Listen Now
Host: Over the course of this season, we’ve been talking about one of the most significant transformations in history.
[MUSIC IN]
Host: Since 1900, more years have been added to the average human lifespan than in the previous 10,000 years. And the revolution isn’t over. Scientists are making new discoveries every day that might increase our lifespans even further.
But there’s a question we haven’t asked yet – an important one: What do we do with all that extra time?
Take life in the United States, where we’ve added an extra 30 years to the average lifespan. The pace of living has changed a little. People are getting married later, waiting to have kids. But for the most part, our life path looks the same: We get our education when we’re young, work and start families after that, then retire in our 60s.
That 30 years we’ve gained? It’s all tacked on to the end – we’ve just lengthened old age.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Experts are reimagining the way our lives unfold. They call it the new map of life.
It’s not just a pie in the sky dream; It’s based on lots of scientific research. Psychologists have made surprising discoveries about happiness and fulfillment in old age, which challenge the assumption that life gets worse as we get older. And economists see better ways to structure work, which could ease the burden of older populations on financial structures, like social security.
There are many ways society could change to take advantage of our extra years — not just at the end of our lives, but throughout them.
I'm Carl Zimmer, and in the season finale of The World As You’ll Know It: The Future of Aging, we’ll look at the incredible gift that we’ve been given: more time and how to use it.
[MUSIC OUT]
Laura Cartensen: In a blink of an eye, we nearly doubled the length of our lives. And that remarkable accomplishment, and it really should go down in the list of the greatest human advances ever. And it's also among the greatest challenges of the 22nd century.
HOST: This is Dr. Laura Carstensen. She's a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. She has studied how the rapid rise in life expectancy has changed our lives.
Laura Cartensen: We are born into worlds today that were quite literally built by and for young people. From the depth of the stairs that we climb every day, to the knowledge that's housed in the medical school libraries, to the social norms that tell us when to get an education, when to marry, when to work and when to retire.
HOST: Carstensen first noticed this reality when she was quite young, after she was involved in a nasty car accident.
Laura Cartensen: I end up in the hospital at the University of Rochester on the orthopedic ward and was recovering from dozens of injuries. I was laying there, picture the cartoonist, you know laying flat on my back leg, tied in the air weights on the bottom of the leg, holding it straight. And I was there for four months.
Carl Zimmer: Wow.
[MUSIC IN]
Laura Cartensen: I got to know the nurses, of course, because, you know, they were there all the time and so was I. And they decided at one point that they were going to assign roommates to me who were older women and asked me to keep them oriented by talking to them. During the day. So I was surrounded by older women for a long period in time when I was 21.
Carl Zimmer: And you had to talk to them to keep them —
Laura Cartensen: They told me that was my job, to try to help them. And really, of course, in hindsight, they were trying to help me. You know, there is this young woman bored out of her mind, and they were giving me something to do.
HOST: Carstensen got to know the older patients. And as she did, she also noticed how the nurses and doctors treated them.
Laura Cartensen: We were all living in the same place. We depended on other people for everything. Our meals, our care, our social contacts. And what I began to observe, probably because I was taking introductory psychology, was how differently I was being treated from these older women.
Carl Zimmer: How were you being treated versus the way they were being treated in terms of age?
Laura Cartensen: I was getting excellent care. And I remember many instances where there'd be teams of doctors, you know, these white coats standing around me, coming in and checking one bone or another and then leaving. The women I was sharing the room with, they don't even talk to. It was like, they'd come in, talk to me, think about what I needed to do next, and then wave to Sadie on the way out. You know, “Bye. hang in there”. And so it was that I was being rehabilitated and they were not being rehabilitated. They were just being housed. And the doctors clearly had their eye on me as this young person who could get better, but they didn't think these other women could. And that's really what led me to ask the question, “How much of aging is really about biology?” And it is a biological process, but how much of that is shaped by the social world?
MUSIC OUT
HOST: To find out, Carstensen went on to become a psychologist. In one line of her research, she compared stereotypes about what it’s like to be old to what it’s actually like.
Carl Zimmer: One of the things that you looked at with your colleagues is how happiness changes over the course of our lives. What patterns did you see when you took a look at this question?
