? Doing? Well? That’s, that’s the challenge. And so then we started to come up with all these different ways we would need to live life. And we began to think of it as a map. Where would we go? Where would we make changes? How would we live our lives differently? If we were starting from scratch and saying, I want you to map out 100 years versus I want you to map out 50 Because that map of 50 is the map that’s still guiding us today, even though we may live to be 100. So that was the idea. And we left this meeting and I was walking down the stairs from the building where we’d had the meeting and commenting to a friend that it was the most interesting meeting I’ve ever been at. And we quickly agreed that all we did for two days was to provide a nice experience for a bunch of relatively privileged people. This was a failure. And so we somehow raised enough money . This was such a gift somehow from heaven. We raised enough money to appoint nine postdoctoral fellows the following year, and they came from nine areas that were identified in this meeting. as parts of life that would need to change. And each one of them did a deep dive report on that domain from work education, environmental exposures, things like this. And then we integrated those reports across these very different disciplines, and came up with a number of insights that were common sort of across their different analyses. And when we put them together, we begin to call it and describe the story of this effort as the new map of life. We are now appointing our third cohort of postdoctoral fellows. And they have been amazingly wonderful. And we’re really making headway and finding some solutions for living long lives.

Michael Hughes  10:53

I think that’s wonderful. Because, you know, it strikes me that you know, you are, what you’re boiling the ocean, I understand. But the thing is, you’re starting from a point of certainty, you know, God, God forbid, you know, something happens to the world. But, I mean, one of the most predictive things, I think, outside of climate change, I think the most productive thing is the age wave. This, this, this, this place that we found ourselves through, that we know for certainty that there will be X number of people moving into the 90s, and hundreds, and that we know that a good proportion of them are just doing their thing, you know, and so we know it’s there. But at the same time, and I’m going to sort of, quote, Bob Kramer, who we’ve had on the show before, and Bob’s terrific said, you know, you’ve got people who essentially have no example of people living this way. I mean, everybody, people in their 90s, and hundreds, he said, are genuinely surprised that they have lived as long as they have, they’ve sort of taken anything that they can get just because you’re grateful for, you know, for whatever, upbringing. And so it just seems that there’s just not enough examples of people of normality, into the 90s, and hundreds, right. So we have to really celebrate and highlight just those normal stories, right?

Laura Carstensen  12:10

Absolutely. I tell people, they’re the pioneers. But they didn’t sign up for it. People who are in their 90s, today didn’t have any real reason to think that they were going to make it to 90 because their ancestors didn’t make it to 90. And so a lot of people came to old age by surprise. They’re surprised they’re still around. But current generations don’t can’t get away with that surprise anymore. We have some good confidence in what the population will look like in the future, just as you just described. And so we need to begin to plan. There’s an economist Andrew Scott, a good friend of mine, he’s a wonderful thinker. And he just published a book about Aging and Longevity. And one of the things he says is, it’s, it’s kind of like listening to the weather report. If you hear that there’s a 4% chance of rain. You don’t necessarily need to take an umbrella or your raincoat. You hear it’s 20%. And you kind of go, Well, you know, maybe I’ll hook it over the back of my chair, maybe I’ll remember maybe not, when they tell you there’s an 80% chance of rain. You bring your raincoat and your umbrella. That’s where we are today with longevity. True, it might not happen, it might not rain, but we need to be prepared for much longer lives.

Michael Hughes  13:39

Yeah, very well said. And you know, what, what occurs to me is that you know, with the, the the asset that you build, you may your body may start to disappoint yourself, it’s yourself, you may have limitations, you may you may, you know, sit around with your friends all day and talk about your medical problems, because guess what they’re important and you want to, you know, you want that emotional support. But it seems to me that we build this very valuable asset in terms of lived experience. And in all, in many non western societies that’s recognized and valued as being an elder and it doesn’t seem to be present in Western society. And here we are, by the way that we are recording this in June of 2024. And we it’s an election year, and I’m just wondering, just in your research, have you found really the benefits of this experience like how it may complement evolved, and just really be an asset to society. And I’ll mention this and I, you know, I’m gonna sound self important as I read The Economist.

Laura Carstensen  14:45

It’s a great journal.

Michael Hughes  14:48

There was an article just about this subject, and they were talking about the leader political leadership, you know, and and, you know, if you look at history, and I don’t know like the Spartans or the Romans and although You know, we hear a lot about the wars because that’s what they happen. But it’s like, Hey, look at all the wars that happened back then. And look at who was leading those, those societies there are men, predominantly in their 30s and 40s, that may not have had calm heads that may have not built that resilience up, do you see? What do you see in terms of loop experience as that asset?

Laura Carstensen  15:27

Emotional Development is one of the most positive aspects of aging. With age, people are slower to anger, more likely to feel grateful, more likely to have deep, rich emotional experiences where you’re smiling, but you also have a tear in the eye because you know, this won’t go on forever. There is a richness to emotional life in advanced years that we don’t see, and and at younger ages. And I think that’s because so much of it has to do with perspective. A, you can’t have the perspective of how things have changed over many decades, when you haven’t been alive many decades. It’s just, you know, it’s impossible. And I don’t mean to diminish anything about the emotional lives of younger people, but that part of that quality of understanding and a deep, emotional way that time passes, life doesn’t go on forever, things come and go. That’s something that to be able to really feel that is something that generally takes decades to come about. And older people have that. So I believe that when we’re thinking about leaders of countries, having that quality is a great asset. It is not the only important asset. I don’t know how anybody keeps up the physical pace that our leaders do presidents traveling, you know, all over the world. Every week, they’re somewhere else I don’t know about you, boy, when I travel, and I’m in, you know, 10 hours, time zone difference. I don’t know, I’m not feeling great every minute. And they’re doing it all the time. I don’t know how they do it. So there’s a physicality to it. Certainly younger people have that advantage over older people, the physical strength and, and vitality, cognitively. We don’t see nearly as much change with age as people believe it’s there. And I think that’s largely because of something you and I were talking about a few minutes ago, and that’s Alzheimer’s disease. We don’t know how to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease. Before symptoms appear, we know the disease starts long decades, years before symptoms appear. And so in the research on cognitive aging, where the older our samples are, the more people are going to be in it, who are in those early stages of dementia. What that results in is an exaggeration of the kind of cognitive problems that people may face as they age, you’re going to have very significant cognitive problems. If you have dementia, you’re going to have relatively mild cognitive impairment or slowing if you have a healthy brain and most of us do. This is a long winded way of saying I think we’re exaggerating cognitive decline. But we do see some changes in cognition, like the speed of processing new information, retrieving words, especially names. I wouldn’t remember my name if I didn’t see it on a screen at the time. You know, it’s like, but the words come to us, they just come later. It’s not that we forgot them in some way. The retrieval is slower. So that’s the cognitive change. And then you have emotional assets, the emotional changes are improvements, and emotional stability, emotional balance. So you put those things together, physicality, cognition, and the ability to make wise decisions based largely on experience and perspective and emotion. And what we need to do is to evaluate people individually across all of those, the areas when we want to elect leaders. It’s troublesome for us to say or troublesome to me when I hear people say we should have an age limit on leadership, because there will be people and their 70s and 80s Who should not be serving high pressure For cognitively demanding jobs, but there’ll be a lot of them who are as well suited or better suited than anybody else available for the position. So if we see tremendous variability or heterogeneity in aging, and the idea that age is going to be the determinative factor is just not supported by data or evidence. We need to consider individuals when we think about different kinds of leadership positions.