Youthful Old Age!

A Self-evaluation Tool

“You can’t help getting older, but you don’t have to get old.”

- George Burns

“If you have confidence, it can empower you to reach heights you never thought possible. But if you don’t, it can have a devastating effect on your future. Confidence lies at the core of what makes things happen.”

- Prof Ian Robertson

Defining Old Age

The inspiration to write this article was triggered by the following WhatsApp message, obviously a newspaper clipping, which caught my compelling attention some time ago. I reproduce it below exactly as received.

I have a tendency to dismiss such messages as just bible bytes, but when I looked at the last line, proclaiming the reputation of the original source, I thought better of it, and read the whole piece with rapt attention. Then I checked the credentials and professional background of the neuroscientist cited in the article. As credibility was established quickly, I began to examine the contents from my own perspective.

The primary observation of Prof Ian Robertson (see picture below, aged 72) is that people are aging slower now than before. The rest of his arguments are set out in the newspaper clipping above and at the original source cited above. However, worldwide differences exist in life expectancy, and I will get to this later in this article. 

Reverting to my own interest in the topic, first and foremost, I have to reluctantly admit that I come under the ‘old’ classification by any common demographic criteria since I will be hitting 85 come September. Actually, I became a ‘super-senior citizen’ when I turned 80, having received twin rewards of a substantially enhanced pension and a not so substantially lower income tax.  The new landmark next month entails me another hike in pension.  So, growing old is not always a curse as it is generally made out to be; it also has its countervailing rewards, even if it is only for some people like me!

There are also other minor rewards like concessional, or even free, entry to exhibitions, museums, art galleries, popular entertainment events, sports and games, etc., in some countries. I have experienced a bit of this in countries as diverse as Japan and Indonesia.  Not so minor is the enhanced interest rates for bank deposits from senior citizens in my country.

I am reconciled to my ‘old’ or ‘super senior’ status as an unalterable fact. But I must admit that a ‘feeling’ of being old has not crossed my mind any time, though my appearance may suggest otherwise. Also, although it is 23 years since I retired from service formally, it is only since the last three or four years I stopped taking up paid assignments of a professional nature, which involved frequent travel within the country, not because I was losing interest in them but because I thought I needed to live differently.  Besides, I have travelled abroad quite extensively during the last decade to satiate my urge to experience the wider world and ‘expand my horizons’. These have kept me both physically active and mentally alert, something impossible had I taken my retirement in any literal sense.

While age is a metronomically increasing number, which we generally measure with a calendar based on repetitive astronomical events, aging is a process that is rather hard to quantify.  It is something like the entropy of a system which only increases with time in an unregulated physical process, and never decreases. (Entropy, whose mathematical description we may ignore here, is a measure of the disorder in a physical system, such as a gas escaping from a leaky valve.)   

Aging and Life Expectancy

While Robertson sees several reasons for a slowing down in the aging process, a correlation can also be seen between aging and life expectancy, which has indeed increased dramatically in most countries in the last few centuries, especially in the last century.  Below is a visual, showing available data on life expectancies in different geographical regions over the period 1770 – 2021. Barring Africa, life expectancy everywhere is now in the seventies! While there are many reasons for this, the single most important reason could be better health, fueled by spectacular advances in medical sciences and technologies, and services, as also by better hygiene and public awareness of good personal and civic habits. 

[The little dip at the end is obviously attributable to the impact of Covid-19]

My own country, India, has witnessed a doubling of life expectancy since independence (1947) as the following graph indicates:

While the huge increase in life expectancy speaks volumes for the progress the country has achieved since independence, it has also opened up a rather problematic situation for the government in the form of sky rocketing pension bills payable to its retired employees at both central and state levels.  In fact, the pension outlay currently is significantly in excess of the salaries paid to working government employees.  However, the extension of retirement benefits to newer government employees has been greatly reduced in an effort to offset the anomaly.  

