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by John Robbins
“Every young man,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, “believes he will live forever.” And the same could be said for every young woman. But whatever our beliefs and thoughts about life, there remains an undeniable and ever-present fact: We are, each and every one of us, growing older.
This is true in every country and among every people throughout the world, but the way different cultures have responded to this reality has varied widely.
For many of us in the industrialized world today, our aging is a source of grief and anxiety. We fear aging. The elderly people we see are for the most part increasingly senile, frail, and unhappy. As a result, rather than looking forward to growing old, we dread each passing birthday. Rather than seeing our later years as a time of harvesting, growth, and maturity, we fear that the deterioration of our health will so greatly impair our lives that to live a long life might be more of a curse than a blessing.
When we think of being old, our images are often ones of decrepitude and despair. It seems more realistic to imagine ourselves languishing in nursing homes than to picture ourselves swimming, gardening, laughing with loved ones, and delighting in children and nature.
In 2005, the famed American author Hunter S. Thompson took his life. He was only sixty-seven, and had no incurable disease. He was wealthy and famous, and his thirty-two-year-old wife loved him. But according to the literary executor of Thompson’s will, “he made a conscious decision that he . . . wasn’t going to suffer the indignities of old age.”
It doesn’t help to live in a society where there is so little respect for the elderly. Television shows and movies frequently portray older people as feeble, unproductive, grumpy, and stubborn. Advertisements selling everything from alcohol to cars feature beautiful young people, giving the impression that older people are irrelevant. Colloquialisms such as “geezer,” “old fogey,” “old maid,” “dirty old man,” and “old goat” demean the elderly and perpetuate a stereotype of older people as unworthy of consideration or positive regard.
Greeting card companies routinely sell birthday cards that mock the mobility, intellect, and sex drive of the no longer young. Novelty companies sell “Over-the-Hill” products such as fiftieth-birthday coffin gift boxes containing prune juice and a “decision maker to assist in planning daily activities” (a large six-sided die, with sides labeled “nap,” “TV,” “shopping,” etc.). Gifts for a man’s sixtieth birthday include a “lifetime supply” of condoms (one), Over-the-Hill bubble bath (canned beans), and “Old Fart” party hats.
We may chuckle at such humor, but negative stereotypes about aging are insidious. They attach a social stigma to aging that can affect your will to live and even shorten your life. In a study published by the American Psychological Association, Yale School of Public Health professor Becca Levy, Ph.D., concluded that even if you are not aware of them, negative thoughts about aging that you pick up from society can undermine your health and have destructive consequences.
In the study, a large number of middle-aged people were interviewed six times over the course of twenty years and asked whether they agreed with such statements as “As you get older, you are less useful.” Remarkably, the perceptions held by people about aging proved to have more impact on how long they would live than did their blood pressure, their cholesterol level, whether they smoked, or whether they exercised. Those people who had positive perceptions of aging lived an average of 7.5 years longer than those with negative images of growing older.
Negative images not only lead to compromised health and shortened lives—they also are distressing in the present. Dr. Levy’s study found that people with negative perceptions of aging were more likely to consider their lives worthless, empty, and hopeless, while those with more positive perceptions of aging were more likely to view their lives as fulfilling and hopeful.
When we are disrespectful to older people and make them invisible, we attempt to ignore the aging process we are experiencing. We hide its signs and look away from the longer-term consequences of our lifestyles. As a result, we make lifestyle choices that may make sense in the short term but take a heavy toll in the end.
I asked a friend recently how he thought he might age. “I’ll probably end up in a nursing home somewhere,” he replied with some bitterness, “with a feeding tube in my nose, staring at the acoustic squares in the ceiling, incontinent, impotent, and impoverished.” Sadly, such views are not unusual. I’ve seen bumper stickers that say “Avenge Yourself: Live Long Enough to Become a Burden to Your Children.” When you distrust the aging process, it’s hard to imagine yourself enjoying your older years, doing things like dancing, jogging, or hiking. It can be difficult even to consider the possibility that you might, during every phase of your lifetime, have the capacity for growth, change, and creativity.
