A word of caution: These predictions are about statistics and averages – which means that they don’t apply directly to everyone. An example is smoking: smoking makes it much more likely that you will get certain diseases – but this doesn’t apply directly to everyone; so we get the reaction of, “My aunt/uncle smoked until they were 90 and it didn’t seem to do them any harm”. You can do everything right and still get sick (or are run over by a bus). These are statistical findings they apply to groups not to any particular individual. Having said that: there are some things that have been found to predict a healthier old age and some that do not.

These finding are from three longitudinal studies – the people were followed for fifty years and so there is good information on how they lived and the consequences that it had for them. The results of these three studies are reported in George Vaillants’ Ageing Well.

Firstly there are six factors – some quite surprising – that do not predict a healthy old age.
1. Hereditary. What you do matters more than the age of your parents.
2. Cholesterol (unless you have had a heart attack).
3. Stress. It may be unpleasant and cause ill health while you are experiencing it but you can recover to have a healthy old age.
4. Parental characteristics and upbringing (intelligence, social class, stability of marriage). While these things may affect our lives into middle adulthood by the time we are in old age they do not predict our health or happiness.
5. Childhood temperament. This may influence us well into adulthood. But by old age seems to make no difference to our happiness – perhaps because by then we learn to live with it or shape our lives to suit ourselves (?).
6. Emotional and social ease. These have influence into adulthood – but not into old age.

There are seven factors found that did predict a healthy old age.
1. Not smoking at all or stopping when young. This was THE single biggest factor for a healthy old age. ‘Nuff said.
2. Mature responses. That is coping with life’s difficulties through delay of gratification, humour, altruism and sublimation. This was even more important than,
3. Not abusing alcohol.
4. Healthy weight.
5. Stable marriage. Good for both physical and psychosocial health.
6. Some exercise. Good for both physical and psychosocial health.
7. Years of Education (probably due to self-care and perseverance).

For me these findings are very encouraging. With the usual portion of luck (not getting run over by buses and so forth) a healthy and happy old age is something that lies within our power.

If you like this post you might also like the others in this series.

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As we go through life we learn our preferences and we shape our lives accordingly to the extent that we can: where we live, who we build friendships with, the kind of work we do and much else besides.

As we age we also develop favourite ways of responding to the unexpected (whether pleasant or disappointing). Life has a way of being unexpected and we develop ways of responding to this.

These ways of responding have been studied by George Vaillant in his book Ageing Well (it is a report on three longitudinal studies of how people aged throughout their lives).

In Ageing Well George lists ways of responding that he categorises as immature and mature. (I have some problems with this kind of evaluation but I’ll get to that later.) The immature responses are:

projection
passive aggression
dissociation
acting out, and,
fantasy

A word of explanation about what these mean. Projection is when I project what is in me onto someone else – the pot calling the kettle black. (E.g. how come when I haven’t had enough sleep everyone else is grumpy.) Passive aggression is punishing by not doing (E.g. not cleaning up instead of telling someone I live with that I am angry with them). Dissociation is standing at one remove from the situation – flipping out. (E.g. maintaining a ‘polite distance’.) Acting out is when my behaviour is motivated by my feelings and has no regard for others around me – I don’t care that others haven’t done anything bad to me, I’m in a bad mood because of what happened before. (E.g. I take out my bad day at the office on those at home – or vice versa.) Fantasy is imagining that things are other than they are as a way of getting through the normal – Walter Mitty. (E.g. I imagine being praised for my work – even though it isn’t particularly praiseworthy).

The mature responses are:

Sublimation
Altruism
Suppression, and,
Humour

A word of explanation about what these terms mean. Sublimation is directing one kind of energy in a different direction or to a different end. E.g. I put the frustration felt after an unsatisfactory conversation into chopping wood. Altruism can be working so that some people don’t have to suffer as we suffered (someone who has experienced homelessness may work in a shelter or soup kitchen). Suppression is delaying reward instead of being impulsive – not denying the desire but being willing to put in the work to satisfy it. Humour as a way of removing the sting from an unpleasant situation.

I think the immature responses can sometimes be quite healthy and that the mature ones can sometimes be destructive. I want to investigate this a little by asking: What’s the difference? It seems to me that the difference between the two lists is that the mature stays with what is and that the immature flips out of the situation and goes somewhere else. From these lists the ‘mature’ is staying with what is. This doesn’t have a lot of place for just having fun or imagination. And it is hard to know where planning fits in (whether a plan works out isn’t always within our control – so is it constructive engagement with present potential or idle fantasy – I think that sometimes the only way to find out is to give it a go and see what happens).