Towards quantifying youthful aging

With my academic background, I tend to look for quantitative relationships among variables, even if they are of non-physical types pertaining to the noncognitive domain.  So, largely on the basis of Ian Robertson’s findings, I propose the following schema as a flippant exercise to partially quantify the process of aging youthfully:

Based on Ian Robertson’s observations, one can classify the human life span broadly into three groups:

G1: Young age, up to 50

G2: Middle age, between 50 and 80

G3: Old age, above 80

Also, the key descriptors associated with his seven-point plan to achieve a ‘youthful old age’ can be reduced to:

1. Aerobic fitness
2. Mental stimulation
3. New learning
4. Reduced stress
5. Social life
6. Healthy eating
7. Thinking young

We need to elaborate each of these descriptors to spell out what it amounts to in some precise terms as far as possible. Let me attempt this in my own way.

1)  By aerobic fitness, I would like to include all physical activities, both outdoor and indoor. Being athletic or predominantly an outdoor type merits a higher rating. Leading a lazy, sedentary life works the other way around. The nature of one’s profession has a great deal to do with one’s physical fitness. The function and structure of the brain both appear to be influenced strongly by physical activity in daily life situations.

2)  Mental stimulation is how one keeps one’s brain active by posing it all types of challenges, including the simplest of mathematical calculations or tackling complex problems requiring the use of advanced mental abilities. Games like chess or tasks like the Rubik cube fall into this category. People with high IQ should also rate highly. One can reduce cognitive decline to a significant degree by mental training.

3)  New learning would mean expanding one’s horizons through learning ‘outside the box’. Moving from algebra to calculus, classical mechanics to quantum mechanics, one genre of music to another, etc., would all involve new learning. The more one learns, apparently the more one can learn. New learning can have profound physiological and psychological effects on the brain.

4)  Life under undue stress is often counterproductive and hinders a smooth aging process. Hence, the emphasis on reducing stress. Extreme and prolonged stress appear to produce strong negative effects, particularly on human memory.

5)  Social life includes how harmoniously one fits into the social fabric of everyday life. The degree of sociability should count as well. People who find it difficult to get on with others ought to rate low in this category. People who maintain a lot of social interactions seem to be able to maintain mental sharpness for quite a long time.

6)  Healthy eating, under nutritional guidance, contributes to fewer ailments in life and therefore, slower aging. There is strong evidence that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables and fish seems to have profound effects on reducing cognitive decline in later life.

7)  People who generally feel the burden of age are the antithesis of thinking young. Thinking young should also result in feeling young, a very powerful psychological stimulant to a youthful old age. The influence of confidence and positive thinking on the mental state is very well known. Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 classic book on ‘The Power of Positive Thinking - A Practical Guide to Mastering the Problems of Everyday Living’ is a notable example.

The Age-Life style Matrix, a self-evaluation tool

Now, we can create a self-evaluation tool by making up a matrix of numerical data showing Robinson’s life style descriptors against the age group as set out below:

Next, one can assign an appropriate numerical rating (needless to emphasize that this is entirely subjective) at each cell of the matrix and do a simple arithmetic exercise to determine where one stands on the ‘youthful old age’ index, both age group wise and overall. The rating can be on a 1-5 scale or even 1-10.  As an illustrative example, here is a fully filled matrix on a 1-5 scale for one hypothetical ‘old’ person:

The above self-assessment profile is broadly indicative of a person who is active both physically and mentally, but leading a somewhat stressful and possibly introverted, but stable, life. 

Self-Evaluation

Now to a self-evaluation of whether and to what extent do I see myself satisfying the seven-point criteria for a youthful old age. Let me go through them one by one, first qualitatively.