Laura Cartensen: Yeah this was a real surprise to me. I wanted to be able to see if I could account for these very high rates of depression and loneliness in older people by understanding better their psychology and the social worlds they lived in. And study after study, failed. Study after study what I found was that older people were not reporting loneliness. They were reporting considerable satisfaction and emotion, high levels of emotional well-being.
Carl Zimmer: So you just thought you just thought that old people were going to get lonelier and lonelier and sadder and more depressed as they got old.
Laura Cartensen: Absolutely. And that was the thinking, by and large, in the entire field. And I think to some degree, it still is today. I mean, the empirical evidence is beginning to break through. But I remember in graduate school, I took a course on psychopathology and they had a chapter in this textbook on basically every disorder. And the last chapter was called old age. Old age itself was considered to be pathological.
Carl Zimmer: Wow.
Laura Cartensen: And there was a psychiatrist who was writing about aging at the time and described aging as this deepening sense of anxiety and fear about approaching death, approaching the end of life.
Carl Zimmer: But that's not what you found.
Laura Cartensen: No. Not only were older people not depressed and not lonely, they were doing better than younger people and middle aged people.
HOST: Carstensen published her results. She was excited to share this surprising finding with the scientific community.
Laura Cartensen: And nobody believed it.
[MUSIC IN]
HOST: Other researchers tried to prove her wrong. One of them even suggested that older people don't feel as deeply as young people do, so they can’t appreciate just how bad they have it.
Laura Cartensen: Another hypothesis was that improved emotional experience comes about because of cognitive decline.
Carl Zimmer: [laughs]
HOST: There’s an episode of Seinfeld that captures this hypothesis. George Constanza volunteers to spend time with senior citizens to cheer them up.
Older Man: I’m grateful for every moment I have.
George Constanza: Grateful? How can you be grateful when you’re so close to the end?
Older Man: I guess I just don’t care.
George Constanza: What are you talking about!? How can you sit there and look me in the eye and tell me that you’re not worried? Don’t you have any sense? Are you so completely senile that you don’t even know what you’re talking about anymore? Wait a sec – where are you going?
Older Man: Life’s too short to waste on you.
Laura Cartensen: I refer to this, tongue in cheek, as the Village Idiot Hypothesis. [chuckles] That we become unable to actually remember and really hold on to these negative emotions well enough to work up a real lather. It turns out that people with the highest level of cognitive functioning, the highest levels of executive function, are experiencing the highest levels of emotional well-being. And so that hypothesis was ruled out.
[MUSIC OUT]
HOST: It’s not just in her research that Carstensen sees the emotional well-being of older people. In 2020, the world ran a natural experiment of its own.
Carl Zimmer: I wanted to ask you about the Covid pandemic, because that was such a tremendous shock to our whole species. But it was particularly hard on old people in the sense that, you know, they were much more likely to die than other people. From your perspective as a psychologist interested in the experience of older people, what did it look like to you?
Laura Cartensen: So I'm going to now return to, um, my research on emotion. One of those explanations is that older people are doing better emotionally because they have more control over their lives than younger people do. And so they can avoid stressful situations easier than younger people can. And that's this explanation that suggests that if older people were in super stressful situations, they wouldn't be doing better. So when the pandemic broke out, our group said, “We can test this now”. Because that's a theory, by the way, that's really hard to test experimentally, because it would be unethical to bring older people in the laboratory and stress them [chuckles] and look at what happens to them over time. So that's not going to be done. Nature did that for us. So during the pandemic, what we found was the same pattern we've been observing pre-pandemic. Older people, emotionally, fared better than younger people did throughout the pandemic.
Carl Zimmer: Wow.
Laura Cartensen: This finding was replicated in many different countries around the globe. So even during this time where older people were at greater risk than younger people, they were doing better.
Carl Zimmer: So now, after all this time, I mean, what's your best explanation for what's happening? How do you explain this emotional well-being in old age?
Laura Cartensen: It's referred to as socio-emotional selectivity theory, but it's a theory about time and time horizons. The theory maintains that goals are always set in temporal contexts. We can't really pursue a goal outside of some time constraint.
Carl Zimmer: I'm going to go shopping this afternoon or I'm going to finish reading this book this month.