I do think that the mature list is worth highlighting, because so often the focus is on ways of coping that are pathological or have the feeling of managing life rather than embracing it. Humour and altruism are rarely talked about I think in this context.

To ground these a little I have an exercise you can try.

• Make a list of some stressful times in your life.

Try to come up with a few that vary in intensity – from trivial day to day stuff up to crises.

• How did you respond? What did you specifically do?

Are there similarities? Or do you respond in different ways? (E.g. I can use humour about trivial things but find this much harder with bigger things. I can write in my journal about anything. Suppression I generally only use to achieve something big.)

• Were you happy with the outcome? Did the way you responded help you? Did it have affects on others that you were happy with?

• Would you like to try other ways of responding?

If so which one? How can you practice it in a simple and easy way today?

I’d like to hear what ways you have for coping with the unexpected that life brings us. Do you find it easy to make lemonade when life brings you lemons (I confess that I do not). What ways work for you? I look forward to hearing about your experience in the comments.

If you liked this post you might also like the others in this series:
A Good Old Age
Ageing Well – can we do anything about it?

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Generativity
Generativity as defined by (Ageing Well p.115) John Kotre: To invest oneself in forms of life and work that will outlive the self.

Generativity – not intimacy – the best predictor of regular orgasm for women and lead to marriages that kept improving into old age.

Generativity is about caring for the younger people (at work or home). It may seem contradictory, but one way to check how we are doing with this is to ask: What have I learned from them [my children, younger colleagues or friends]?

Learning from those younger than us has many advantages. It keeps us learning – it helps us stay sharp and keep our minds alive. It helps us stay in touch with the world and how it is changing. And it helps us maintain our relationships (as we age our contemporaries tend to die).

Keeper of the Meaning
This is partly being judicious – seeing that there is more than one side to the story.
The radicalism of conservatism.
Those who founded a group of some kind will usually recall why it was founded. For them the group may remain a means to an end – make a widget or a fortune, bring a social or material innovation into existence. The founders can often be less attached to the group than those who are part of it. This can be a surprise – the founder will move on with few regrets while others care more about the group itself.

In this way conservatism (remembering the reason for the founding) can lead to radicalism – a willingness to try out new things, or simply close the show down if a better way of achieving the original purpose comes along. One of the tasks of old age is to remember why we did things (their meaning).

This too can give a sense of the bigger picture – elders can be ‘consultants’ who have a perspective that is not only more balanced but wider.

I am fifty and can remember the older conservatives (I am speaking from the Australian perspective). They boasted that we did not live in a police state like those Communists. The newer conservatives have recently introduced a whole series of laws widening police powers, even reviving sedition. (The ‘progressive’ (sic) side of politics has done little to alter this.) I would like to cling to the older conception of democracy – which embraced not being a police state – and repudiate the newer, which seems to come down to comfortable consumption. Is this stodgy rigidity and pining for the good old days. I think not – I didn’t like the older conservatives at the time, I prefer innovation to trying to preserve older ways and of doing things, and I am not pining – just very angry.

Integrity
Death is coming – but this is more than chronology. It brings us to questions of how we have lived and how well.

As defined by Erik Erikson (Ageing Well p.49) integrity is ‘an experience which conveys some world order and spiritual sense. No matter how dearly paid for, it is the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that, by necesssity, permitted of no substitutions.’

If we can live in light of death (when old or young) we can have an intensity and a sense of preciousness, it can challenge us to be who we are.

This doesn’t mean that we have to think about death much. Laurens van der Post when old said that he still felt the same as ever and just got on with living. This is integrity too.

As death gets nearer we can have the sense that we have done what we needed to do.

Whether young or old I would like to hear your experience of ageing. Do you think these three tasks are part of your experience? Let me know in the comments.

If you liked this post you might like others in this series:
A Good Old Age
Ageing Well – can we do anything about it?

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The question this raises is: So what? That radio station we like to tune into: WIIFM (What’s in it for me?). Can I do anything that makes it more likely I will age well?

There are (at least) two possible reasons why we couldn’t be able to do anything about ageing well.
1. It’s all in our genes.
2. It’s all due to our environment.

With these two positions I have the difficult job of saying that I am in partial agreement. Our genetic make-up provides limits and resources of some kind. We can make up for these by cultural creations: for instance clothing. People can only tolerate a range of temperatures – these may be wider than we think, but those who live close to the poles don’t walk about without clothing (there are limits to our adaptability). These limits are then accommodated by our technology and creative adaptation (inventions like clothing).

