Aging: Does “Old” Mean No Longer Fully Alive?

As one born at the beginning of the Baby Boom, I am used to having the preoccupations of my generation becoming fodder for media preoccupations with us, much as the Millennials are experiencing now. And now that we  are in or approaching later life, this focus on us emerges again.70 million of us Baby Boomers are facing what it means to be in later life. And many of us begin to fret about how old is old? Am I old? What does it mean to be old? How is it that so many of us recoil from knowing ourselves as old?One researcher, Serge Scherbov, says in a recentNYTimes article for Americans, it ’s roughly 70 to 71 for men and 73 to 74 for women, though, as he has written, “your true age is not just the number of years you have lived.”“The main idea of the project,” he told me, “is that an old age threshold should not be fixed but depend on the characteristics of people.” Factors such as life expectancy, personal health, cognitive function and disability rates all play a role, he said, and today’s 65-year-old is more li ke a 55-year-old from 45 years ago.So according to Dr. Scherbov, I am not yet  old, though I have been contentedly referring to myself as a “little old lady” for at least 5 years now, shamelessly taking advantage of whatever courtesies or benefits that accrue to me because of so labeling myself. And maybe because I am told that I look younger than my age, I am comfortabl e identifying myself as old.For his book “Healthy Aging,” Dr. Andrew We...
Source: Jung At Heart - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: blogs