In the last hundred years we’ve added nearly thirty years to the average life expectancy in the industrialized world, but for many older adults the later years are not a time of happiness and well-being. A century ago, the average adult in Western nations spent only 1 percent of his or her life in a morbid or ill state, but today’s average modern adult spends more than 10 percent of his or her life sick. People are living longer today, but all too often they are dying longer, too—of chronic diseases that cause debility and cognitive impairment.
By 2025, the annual cost of managing chronic conditions in the United States will exceed a trillion dollars. Already, half of those age sixty-five and over have two or more chronic diseases, and a quarter have problems so severe as to limit their ability to perform one or more activities of daily living. Meanwhile, the average age of the chronically ill is continually getting younger. Throughout the industrialized world, people are living longer, but they are getting sick sooner, so the number of years they spend chronically ill is actually increasing in both directions.
Sometimes I think we have not so much prolonged our lives as prolonged our dying. While we have extended the human life span, we have not extended the human health span.
The Age Wave
As our older people are getting less and less well, their numbers are growing, and this process is about to shift into hyperdrive. As author Ken Dychtwald has described in his seminal book Age Power, there are at this very moment approximately eighty million baby boomers in the United States barreling toward old age. (The term “baby boomer” generally refers to people born between 1945 and 1960.)
In 1900, there were only 3 million people in the United States who were sixty-five or older. By 2000, the number had leaped to 33 million.
A century ago in the United States, the odds of living to the age of 100 were less than one in five hundred. Now the Census Bureau expects that one in twenty-six baby boomers will reach that age. Today, the likelihood that a twenty-year-old American will have a living grandmother (91 percent) is higher than the likelihood that a twenty-year-old in 1900 had a living mother (83 percent).
This advancing age wave is the most significant demographic event of our lifetime, and it is taking place in every industrialized nation in the world. About half of all people who have ever lived past the age of sixty-five are alive today.
In Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Venezuela, the percentage of elderly persons in the population is projected to double between 2000 and 2025.5 China is expected to be home to 332 million oldsters by midcentury. That’s more elderly people in a single country than inhabited the entire planet as recently as 1990.
According to the United Nation’s Population Division, roughly 10 percent of the world’s 6.4 billion people are today over sixty. By 2050, 20 percent of the planet’s 10 billion human beings will be over sixty. By then there will be nearly 2 billion people in the world sixty years of age and older. This is a number roughly equal to one-third of the entire current global human population.
This increased longevity would be a blessing if it were accompanied by increased health and wisdom, but sadly it often is not. Close to half of all Americans over the age of eighty-five have Alzheimer’s disease. The toll taken by Alzheimer’s and other chronic diseases on the old is increasing so much today that the average twenty-first-century American will likely spend more years caring for parents than for children.
By 2040, it is estimated that 5.5 million Americans—more than the entire current population of Denmark—will live in nursing homes. Another 12 million—equal to the combined populations of Israel, Singapore, and New Zealand—will require ongoing homecare services. Many will spend their final decades struggling with loneliness and depression.
Although modern medicine is eminently equipped to prolong life, it seems to be far less able to promote healthy aging. What good will it do us, asked a comedian in 2004, if at some point in the future, the human life span is extended to two hundred years, but the last hundred and fifty years are spent in unremitting pain and sadness?
An ancient Greek fable tells of Aurora, the beautiful goddess of the dawn, falling deeply in love with a human being—the warrior Tithonus. Distraught over his mortality, Aurora requests a special favor from Zeus, the supreme ruler of Mount Olympus and of the pantheon of gods who reside there. She begs Zeus to grant her lover eternal life.
Zeus, foreseeing trouble, asks her if she is certain that this is what she wants. “Yes,” she responds.
At first, Aurora is delighted that Zeus has granted her request. But then she realizes that she neglected to ask that Tithonus also remain eternally young and healthy. With each passing year, she looks on with horror as her lover grows older and sicker. His skin withers, his organs rot, his brain grows feeble. As the decades pass, Tithonus’s aging body becomes increasingly decrepit, yet he cannot die. Ultimately the once proud warrior is reduced to a wretched collection of painful, foul, and broken bones—but he continues to live forever.
More Life, More Health
It has been said that we can destroy ourselves with negativity just as effectively as with bombs. If we see only the worst in ourselves, it erodes our capacity to act. If, on the other hand, we are drawn forward by a positive vision of how we might live, we can shrug off the cynicism that has become fashionable today and build truly healthy lives.