Our environment influences us in important ways. If it was all up to us as individuals there would be no reason to care for others (our action would make no difference – it would be all up to them) or create beautiful things (people could decide to see anything as beautiful).

The great variety of cultures and individual differences makes it unlikely that either of these positions is correct. Two people in the same situation can respond quite differently (even if they had a similar upbringing). “Identical twins” are different in measurable ways physically and can be quite different in personality (even when brought up in the same family).

That “identical twins” raised in the same family can be so different I think shows that both the ‘it’s all in the genes’ and ‘it’s all the environment’ are both wrong. The individual makes their own contribution to how they put their life together. They certainly use the elements of their genetic inheritance and draw on their social situation as elements that they put together, but the individual makes their own contribution.

This means that we can do things to make it more likely that we will have a good old age. Some of these are surprising and require explaining, I’ll write about these in future posts. To end this post I’d like to list some of the simple and obvious ones.

What can we do?

• 1. Avoid alcoholism. It not only has serious affects on our physical health, it often devastates our relationships too.

3. Get to know young(er) people. Due to misfortune and ill health our friends tend to die off as we age. A lonely and isolated old age is not enjoyable.

How do you feel you are ageing? Are you happy with how you’re doing? Have you found things that have helped you age well? I’d like to hear about your experience in the comments.

If you liked this post you might also like:
A Good Old Age
Four Simple Little Things to do for Big Health Benefits
How to live a long and healthy life

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This has lead me to thinking about what to do. Or, put another way, . . .

What is Aging Well?
There is actually a good book about this, Aging Well by George Vaillant. It is about the results of three longitudinal studies of Americans. They followed individuals from their young adulthood to their old age (the studies began around the 1930’s). These studies are a very precious resource. The drawback is that 2 of them studied the privileged – college and university students in the 1930’s; who were a very small and privileged minority at the time. The other studied working class people. So, there is no perspective from the poor (although the studies did include some who had lived below the minimum wage all their lives).

I’m going to do a series of posts about this book and what it means for us. But first I need to be up front about my values. Because . . .

To speak of “aging well” is a value judgement. To speak of some people aging well means we think that some do better than others. Possibly the most famous saying about this at the moment is from Steven Covey: Who ever died wishing they had spent more time at the office? Thinking about a good old age means making judgements about a good life.

What do we want for our old age?

• To be physically healthy?
• To look back on a lifetime of public service and achievement?
• A bank balance with lots of zeroes in it?
• Successful children?
• To have produced a classic in my creative field?
• To have lived true to my values?
• More than one of these? Or perhaps all of them?

Thinking about my old age, confronts me with my values.

Here’s an exercise to try to help you confront your values. (You have probably come across it before, but I find it worth doing more than once.)
Imagine you are at your own funeral and that you get to give your own eulogy? What do you say as you look back on your life? (You can imagine the scene as if it was happening tomorrow or many years in the future.)

This can be a complicated business. For me health (to put it as simply as possible) has five ‘dimensions’: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual and social. A healthy old age means paying attention to each of these dimensions. I have come up with a simpler definition: joy. A healthy old age is one that has joy.

I would like to hear your thoughts. What do you think will be a good old age for you? Have you made plans about it? Are you doing things to guide you into it? Let me know in the comments for this post.

The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.

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First up, because it has the biggest agenda, is On The Commons. This blog covers the whole of our social lives from the perspective of what we share – rather than private ownership. It is biased to the US in its coverage. Consistently well written and clearly argued. If you want a place to go to get a broad view of a better way to live, this blog would be a good place to start.

The single biggest and most urgent issue facing our planet (and all us inhabitants of it) in my view is climate change a.k.a. global warming. (If you have any time for the climate change deniers reading Tim Lambert’s Deltoid blog about the antics of the deniers should cure you of it.) There is a good blog called Fight Global Warming. It has links to the science and also has practical suggestions for what to do. It is a great place to start to change what you do to help save our planet.

Finally at a smaller level is Coffee Kids: Supporting Coffee Communities to Support the Coffee Industry. This is not just about providing a good price for the coffee, or about just conditions. It is about working at the village level to decrease reliance on coffee as the sole crop: to give a wider economic base to the villages. This seems a very worthwhile and important initiative to me.

The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.

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Chris and I pretty much agreed that politics alone wouldn’t bring in utopia. I still think this – personal trauma and our relationships aren’t much affected by the laws that politicians past. But now I want to fudge this a bit.