Laura Cartensen: Yep. Or you're going to finish your college degree in 2028. Humans are always monitoring time. We take account of time and how much time we have left in our lives from the time we're very young. And so we're constantly sort of assessing how much time and how much time we have left. It turns out that when time horizons are long and nebulous and expansive, we tend to pursue goals that are high risk. We tend to pursue goals about learning, which in and of itself requires negative reinforcement. We have to find out how we're wrong and as well as how we're right. As time horizons grow shorter, people tend not to pursue those kinds of high risk goals. Instead, we come to focus more on goals about emotional satisfaction. So with age, we come to focus more on the present, live in the moment and pursue activities and experiences that are emotionally satisfying.
Carl Zimmer: So how did you do the research that let you see the effect that these time horizons have on how we feel as we get older?
Laura Cartensen: We developed a social preference paradigm where we presented older and younger people with the choice of how they could spend 30 minutes in this case. So we'd say, I want you to imagine you've got 30 minutes free. The following three people are available to you. Who would you like to be with? So we were now assessing what type of interaction people would like to have. The author of a book you just read – knowledge. A recent acquaintance with whom you seem to have much in common, so that’s the promise of a future. Or a close friend or relative. Who do you choose? And older people strongly, overwhelmingly would say, a member of my immediate family, or a close friend. So they wanted to be with someone who was emotionally meaningful and not as high on these other dimensions of knowledge, information acquisition. So that showed us that we had these differences by age that we had found in other studies.
HOST: But Carstensen found that those time horizons change with people’s circumstances.
[MUSIC IN]
Laura Cartensen: We could say, “now I want you to imagine. You're about to move across country. You're going by yourself without family or friends. The following three people are available to you. Who do you choose?” And younger people look just like old people. Now, they wanted to spend time with a member of their family or close friend. We were excited by this. We thought, “Wow, could we make old people look like young people?” And so in another study, we said, “Now I want you to imagine you just got a phone call from your physician who told you about a new medical advance that virtually ensures you'll live about 20 years longer than you expected in relatively good health. Three people are available to you. Who do you choose?” And now old people no longer want to be with their close friends and family. [chuckles] Now they're choosing the author of a book they just read or a recent acquaintance.
HOST: As the world changes around us, it can shift our time horizons. Researchers found that during the SARS pandemic in 2003, young people’s time horizons looked more like old people’s. They wanted to spend time with loved ones, too. And the same shift happened in 2020, during the COVID pandemic.
Carl Zimmer: So in a pandemic or something like that, even young people are just not thinking very far ahead. They really have a short time horizon.
Laura Cartensen: And when you have a short time horizon, according to our theory, you're going to optimize emotional meaning and emotional experience.
[MUSIC OUT]
HOST: Our common beliefs about old age don’t make room for these kinds of experiences. Things like finding emotional meaning or continuing to learn late in life. Carstensen says that undervaluing old age has led us to look at the extra years of life more as a burden than as a blessing.
Laura Cartensen: We were handed a gift. 30 extra years of life. What we've done is we tacitly put them all on at the end. Only old age got longer and now we're complaining and we're kind of going, “Oh how do we take care of all these old people? They don't work long enough. They're getting sick.” All these problems. All of these problems, if you just start to unpack them a little bit, reflect policies and challenges that came about because of this mismatch between the world we're living in and the length of our lives. I see the challenges as not only for older people, but all of us.
HOST: In 2018, Carstensen and her team set out to address those challenges. They held a two day meeting at the Stanford Center on Longevity. They brought together experts from a wide range of fields to figure out what changes could be made to help people thrive during their 30 extra years. And after the meeting, her team got to work.
Laura Cartensen: What we did was appoint nine postdoctoral fellows for two years to say, “Well, how would we change education? How do we need to change financial security? How about health?” And they worked for two years on each of these nine different aspects of life that needed to change, and wrote about what they were like now — health care, education, work, retirement, things like this. And then also began to offer their insights into how they might change.
HOST: Carstensen and her colleagues call their project “The New Map of Life.” She says that truly supporting an extra thirty years of life – and potentially more – can’t just start when we reach old age. It has to be baked into our lives from the beginning.
Laura Cartensen: We need to prepare little children today to be the first centenarians of the 22nd century. They're here. They're living among us. We need to think about that.