It is extraordinarily important for us today to replace the prevailing image and reality of aging with a new vision—one in which we grasp the possibility of living all our days with exuberance and passion. There are few things of greater consequence today than for us to bring our lives into alignment with our true potential for health and our dreams for a better tomorrow.
It is a sad loss that our medical model has been so focused on illness rather than wellness. Until recently, there has been so much preoccupation with disease that little attention has been paid to the characteristics that enable people to lead long and healthy lives and to be energetic and independent in their elder years. As a result, few of us in the modern world are aware that there have been, and still are, entire cultures in which the majority of people live passionately and vibrantly to the end. Few of us realize that there are in fact societies of people who look forward to growing old, knowing they will be healthy, vital, and respected.
There are many people today who want to live in harmony with their bodies and the natural forces of life. You may be one of them. If so, it’s helpful to understand that you are not alone, and that you have elders from whom you can learn how to accomplish your goals. There are cultures whose ways have stood the test of time that can stand as teachers on the path of wellness and joy. There are whole populations of highly spirited, vigorous people who are healthy in their seventies, eighties, nineties, even healthy at a hundred. What’s more, they have a great deal in common, and their secrets have been corroborated and to a large extent explained by many of the latest findings in medical science. New research is showing that we have all the tools to live longer lives and to remain active, productive, and resourceful until the very end.
This is good and hopeful news. It offers us a much-needed paradigm of aging as a period of wisdom and vitality. Through these healthy cultures, we can and a compelling vision of how to mature with pleasure, dignity, purpose, and love. We are being shown that something precious is possible—a far brighter future in which aging is enjoyable and desirable. And we are being shown the practical steps we can take to achieve it.
Aging, of course, is not something that begins on your sixty-fifth birthday. Who you will become in your later years is shaped by all the choices you make, all the ways you care for yourself, how you manage your life, even how you think, from your earliest years, about your future. I have written Healthy at 100 because I have seen too many people grow old in agony and bitterness while others grow old with vitality and beauty, and I know it is possible to age with far more vigor, happiness, and inner peace than is the norm in the Western world today.
No one familiar with my earlier work will be surprised that I am interested in how our diets and exercise can help us to live long and healthy lives. But they may be surprised by some of my findings, including the great emphasis I am now placing on strong social connections. I have learned that the quality of the relationships we have with other people makes a tremendous difference to our physical as well as emotional health. Loneliness, I discovered in my research, can kill you faster than cigarettes. And by the same token, intimate relationships that are authentic and life-affirming can have enormous and even miraculous healing powers. In this book you will and why this is so, and gain clarity about the various essential steps you can take to extend both your life span and your health span dramatically. Reading this book will not only help you add many years to your life, but also help make those added years—and indeed all your remaining years—ones in which you experience the blossoming of your finest and wisest self.
Even if you’ve eaten poorly and have not taken very good care of yourself, even if you’ve had more than your share of hardships and pain, this book will show you how the choices you make today and tomorrow can greatly improve your prospects for the future. It will give you a chance to right any wrongs you’ve committed against your body. You’ll see how to regain the strength and passion for life that you may have thought were gone forever.
Whether you are in your twenties or your eighties or somewhere in between, whether you consider yourself superbly fit or hopelessly out of shape, I believe you’ll and in these pages what you need in order to regenerate rather than degenerate as the years unfold. This book will show you how to regain, and to retain, more mental clarity, physical strength, stamina, and joy.
I have written Healthy at 100 to offer you ways to enhance and improve both the quality and quantity of your remaining years. In this book are steps you can take to shatter stereotypes and misconceptions about aging and to rejuvenate your mind and body. Here are practices you can start today in order to live with greater health and joy no matter what your age.
In our youth-oriented culture, aging is often a source of great suffering. Older people frequently start to see themselves as collections of symptoms rather than whole human beings. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It is within your grasp to realize the opportunities for beauty, love, and fulfillment that occur at every stage of your life. It is possible to live your whole life with a commitment to your highest good. I have written Healthy at 100 so that you can learn how to make each and every one of the years of your life more full of vitality and joy, and more worth living, than you may ever have imagined.
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