Changing Paradigms of Aging and Being Older

Abstract

Contemporary discourse about the global aging of populations, especially in relation to the costs of health and social care and the impact upon social and economic conditions, tends to be alarmist in tone, partly because it often assumes the experiences of aging and later life to be unchanging historical constants. It is often assumed that the experience of the present can be extrapolated into the future. For example, the proportion of physically or mentally impaired 80 year-olds ln the year 2000 will be the same in 2050 and, hence, the absolute numbers will be, alarmingly, much greater. This is to underestimate change in the experience of aging over time, to fail to recognize that the physical and mental condition of one cohort of 80 year-olds may be very different from another because their life experiences have been different. To take one example, an 85 year-old living in Western Europe today will have been born in the middle of World War I in the vastly poorer economic circumstances of most European populations in the early twentieth century. He or, more probably, she will have experienced the economic depression during the nineteen twenties and thirties, which in many countries was prolonged and severe. She would have lived through the trauma of World War II. She would have been in her forties before the prosperity of the later twentieth century became part of her everyday experience. On the other hand, a woman born in 1945 and reaching the age of 80 in 2025 will have had very different and generally less traumatic experiences, though not all of them are yet known. Among other things, she will have benefited from the advances in medicine from the mid-twentieth century. The future is hard to predict, but examining the past and change over time can help us to guard against serious pitfalls of prediction.