Supporting Healthy Aging in a World of Longer Life Expectancy

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 kind 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 in 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. Hello, and welcome to The Art of aging which is part of the abundant agent podcast series from United Church homes. On this show, we look at what it means to age in America in and other places around the world with positive and empowering conversations that challenge, encourage and inspire everyone everywhere, as we say, ah with abundance. Today I am so pleased to welcome Laura Carstensen to the show. Laura is professor of psychology at Stanford University, where she is the fairleigh s Dickinson jr professor of public policy and founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. Her research on the theoretical and empirical study of motivational cognitive and emotional aspects of aging has been funded by the National Institute on Aging without interruption for more than 30 years. Maybe you’re just knocking up the hits or or, or aren’t elected members of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She served on the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on an aging society and was a commissioner on the global roadmap for healthy longevity. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the climber award, the Richard Kalish award for innovative research and distinguished mentors from both the Jericho Gerontological Society of America and the American Psychological Association. She is of course an author for a long, bright future happiness, health and financial security in an age of increased long longevity available now. Laura received her BS from the University of Rochester and her PhD in Clinical Psychology from West Virginia University. She holds an honorary doctorate from the I cannot pronounce it

Laura Carstensen 03:04
Cattolica

Michael Hughes 03:07
rolls off the tongue. It’s Holika University of Leuven in Belgium. Wow, LoRa Welcome to the show.

Laura Carstensen 03:12
Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. And

Michael Hughes 03:16
Just a reminder for listeners that this podcast series is sponsored by United Church homes is the Ruth Frost Parker center for abundant aging. To learn more about the center, including our annual symposium in October of each year, visit United Church homes.org backslash Harker hyphen center. Alright, so Laura, I gotta say, you know, you’ve been at this for a minute. I mean, you did this as it’s been, I find this area fascinating. What do you find fascinating? What’s driving your passion for this work?

Laura Carstensen 03:53
Well, my passion is really driven by a recognition of the opportunity that we have to sort of recraft life to really think about what a long life can look like and how to best use the added years of life. So we nearly doubled the length of our lives in the 20th century. And what this means is that there’s a mismatch between the length of our lives and the worlds into which we are born and how prepared they are to support century long lives. You know, the bottom line is they’re not. So we’re born into worlds that were literally built by and for young people. And what we need to do is to rapidly build a new world, a revised world that supports people all the way through 100 and sometimes beyond. That’s the challenge. And a lot of people are worried about aging societies and aging individuals and I share many concerns. But my passion to answer your question in this long winded way, is that we also have an unprecedented opportunity. And the opportunities to me outweigh the challenges. I have great confidence in science and technology and being able to better support longer lives to find cures for the diseases afflicting older people. I worry that we aren’t focusing enough on the great gift that longer lives are, and how we can use these years to improve not just the quality of life and old age, but the quality of life all the way through. Yeah.

Michael Hughes 05:43
And so it’s this concept of not just having more years, but more healthy years. And so, look, people are worried about things like dementia and Alzheimer’s. And I think that the estimate is that if you’re age 65, plus, your chances of getting Alzheimer’s are 10%. And, you know, when I say that to people, they actually think, wow, that’s low, I thought that that’s just an inevitable part of aging. So it’s, it’s an environment of great strides are being made in in Alzheimer’s, but it sounds like the greater challenge is not so much that the medical world will find it find a way to us, for us to have more of these healthy years, but just really the societal, at least in Western society, you know, just this, this, this, this trope, this reaction, this just this this outdated notion of older people, as just a homogenous group that needs to be taken care of.

Laura Carstensen 06:35
Right? Right. And again, this is the greatest danger as we squandered the gift, these extra years instead of making use of them. But people do have a lot of worry and concern. And again, it’s well justified. Dementia is a horrible disease that affects not only individuals but their families. But as you say, the majority of people will never get it. And you know, you said 10% of people 65 and older, it’s actually 3%, between 60 and 70. And then it goes to something like 5%, the issue is it goes up with age. So where you see higher rates as in people 85 years of age and older, the rates are 38%. Now, again, that’s nothing any of us should feel easy about, we should be concerned. On the other hand, that means that 62% of us won’t ever get dementia. And so thinking of dementia, as the thing that we have, you know, to face as we get older, is just inaccurate. And we need to focus on cures for diseases, but we also need to focus on, again, the opportunities that people have with longer healthy lives. Yeah,

Michael Hughes 07:57
yeah. And I think you know, more and more, I mean, I’m really privileged to be in the work that I am now because, you know, I have had more opportunities to meet and get to know people who are in their 90s. And there are hundreds. And the, you know, just seems like society either says, you know, when you’re there, you’re just Dottie, or, or, or you have to do these extraordinary things to kind of prove that you’re still like skydiving and things like that. But what I mean is, we have this notion of just people and their agency, with their desires, with their curiosity, with everything that kind of just drives them forward. It’s just these more years of life, I just think about all the implications it has for just the systemic systems that we have. I mean, let’s take work for example, you know, you have this notion of beginning, middle and end to your career, and then this notion of retirement, but I don’t think that’s a healthy aging view.

