60 is the new 50, according to science and 60-year-olds

Old age is starting later and later, especially if you ask the people concerned. A study published by the American Psychological Association has found that middle-aged and older adults today believe that old age starts later than their contemporaries thought decades ago. Even later than the participants themselves said. Being old is not what it used to be. The study reflects biological changes, but also suggests a lot about the way we relate to aging. “There is a surprisingly strong historical trend toward a subjective postponement or later onset of old age,” explains Markus Wettstein, a psychologist at the Humboldt University in Berlin and lead author of the study. “And we still don’t fully understand why.”

In recent years, life expectancy and quality of life have risen. This has gone hand-in-hand with changes in society: key life stages now happen later, such as marriage and parenthood. And in many countries the age of retirement, the official gateway to old age, has also been pushed back. The diffuse concept of old age may have been pushed back a few years due to these changes, the researchers suggest. Or perhaps, in an ageist society, no one wants to perceive themselves as old.

But what exactly does it mean to be old? From what age is one objectively elderly? Respondents answered the question between one and eight times over a 25-year period. They changed their response as they aged, citing older and older ages as they themselves aged. In the end, the most cited age was 70 and 71. Wettstein is not willing to back those ages. “It is difficult to define [old age] because we always see in our research how tremendously heterogeneous the group of older adults is,” he explains in an exchange of messages.

In general, women tend to say that old age starts at a later age than men. This has been seen in previous research and was confirmed with the new study, where there was a divergence of 2.4 years. “Women tend to live longer than men, which could explain this difference in the perception of the onset of old age,” says Wettstein. The study, which used data from 14,000 German citizens, analyzed how terms such as biological age, chronological age and subjective age have changed since 1988 to more recent dates. “If life expectancy is longer, the perception of the onset of old age could be postponed to a certain extent,” reflects Wettstein. “Someone who is 60 years old might have been considered old in the past, but today, they can expect to live 20 years or more.”

Bruno Arpino, a sociologist at the University of Florence who specializes in aging, goes further and speaks of a prospective age. “Normally, age is measured by looking back to the moment one was born. A totally different perspective, which some researchers propose, consists of looking into the future, that is, how many years a person can expect to live. In this context, being older not only depends on when you are born, but also where. The life expectancy of the country will determine what we understand by elderly.”

The healthiest old people are still old people

Old age is not a number, but a subjective concept, which changes according to society. “In a study carried out in European countries, large differences were observed between countries, of up to 10 years,” says Wettstein, who explains these changes were based on “the participation of the elderly in the labor market, the proportion of older adults within a country and the cultural perception of old age and older adults.”

The study argues that an “individual’s subjective age might be an important factor” when talking about old age. Subjective age refers to how old a person feels, compared to how old they actually are. And generally speaking, adults tend to think of themselves as much younger. According to a 2006 study, adults over 40 perceive themselves, on average, to be 20% younger than they really are. The difference between chronological age and subjective age begins to widen slowly, but inexorably, at age 25, and continues to widen from that point on. As the authors of a University of Virginia study on ageism explain: “Subjective aging appears to occur on Mars, where one Earth decade equals only 5.3 Martian years.”

This is what older people say about what it means to be older, but what does the science say? Is there some support for this subjective perception? The short answer is yes. But Wettstein prefers to give a longer answer: “Thanks to medical advances, older adults are to some extent healthier than they were 10 or 20 years ago, and that could explain why they also believe that old age begins later,” he explains. So this phenomenon is not only psychological, it has a real scientific basis.

A 2021 study carried out in Finland broke this down in numbers. The researchers gave men and women aged between 75 and 80 a battery of physical and cognitive tests. They saved these results and when 28 years passed, they repeated the same tests on another group of men and women of that age. The new round of seniors scored better marks in all areas. They walked faster by between 20 and 40 centimeters per second, were able to grip with between 5% and 25% greater force and could raise their leg between 20% and 47% higher than the group that did these tests 28 years before them. What’s more, they had at least 14% more lung capacity, and better verbal fluency, reasoning, and working memory.

The present study postpones the onset of old age, and its authors argue that it is a solid trend. But not all gerontologists think the same. “We do not have reliable data from the past,” Arpino concedes.

However, interesting information can be obtained from the texts of poets, writers and historians. For example, the ancient Greek poet Mimnermus wrote: “Would that the fate of Death might overtake me without disease or woeful trouble at threescore years” — meaning 60 years of age. Currently, the age at which a person begins to be defined as elderly is around 60 or 65.

“This is an age of convenience used even by international organizations such as the United Nations,” says Arpino. So things haven’t changed that much. Different studies may speak of healthier and stronger elderly people, but that doesn’t mean they are no longer elderly. Sixty is the new 50, but only for people who are 60. And that says more about the stigmas associated with old age than about when it begins. “Throughout history, the perception of how we age has changed more than when we think it starts,” concludes Arpino.

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