Aerobic fitness: In my student days I used to dabble in all kinds of street level sports activities, including tennis ball cricket and long-distance walking, the latter more out of necessity than choice, eventually giving way to cycling even longer distances, more out of thrill than necessity. This progressed with time to table tennis, outdoor ‘ball’ badminton, which is a lighter version of indoor shuttle badminton, and eventually to even lawn tennis, which came in only one version for me, i.e., on hard courts. Walking long distances continued into my middle age and is still my mainstay, as are some indoor aerobic exercises, on the treadmill and the monocycle. These have ensured an adequate level of aerobic fitness despite having to manage some annoying morbidities and coexisting with some comorbidities, and covid! Yes, I score decently on this criterion!

Mental stimulation: If learning and teaching physics, other physical sciences and mathematics, and doing some occasional investigation and research projects requires or results in any degree of mental stimulation, I have had a fair share of it. Observational astronomy as a serious hobby has provided a welcome bonus! Even if a history of viewing total and annular solar eclipses in different parts of the world as another facet of the hobby is not sufficient evidence of an intense mental stimulation, the anticipation of viewing a few more of them in the winter of my life certainly is.

New learning: The very nature of the academic disciplines and activities that provide me a mental stimulation necessitates a continuous flow of new learnings to sustain the existing ones. This is perhaps the essence of the phrase ‘growing older and wiser’. But this is not the same as creating new knowledge or pushing the frontiers of existing knowledge which a true scientist ought to be doing. I have no illusions in this regard! My rating is distinctly bearish on this score!

Reducing stress: Stress is perhaps an unwelcome byproduct of an achievement oriented and active life. Success often comes at the expense of stress. I have had a fair share of highly stressful situations in life, as when I had to answer six theory papers in six consecutive days without a break in my master’s degree examination, or when I took up a high paying job only to realize that I was a misfit for it and eventually had to resign from it, or when I had to handle a major medical emergency at home, or when I myself was the victim of a hit-and-run accident in a foreign land, etc., but there have not been too many that I brought upon myself that are of my own making. By and large I have learnt to manage such situations with a combination of firmness, boldness, proactiveness and equanimity, and got on with the demands of life relatively unscathed. The art of reducing stress often boils down to not expecting disproportionately rewarding outcomes in relation to the efforts put it. I can rate myself satisfactory on this score.

Social Life: Being a bit of an introvert and unwilling to compromise on some of my radical beliefs, I do consider my social life perhaps as my weakest link with the outside world. Being a lifelong teetotaler and a vegetarian hasn’t helped either. I have been getting on reasonably well with other people socially as well as professionally, but perhaps not as well as I could. My score is distinctly below par.

Healthy eating: In my student days it was primarily a question of adequate eating as evidenced by my impoverished looks. After this issue was resolved in my later years, healthy eating was more a norm than an exception since most of what I used to eat was good home cooked food. It was only during my middle and old age stages that I occasionally indulged in junk food, especially during my travels. In recent years healthy eating has become a matter of necessity. By and large, I am doing well on this score.

Thinking young: I don’t suppose old people can be thinking young without also feeling young. The two indeed go together. If a feeling of living in a world full of excitement and wonder doesn’t foster thinking young, I am afraid nothing will. This is indeed my forte and I should rate myself quite high on this score.

So, how youthfully is my old age progressing? In other words, what is my self-evaluated matrix score? If at all interested, I leave the reader to unravel it from the following rather enigmatic numerical string:

454545543334233433555

The bottom line

How youthfully one can age also depends on one’s attitude towards life.  The following quote from Dr Ben Carson sums it up eminently:

“Sometimes you are unsatisfied with your life, while many people in this world are dreaming of living your life. A child on a farm sees a plane fly overhead and dreams of flying. But, a pilot on the plane sees the farmhouse and dreams of returning home. That’s life!! Enjoy yours… If wealth is the secret to happiness, then the rich should be dancing on the streets. But only poor kids do that. If power ensures security, then officials should walk unguarded. But those who live simply, sleep soundly. If beauty and fame bring ideal relationships, then celebrities should have the best marriages. Live simply. Walk humbly and love genuinely...! All good will come back to you.”