Laura Carstensen 08:56
I’ve been encouraging people lately to retire early. And often. That is to just stretch out our working lives. So that we work more years, but we also take breaks throughout our working lives. sabbaticals time to retrain time to try different things time to just take a break and rest. I think our model of work, again, is built on these lives that are half as long as the ones that we have today. So if life expectancy is 50, you don’t have a lot of time to do a lot of different things in your life, you’re gonna get an education, you’re gonna find a mate, a partner to live your life with, you might have a couple of kids, you’re going to work like a dog to support them. And then bingo, you retire, and you’re dead. I mean, that’s, that’s the life course, not a lot of time. So what we can do now is to think of how long we will work for 100 years, and that allows us also to relieve ourselves of some of the pressure of saving enough money in a working career. 40 years to not work for another 3040 years, 50 years, you know, we, that’s an enormous challenge. And most people simply can’t. You can’t deal with it, they can’t make that challenge. And so if we thought instead about working more and less at different times in our lives, it would also address some of the financial pressure. And

Michael Hughes 10:26
How does that work with education LoRa? I mean, if you think about it, if we think about just this, this, I think that I think everyone’s desired path, as we live our lives, is to do more of the things that we want, versus more of the things that we have to do. So if we’re working, and if we’re talking about someone who, you know, is, you know, growing up in, in a town where there’s a single industry that work in that industry, it has, it has a beginning, middle and an end, it’s kind of tough to sort of say, now I have to restore it, or are we starting hasn’t become a habit yet. So how does education play a role there? Yeah,

Laura Carstensen 11:02
Well, we also need to integrate education throughout our lives. Again, if we’re going to live to be 100, the idea that we finish our education at 20 doesn’t make a lot of sense. And it also clearly doesn’t make a lot of sense for working lives, because work changes and the demands on us change. So what we need to do is to find a way to integrate education and work together. But again, think of a life course, where you work for six months, and then you take a month off, and you take a course. And then you go back to that job. So what we’ll do is have a much more fluid back and forth between work and education. So that it doesn’t feel like a stark change. It’s really hard now for people if you retire, let’s say let’s say not even retire, let’s say you lose your job at 50. Most people who lose their job at 50, never get back into the workforce. And that’s, that’s the reflection of a number of different factors like ageism, but also that it’s just hard as you’re saying, it’s hard to go back and say now I’m going to start something very different, brand new. But if we were comfortable with learning and changing and revising our jobs throughout our lives, then that would feel much more comfortable to us and much more normal, and it would be better for our brains and our physical health. Yeah,

Michael Hughes 12:25
and it’s almost like it’s even if you choose to evolve yourself in the career that you have now, it’s kind of the you know, you become you sort of become proficient to a certain level. And then maybe if you’re working in an organization where you have other people, then you hand that off to the other person, I think somebody was a CEO, writing this to me once it’s like, yeah, my job is to learn the next thing in this industry, and then teach that to my people. So they can take it over. And then I go off to learn the next thing. And that’s a really hopeful, yeah, journey, you know, yeah,

Laura Carstensen 12:55
yeah. And that’s a really nice model for CEOs. Unfortunately, in most companies, you’re the CEO, and then it’s up and out, which is ridiculous.

Michael Hughes 13:05
But not CEOs do. But

Laura Carstensen 13:08
this is also true, this is also true. But we do tend to have linear paths through our careers now. And again, I think that would be great if that changed a little bit. So you’re getting better and better at one thing, you might shift to a very novel kind of a job or an organization where you’re applying some of the expertise you have. But learning something new. And I think that’s a great model, again, both for contributions and creativity, as well as cognitive health. People like to say that young people are the creative ones in life. And there’s really not any evidence that creativity declines with age. But people believe it does. I would guess, just and I don’t know, studies on this, but my best guess is that the most creative thinking would come from taking your deep expertise that you’ve been applying in one area, and now bring that deep expertise to a related but different kind of a challenge. That’s where you really just start to see sparks fly. And

Michael Hughes 14:24
I just want to give you a sort of an anecdote here is that, you know, we really do embrace Human Centered Design at United Church homes. And it’s a way of close co-creation with the people you aim to serve. And we started this investigation or just really trying to win over folks at United Church homes by starting this with our residents. So we have these two days what we call these idea thongs where we will offer up like $1,000 grants for the best ideas to enhance resident life in the community. And will put people through two extra days. The first day would be dreaming color wild ideas. How big could they get? At. And then the second day is really more about reductive thinking where we start to qualify them under constraints, and we improve them and I’ll just give the residents $1,000 and then go off and have a kid or they can actually do the idea, right. And they come up with wonderful ideas and and, and but I’m just saying, I do that same workshop with comparatively younger people. And the creative energy that I feel the vibe, it’s just the same. It’s the same people in their 90s that it is within so that’s a very hopeful story, and sort of supports your thesis of just, you know, just just these opportunities to continue. We could be a force and with this cushion of lived experience that I think is going to be a huge untapped resource.

Laura Carstensen 15:48
I’m with you, 100%!