[MUSIC IN]
Andrew Scott: The demographers tell us that we're having fewer children and people are living for longer. Younger cohorts are smaller, older cohorts are larger. And what's remarkable in most of the macroeconomic literature is that it's seen as a problem. It's seen as just really bad news.
HOST: Andrew J. Scott is an economist at London Business School and the director of economics at the Ellison Institute of Technology. He's one of the people who lent their expertise to the new map of life. While some experts look at the medical or psychological sides of aging, Scott thinks about how we can reorient our careers and our finances for longer lives.
Andrew Scott: The underlying assumption is everyone aged over 65 is old, that they don't work, they need a pension, they get ill and they’re a burden. It turns one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century, which is that fewer children die, fewer parents snatched away in midlife, more grandparents meeting their grandchildren, and economics are going, “wow, this is a problem.” And I thought, that doesn't sound totally bad news. That sounds quite good to me. So how did we turn this into just a bad news story. And that's where my economics started to kick in.
I'm 59. What economics tells me is I have to behave differently from my father at 59 or my grandfather at 59. And there's lots of economic and social aspects to that. But ultimately it's about having more time. And then how do you make the most of that time? That's sort of the perspective, because economics talk about endowments and really as life gets longer, you're given more time.
[MUSIC OUT]
Carl Zimmer: Endowments are what exactly?
Andrew Scott: What you're given to start off with. So you come into the world and you have an endowment. And of course, the bigger your endowment, the more options you've got. And you might think about, you inherit something, or this is the amount of time you can expect in your life. And if you've got more time ahead of you, that should be a good thing if you can use it well.
Carl Zimmer: To your mind, what's the big shift or big shifts that we're gonna have to make to move away from a society where aging looks like this terrible nightmare to a longevity society where we are making the most of an extended lifespan?
Andrew Scott: So I think there's a bunch of issues here and some of them are practical and some of them are conceptual. On the practical ones, I always focus on two things. We need a health system that keeps us healthy. Our current health system is focused on disease. It's a sick system. The very fact we call prevention prevention shows you how dominant the disease paradigm is. Why don't we say maintaining health? But we say, no, it's about preventing disease. So we need a health system that truly focuses upon health and not treating disease.
HOST: Scott says that promoting health earlier in life would significantly reduce healthcare costs later in life.
Andrew Scott: As an economist, I talk about compounding. If you invest your money 20 years ago, it builds and compounds over time. There's something similar that happens with health, so that if you can make yourself as healthy as you can at 50, you're going to be a lot more healthy at 60 than if you don't. And, the benefits really do compound over time.
HOST: Improving health outcomes has another big economic benefit. It lets people continue working.
Andrew Scott: The other thing as a macroeconomist I particularly focus on is not making people work beyond the social security age, which a lot of governments are focusing on. But actually keeping people working from 50 to 65. So in the United States at 50 about 80% of people are working. By 65 I think it's down to about 35%.
Carl Zimmer: Why do we see that decline in that period?
Andrew Scott: It's a combination of people becoming ill and, you know, at 50 of these chronic diseases start to creep in. Having to care for someone who's ill. You know, there's a lot of nonsense about older people not being able to be productive and by and large the evidence is much less conclusive than you think. But skills can get out of date and you've got to make sure that your skills are updated. Ageism in the workplace, people assume older workers are less productive even if they're not. Then I think there's another more challenging issue which is, older workers tend to become more expensive. Because even if their productivity doesn't fall, their wages tend to rise. And of course in America you've got healthcare as well. And lots of people think they’re going to be okay getting through from 50 to the retirement age, and then they get a bit of a nasty surprise for any of those reasons, and it’s a real challenge.
[MUSIC IN]
Andrew Scott: If you're living a longer life, you need more resources over that life if you're not to see a fall in your standard of living.
HOST: Scott says having more resources will likely mean working for longer. Some countries are already pushing their retirement ages – Denmark recently passed a law setting the retirement age at 70.
But Scott says that lengthening our work lives shouldn’t mean we just tack on another five or ten years of labor. Instead he believes that we need to change the way our careers unfold. In the 20th century, he says, a three stage career became the dominant approach to work. First you have your education. then you work. then you retire. But in the new map, people will have multi-stage careers.