This is because just as I was having this discussion I started reading Affluenza by Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss who at the time they wrote the book were at a left-wing (well what’s left of the left-wing these days – let’s call it the progressive side of politics) think tank called the Australia Institute. (The institute is still in existence and producing some of the most interesting social research I know of. For instance they identified ‘downshifters’ in Australia – those who had made a voluntary reduction in their life. Over the previous five years (excluding those who had retired) this was 25% of the workforce. The implications of this to me seem huge – and entirely off the party political radar.

Affluenza: when too much is never enough, is a book about materialism and how it is failing to make our lives anymore enjoyable. Why it is relevant to bringing in utopia is that they deal with politics and public policy as a way of affecting people’s happiness. Which I thought was pretty much futile.

At the end of the book they provide eight points on what governments can do to make people happier (pp.218-224). They are:
1. Measure what matters – that is people’s wellbeing rather than money.
2. Provide fulfilling work. This means favouring in legislation such things as job security, reducing unemployment, encouraging maternity and paternity leave.
3. Reclaim time. Limiting work hours, providing for productivity gains to be traded for reduced work hours rather than just money.
4. Re-do education. Focusing on developing people rather than training them for job slots (which may well no longer exist by the time they graduate).
5. Investing in early childhood. All the research shows that this returns extraordinary dividends.
6. Discourage materialism and promote responsible advertising. E.g. outlaw advertising on children’s TV.
7. Encouraging dramatically a shift to renewables. Having urban planning that preserves trees.
8. Build communities and relationships. Encouraging volunteering and supporting carers.
Any of which would move us closer to a better way of living.

This is a pretty impressive list. It certainly demonstrates to my mind that public policy can impact our private wellbeing.

And I still think that the private is more powerful than the public for our individual experience. With good friends and support people can flourish even in difficult situations but it is very hard for public policy to make up for personal trauma.

So, this book has caused to see more of the possibilities that public policy has for making our lives better. I do recommend that you read it. It is a very thorough demolition of the idea that more money will make us happier (after basic needs are met). It is well written, clear and accessible.

What do you think? Do you think that governments have a role in promoting our individual happiness? Some people regard this with horror – that government has not business trying to do this kind of thing (I understand this view and have a good deal of sympathy for it). Would you like to see the kind of changes that Hamilton and Denniss outline in their eight points? I’d love to hear your views.

The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.

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This type of literatures takes its name from the first modern example – Thomas More’s Utopia. (The name is a pun in Greek: the “topia” part means place, and the “U” part means both ‘no’ and ‘good’. So the idea is that it is about a good place which doesn’t exist.).

At a stretch I guess ‘utopian’ could apply to the creation stories of different religions which usually give instructions about how we should live. Some science fiction can also fall into the category of utopian.

The different utopias are usually set in the distant past or far future. Some, however (like William Morris’s) are set in the near future – to emphasis that they are achievable. This is similar to Ted Trainer showing how existing suburbs can be easily converted to large sustainable suburbs without huge change).

Usually, in the good place described people live in harmony with both nature and other people.

“Utopian” can be used as a criticism – meaning hopelessly idealistic.

Today I think our global situation is such that what used to be seen as utopian is now our only option. If we don’t find how to live sustainably on our planet we won’t be living on it. And this means finding ways to get along with other peoples and countries who we disagree absolutely with. Our situation it seems to me really is global.

Do I think there is one right way to achieve this? No. But I think there are clear directions we can move in.

The biggest thing that those of us in suburbia can do is: if at all possible get by without a car. If we can’t do this (I don’t think I could if I had children) there are other options that can be easy (buying energy saving light globes) to more challenging (invite friends round and share a meal instead of going out to a restaurant).

To put the responsibility for changing the world on the shoulders of individual is unfair. No one of us will change the world on our own. This is where we need to join groups that we like or perhaps introduce new things to groups we are already part of. There are a huge number of groups working for sustainability and justice. There is much we can do in our existing groups (churches often have links with other churches overseas, recycling at the office . . . ).

I think my part is creating the utopia that we need to survive is focused on us and our relationships. If the sustainable way of living on our planet means as much stress and dis-ease as we currently have then it will be of doubtful benefit.

What can we do as individuals. I think we can form a vision of our desired future and then take what steps we can to bring it about. These can be simple things: walking where possible, talking to friends instead of watching TV shows we don’t particularly enjoy, buying more environmentally friendly products, shopping at the farmer’s market when one is available.

I would like to hear what you think. Do you think I am too pessimistic? Too utopian? What is your vision for a desirable future (one that you would be happy for you and your children to live in).

If you liked this post you might also like:
Community Psychotherapy

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