and societies are getting grayer you hear about it all the time
you read about it in your newspapers you hear about it on your television sets
sometimes i 'm concerned that we hear about it so much that we 've come to accept longer lives with a kind of a complacency even
longer lives can and i believe will improve quality of life at all ages
now to put this in perspective let me just zoom out for a minute more years were added to average life expectancy in the twentieth century than all years
we nearly doubled the length of time that we 're living so if you ever feel like you don 't have this aging thing quite pegged don 't kick yourself it 's brand new
and because fertility rates fell across that very same period that life expectancy was going up
that pyramid that has always represented the distribution of age in the population with many young ones at the bottom winnowed to a tiny peak of older people who make it and survive to old age is being reshaped into a rectangle
and now if you 're the kind of person who can get chills from population statistics
born in the developed world are having the opportunity to grow old
through cultural changes our ancestors largely eliminated early death so that people can now live out their full lives now there are problems associated with aging diseases poverty loss of social status it 's hardly time to rest on our laurels
but the more we learn about aging the clearer it becomes that a sweepingdownward course is grossly inaccurate
aging brings some rather remarkable improvements increased knowledge expertise
of life improve
that 's right older people
is coming to the same conclusion the cdc recently conducted a survey where they asked respondents simply to tell them whether they experiencedsignificantpsychologicaldistress in the previous
and a recent gallup poll asked participants how much stress and worry and anger they had experienced the previous day and stress
worry anger all decrease with age
may be that the current generations of older people are and always have been the greatest generations that is that younger people today may not typically experience these improvements as they grow older we 've asked
well maybe older people are just trying to put a positive spin on an otherwise depressing existence
years ago my colleagues and i embarked on a study where we followed the same group of people over a ten year period originally the sample was aged eighteen to ninety four
and we studied whether and how their emotional experiences changed as they grew older
our participants would carry electronic pagers for a week at a time and we 'd page them throughout the day and evenings at random times and every time we paged them we 'd ask them to answer several questions on a one to seven scale how happy are you right now how sad are you right now how frustrated are you right now
so that we could get a sense of the kinds of emotions and feelings they were having in their day to day lives and using this intense study of individuals we find that it 's not
one particular generation that 's doing better than the others but the same individuals over time come to report relatively greater positive experience now you see this slight downturn at very advanced ages
and there is a slight downturn but at no point does it return to the levels
we see in early adulthood now it 's really too simplistic
to say that older people are happy
in our study they are more positive
and other research has shown that older people seem to engage with sadness more comfortably they 're more accepting of sadness than younger people are and we suspect that this may help to explain why older people are better than younger people at solving hotly charged emotional conflicts
and all things being equal
older people direct their cognitive resources like attention and memory to positive information more than negative
if we show older middle aged younger people images like the ones you see on the screen and we later ask them to recall all the images that they can older people
but not younger people remember more positive
in day to day life this translates into greater enjoyment and satisfaction
process than negative emotions and so you switch to the positive emotions maybe our neural centers in our brain are degraded such that we 're unable to process negative emotions anymore but that 's not the case the most mentally sharp older adults are the ones who show this positivity effect
so how can this be well in our research we 've found that these changes are grounded fundamentally in the uniquely human ability to monitor time
not just clock time and calendar time but lifetime and if there 's a paradox of aging it 's that recognizing that we won 't live forever changes our perspective on life in positive
when time horizons are long and nebulous as they typically are in youth people are constantly preparing trying to soak up all the information they possibly can taking risks exploring we might spend time with people we don 't even like because it 's somehow interesting
we go on blind dates
you know after all if it doesn 't work out there 's always tomorrow
we age our time horizons grow shorter and our goals change when we recognize that we don 't have all the time in the world we see our priorities most clearly we take less notice of trivial matters we savor life
we 're more appreciative more open to reconciliation we invest in more emotionally important parts of life
if we invest in science and technology and find solutions for the real problems that older people face and we capitalize on the very real strengths
of older people then added years of life can dramatically improve quality of life at all ages
societies with millions of talented emotionally stable citizens who are healthier and better educated than any generations before them armed with knowledge about the practical matters of life and motivated to solve the big issues
can be better societies than we have ever known my father
who is ninety two likes to say
let 's stop talking only about how to save the old folks and start talking about how to get them to save us all
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