Andrew Scott: The way I look at it is over your life, you're going to have to focus on different things. Sometimes you're focused on money and it's work all the hours I may have to. Other times it may be, I need to care for aging parents or young children, or I really need to do a career shift. And so we have this multi-stage life that as life gets longer, we change. And part of that will be about adult education. I don't think you can learn everything you need to know at 21 if you're to be living to 90 and working ‘til you’re 70. But it's not just education that changes. Finance, relationships, all of these things need to adapt and adjust to the realities of the life we can now expect to live. They all changed in the 20th century, they just need to change again in the 21st.
[MUSIC OUT]
Carl Zimmer: What are the economic advantages to people working longer?
Andrew Scott: So the main one is going to be able to create additional resources at the individual level and of course for the government through taxes and not paying pensions. So that's the narrow economic gain. I think there's also a very interesting literature that says that one of the things that keeps people healthy and happy for longer is a sense of engagement. And not all work has to be about a salary. I mean, obviously you need the money, work has to be about a salary, but also a sense of why I'm getting up every day and a sense of purpose is really, really important. And if I think about work more broadly, that's a very key part of having a good long life.
Carl Zimmer: Have economists looked at the numbers on what the potential economic gains would be of this kind of a shift?
Andrew Scott: They have. So let's think about two different things. Keeping people at work from 50 to 65. So right now that falls from about 80% of people aged 50 are working to 65 it's about 30%, 35% in the US. If you could halve that rate of decline, that's a lot of money. And then broadly, I mean, this is a very rough rule of thumb, every extra year of work that you add to the social security age is 1% of GDP, roughly.
Carl Zimmer: So let's imagine that you were put in charge of health in the UK or the US, take your pick. What would be some practical things that could get this ball rolling?
Andrew Scott: For employment, I think the government, rather than just say, “I'm going to keep raising the social security age”, I'm going say, “okay I'm going to try and help you stay in work for longer”. And I think for me, one of the things I would focus on is people in their early 50s possibly doing physical and manual work who can't carry on because it's punishing. And so help those people get retrained or re-skilled to reallocate their expertise in other areas. And I'm not saying you have to, you know, retrain them as full stack developers or anything like that. There's a range of skills that we need in society. Some are around intelligence, some are around emotional intelligence. But we cannot underestimate the capacity of older people and we need to help people maintain a sense of purpose and finance.
Carl Zimmer: Are there any places when you look around the world, who are tackling these issues that you've brought up and are really making good concrete steps in the right direction?
Andrew Scott: Japan I think has done a very good job. And Japan's done a good job in a number of ways. The first is, it’s got very high life expectancy. But two, it's actually got pretty good healthy life expectancy. And I think that’s a combination of factors including tackling inequality. There’s less inequality so there’s less problems about non-healthy life.
The second thing they’ve done, I mean there's two issues with this demographic change. One is, a shift in the population to fewer younger people and more old, which is what the UK and US and everywhere is getting. And in some countries, you've got a fall in the population, which Japan is having, and UK and US aren't. And I think dealing with a fall in the population is much harder than dealing with a shift in the age structure. But Japan's got them both and its economy has actually done pretty well, given those two things have been happening. Its per capita growth has remained quite good. And it's done that because it's done a good job of keeping older people in work. And again, that's about health. It's also about offering a flexible employment contract so that older people can have what I call age-friendly jobs — jobs that are a bit more flexible and give people more autonomy.
[MUSIC IN]
Carl Zimmer: To your mind, what are the biggest barriers to achieving this vision of a longevity society? Are they sort of a personal cultural problem or is it more have to do with governments and their policies?
Andrew Scott: We're talking about a pretty fundamental change. For the first time ever in human history, the young can expect to become the very old. So I don't expect society to turn on a dime, but we need to have individual change, cultural change, firm change and government change and everyone has different responsibilities. I do see lots of individuals doing things differently. We're seeing a big increase at the age at which people get married, when they have their first child. We're seeing much more investment in developing as an adult. It's called emerging adulthood. So things my father did at 14, I did in my early 20s and my children are doing late 20s, early 30s. Similarly, I think we're seeing people changing their behaviors in their 50s.
