being kind to you. A little love and kindness is what everyone needs.’
The job is physically tiring, but Bette makes few concessions: ‘If I have free time I don’t sit down, I walk the cabin and talk to people. I do have a nap in the afternoon – I’ll admit that – but younger people get tired too.’ She gets up early in the morning and prepares a meal for her son before driving the hour to the airport. On the way home, she says, she does feel more tired. ‘Before, I might have gone to the store on the way home, and done other things; now I might just get gas.’
What is her secret? She pauses. ‘When I think about it now, I think my goal in life is to keep moving,’ she chuckles. She may sit down to watch TV, but never for long. ‘There’s always something to do.’ She doesn’t follow an exercise regime, and admits to eating chocolate, but laughs: ‘I can still suck in my tummy.’ Almost without knowing it, she seems to have been following three of the tenets of the old-age lifestyle gurus: keep active, retain your sense of purpose and connect with people.
Is Bette Nash old? She thinks for a moment. ‘I don’t feel like I’m an old person. I have a handicapped son, I don’t have the chance to feel old; his needs are so great. My sister has Parkinson’s and dementia and I look at her and I think she’s old, but she’s younger than I am.’
Bette is not ‘old’ in the way we used to think of it. But her younger sister is. And this is where the debate gets confused. The stereotypes don’t fit any more. What we are witnessing is the decoupling of biological age from chronological age.
New Stages Require New Signals
When Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, created what was arguably the world’s first state pension in 1889, he set the pension age at 70. Few would ever draw it, since the average German lived to around 45.
Today, life expectancy in Germany is 81. But Germany’s pension age is 6511 and the average German gives up work at 62. Right across Europe, retirement ages are not keeping pace with life expectancy. In the UK, men leave the labour force earlier than they did in 1950.12
If current trends continue, some of us living in Europe, parts of Asia and North America could spend a quarter of our lives retired. That is crazy.
Lord Adair Turner chaired the independent UK Pensions Commission which recommended in 2005 that the British government should raise the pension age to 66 by 2030, and to 68 by 2050. He now thinks this wasn’t sufficiently far-sighted. The UK government now intends to raise the pension age to 67 by 2028, but he thinks ‘this won’t be nearly enough. In 1950, average male life expectancy at 65 was 12 years. By the time we were looking at it, in 2003, it was 20 years. Life expectancy at 65 could be another 35 years by the time we reach mid-century. We should have started increasing the pension age years before.’
Actuaries, he says, simply didn’t realise how fast life expectancy was growing: ‘There was a dominant hypothesis about a limit to life. They kept producing curves showing life expectancy growing, but then tailing off. Eventually we said there’s no reason to tail off.’ Why did they get it so wrong? ‘Smoking. The tobacco companies were mass murderers,’ says Turner – and no one thought their power would wane.
Pensions are one of many signals which influence how we see older people – and ourselves. These signals need updating.
What it means to be 65 has changed utterly. In the 1950s, a 65-year-old woman in Britain could expect to live a further 14 years.13 Today, according to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, the average 65-year-old woman can look forward a further 23.4 years.14
Yet 65 is now the age at which many institutions impose a concept of old age upon their citizens. It’s the moment when Germans, Swedes, Canadians, Australians and Brits can officially retire, and Americans become eligible for full Medicare (federal health insurance). It’s a tipping point for financial advisers, who will often start switching your pension portfolio into bonds when you hit your 50s. And ‘65+’ is often the maximum age bracket cited in questionnaires, with no other boxes to tick – as if it’s the beginning of the end.
In London, everyone gets a free bus pass when they turn 60. It’s called an Older Person’s Bus Pass – something which causes a great deal of blushing among the many still-vibrant commuters who could perfectly well afford to pay their own fare. In the US it is entirely normal to call people ‘Seniors’, and to offer them Senior discounts, for a period of what could, these days, end up being 30 years. Yet much of that period will be spent as Young-Old, not Old-Old.
What if, instead of defining people by how many birthdays they’ve enjoyed, we define them by how many years they have left? Obviously, that’s hypothetical. None of us can know individually when we will meet our end. But we do know the average. And if we apply that average, things look different.
If we defined old age as having 15 years or less left to live, we wouldn’t call many baby boomers ‘old’ until they hit 74. Up to that point they’d be middle-aged. This is a crude measure. Not everyone will be in good health at 74: some will need support. But it’s still a useful thought experiment, which has been carried out by a group of demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna.
The Austrians wanted to challenge the use of 65 as the onset of old age in Europe.15 First, they ran the numbers for remaining life expectancy. Next, they drew up a list of characteristics which we usually associate with being ‘old’, such as reduced mental agility and dependency on others. On this basis, across four different countries – Norway, Japan, Lithuania and the US – they concluded most baby boomers remain middle-aged until their mid-seventies.
The insight that chronological age is a poor way to classify who is ‘old’ came originally from the Canadian-American demographer Norman Ryder, who realised in the 1970s that expected lifespan is a better indicator than age of our need for state support: which is, after all, what the state is interested in.
‘If you don’t consider people old just because they reached age 65, but instead take into account how long they have left to live, then the faster the increase in life expectancy, the less ageing is actually going on,’ explains demographer Sergei Scherbov, leader of the Vienna study. ‘Two hundred years ago, a 60-year-old would have been a very old person,’ he tells me. ‘Someone who is 60 years old today, I would argue, is middle-aged.’
Scherbov is now working with the UN to redesign traditional measures of ageing, using what he calls ‘characteristic-equivalent ages’. In 2015, for example, the average Japanese woman of 65 could expect to live another 24 years. But the average woman in Nigeria had to be much younger – 46 – to get 24 more years life expectancy. To be equitable, their pensions would need to start at different ages.
Evolving lifespans should make governments careful about what signals they send, to encourage people to save enough. ‘You don’t need to tell a 25-year-old when their retirement should be,’ says Lord Turner. ‘If you tell them there is a fixed retirement age, you are not telling them that things are uncertain. It would be better to tell them, look right now you’re in a pension scheme which retires at 65, but that may change with life expectancy.’ Lord Turner has suggested making the pension more generous from 70, and means-testing other benefits before that age.16
Our Stereotypes Are Out of Date
Institutional signals of this kind are one reason why we have not caught up with the reality of Extra Time. Another is the media. We journalists are deeply confused about age.
In 2018, The Times gave a double-page spread to a French lady called Mylène Desclaux,17 who had published a book about how to be sexy at 50. The breathless article advised women never to give a birthday party after 49, to avoid wearing reading glasses which might give the game away and to change their first name if it sounded too dated. In other words, lie. At 50! What would she suggest women do at 70, I wondered?
If 50 is old to some journalists, 65 is beyond the pale. Sub-editors love to bung ‘pensioner’ into headlines, making the subject an object of pity no matter what the story. ‘Plucky Pensioner Patrols Crime-ridden