And firms have done something. Across the high-income countries over the last 10 years, on average about 80% of employment growth has been workers aged over 50. So the labor market has absorbed lots and lots of older workers despite concerns about ageism. So change is already happening, but the pension system and the health system are still very stuck in their ways. We haven’t got institutions that support us being healthy, productive and engaged for longer. Because it’s never really been worth doing. Now it really is given we all can do it.
Carl Zimmer: Is that going to mean that pension systems or social security systems in the United States or, you know, other programs, they're just going to have to become gigantic to take care of all the people who are depending on them?
Andrew Scott: What I say is we need to have a three dimensional longevity dividend. We already have long lives. The problem is they're not healthy for long enough and they're not productive and engaged for long enough. If you can make people healthier for longer and productive for longer, not only is life more enjoyable, but you solve the health crisis and you solve the pensions crisis. It's really very simple, if we are living for longer, we have to invest more in our future.
[MUSIC OUT]
HOST: The logic may be simple, but putting these ideas into practice will take work. Government policies will have to support employees taking leave earlier in their careers. Companies will have to underwrite job retraining. Financial services will need to be tailored for both longer lives and career shifts along the way. There will need to be a society-wide rejection of the idea that older employees are dispensable.
And Laura Carstensen says that we will need to rethink how we save and invest over our lifetimes.
Carl Zimmer: How do we find the money to live to 100?
Laura Carstensen: Well, we have something really interesting that's working in our favor for very long lives, and we call it compound interest. But we have to start early.
HOST: What Carstensen has in mind is something like the child trust fund. That's a program that the British government ran from 2002 to 2011. Every child in Britain got a tax-free savings account containing 250 pounds. and the government added another 250 pounds at age seven.
Families could also add money to the fund, and that money would gain tax-free interest. At age 18, those British children would be able to dip into the fund to pay for school and for other expenses, or they could just leave it alone to gain more interest.
The British government ended the child trust fund program to trim the budget. Carstensen thinks that was a short-sighted move.
Laura Carstensen: If we began to think about financial preparedness from the time a child was born, and in some cases the role of government, in some cases the role of family members and communities and philanthropy, we could really help people prepare for longer lives in very different ways than we think about it today.
HOST: A similar plan has been considered in the United States as well.
[MUSIC IN]
Carl Zimmer: The kinds of things we're talking about, a lot of it really does seem to add up to a big transformational change. And not just for old people, but for all of society.
Laura Carstensen: Right.
Carl Zimmer: If we are able to bring these kinds of changes about that you think we need to be doing, I mean, what do you see as the payoff? Like what will society look like if we can solve these problems?
Laura Carstensen: I'm an optimist. [chuckles] We have an enormous opportunity. I mean ask people in mid-life, “what's your greatest challenge? What's the biggest problem you have in life?” And a real common answer is, “I don't have enough time.” And I've been telling people. Yeah, you do. [laughter] People living today have more time than any generations of humans have ever had in their lives. So we have time. But if what we do with it is to just kind of waste the opportunity, if we continue to live our lives as if we're going to die at 50 but really we live into our 80s, 90s, and 100, what a waste.
My greatest fear about it all is that people are kinda sleep walking through one of the greatest opportunities we’ve ever had as a species. Probably the greatest risk for not achieving this is a lack of imagination.
[MUSIC OUT]
CREDITS
HOST: The World As You’ll Know It is brought to you by Aventine, a non-profit research institute creating and sharing work that explores how today’s decisions could affect the future. The views expressed don’t necessarily reflect those of Aventine, its employees or affiliates.
For a transcript of the episode and more resources related to what you've just heard, please visit aventine dot org slash podcast.
Danielle Mattoon is the Executive Director at Aventine. Bruce Headlam is the Editorial Director at Aventine.
Our Producer is Emerald O’Brien. Our Associate Producer is Marialexa Kavanaugh.
Our Editor is Joel Lovell. Kamilah Kashanie is our Managing Producer.
Original music by Davy Sumner with additional music from epidemic sound.
This episode was mixed by Marina Paiz.
Our head of sound and engineering is Raj Makhija. Our Senior Recording Engineers are Marina Paiz and Pedro Alvira.
Fact Checking by Will Tavlin.
Music licensing by Extreme Music and Epidemic Sound.
Our executive producer is Asha Saluja.
I'm your host, Carl Zimmer.
Make sure to listen to us on the Audacy app or wherever you get your podcasts.