Perception of when old age starts has increased over time, shows study | Hacker News Reader

Perception of when old age starts has increased over time, shows study

theguardian.com

34 pointsBrajeshwar60 comments

I’d say it’s not just perception—old age is starting later. My parents aren’t nearly as “old” as their parents were at their current age, or even ten years younger. You might argue that this is recollection bias (i.e. that my grandparents just seemed really old to me when I was a child), but photographs seem to bear my memory out, and I can say with certainty that my parents are way more active and healthy than I ever remember my grandparents being.

Nutrition and medicine have come a long way in the last 50-60 years. I also think that growing up during the Depression and WWII aged an entire generation before its time.

It's likely a mixed bag. One of my grandfathers died before reaching the current age of my retired parents, and the other was still doing calisthenics and running. I have the impression you'd need to look at much larger sample sizes to find the truth.

It's almost certainly not medicine or nutrition. I know romanticising the advancement of humanity gives us a nerd-on but the reality is it's probably just that our grandparents lead gruelingly hard lives on average and that showed years on.

My grandpa was a coalman in his 20s and basically couldn't walk from his mid 70s as his knees were shot. His hip dislocated on average every few months toward the end as there was no muscle holding it in.

More outdoor jobs, and exposure to the sun ages the skin etc.

Gruelingly hard and unhealthy lives. Until relatively recently there was a very high likelihood that you were either a heavy smoker or lived most of your life inhaling a lot of secondhand smoke. There was also a boom in alcohol consumption in the post WW2 western world that lasted into the 1990s.

> Until relatively recently there was a very high likelihood that you were either a heavy smoker or lived most of your life inhaling a lot of secondhand smoke.

Heavy smoking was definitely a problem, as was air and general environmental pollution. Nutrition, too, has made a huge difference. I think that the role of emotional stress is under-appreciated. The Baby Boomers had happy childhoods. The Vietnam War killed .03% of the U.S. population at the time, and the survival of the U.S. was simply never in doubt. Their parents, OTOH, generally had miserable childhoods during the Great Depression, then WWII killed .3% of the population, and of course there were some concerns about the survival of the U.S.

‘Secondhand smoke’ is not actually a thing which has an effect. It’s a propaganda term which ought to be avoided. Old folks today — i.e., the ones who look so much younger than old folks a generation ago — spent their childhoods and adulthoods absolutely surrounded by cigarette smoke, and smoking bans came in far too late to have an effect this recently. Compare never-smoking Boomer children of heavy smokers today to never-smoking Boomer children of non-smokers: there’s no appreciable difference.

> ‘Secondhand smoke’ is not actually a thing which has an effect. It’s a propaganda term which ought to be avoided. Old folks today — i.e., the ones who look so much younger than old folks a generation ago — spent their childhoods and adulthoods absolutely surrounded by cigarette smoke, and smoking bans came in far too late to have an effect this recently. Compare never-smoking Boomer children of heavy smokers today to never-smoking Boomer children of non-smokers: there’s no appreciable difference.

Color me skeptical for a few reasons:

1. From what I understand the negative effects of air pollution more generally are pretty well documented at this point. Cigarette smoke is just one more source of particulate matter in the air which has those ill effects. Just one that was perpetually present at (more or less) all times everywhere.

2. Complete smoking bans are relatively new (although in some places going on 30 years old at this point) but restrictions on where you could smoke happened more gradually. Also the amount of smoke being inhaled by non-smokers is a function of how many smokers there are as well of rules about where you can smoke. The percentage of adults who smoke peeked in the early 1960s and started declining more rapidly in the early 1970s.

Nutrition has seen significant steps backwards in the recent decades. Medicine might also be a net negative since it's mostly treating nutrition related diseases/deficiencies with drugs that have their own side effects.

Medicine has seen progress in fields like surgery and oncology, as in extending lives of old and sick people, so life expectancies are going up.

Life expectancy of overall populations has also increased because of the massive reductions in child mortality thanks due to medicine and better sanitation.

Yes but has life expectancy of the people "who would not have died in child mortality" improved? Seems like a dishonest use of averages

During covid, my mom, in her 60s, was talking to her father, in his 80s. He told her the people he was really concerned about during this pandemic were "the elderly"!

She laughed and pointed out to him that his daughter was old enough to be considered high risk due to age, but he said he had a neighbor who was 104, so those are "the elderly" he was really worried about.

I think your sense of "old" also has a lot to do with the people you know!

(FWIW, both grandpa and his neighbor survived covid. Grandpa's still healthy as a horse as he sneaks up on 90, but his neighbor has since passed away peacefully.)

As childhood is extended, the other epochs have to be moved to accommodate it.

Used to be, someone who was 16 was considered a (young) Adult, ready to live on their own, start a family, be responsible for themselves and others. Now that point is at least a decade later.

I don’t know anywhere in the world where 16 year olds were sent or even able to live on their own. Maybe military or boarding school, or even some type of college, but it wasn’t really on their own.

And outside of a few decades post WW2 USA, I don’t know of 18 to 22 year olds buying their own land/house either. Around the world, multigenerational households have been the norm for eons.

traditionally, nowadays it seems more like a nice opportunity to get gifts. but a barmitvah used to be when a boy was considered old enough to marry and settle down. last i check, jewish boys have it at 13.

Hell, Gandi was 13/14 when he got married.

Marriage does not imply self sufficiency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi

> Recalling the day of their marriage, he once said, "As we didn't know much about marriage, for us it meant only wearing new clothes, eating sweets and playing with relatives." As was the prevailing tradition, the adolescent bride was to spend much time at her parents' house, and away from her husband.[31]

> nowadays it seems more like a nice opportunity to get gifts.

People forget that it has extensive legal ramifications that protect people when things go wrong.

The decline of marriage in the UK has lead to a lot of problems with things like inheritance, responsibility of children, the financial interests of the less affluent partner etc.

* Gandhi

(Sorry! The silent 'h' is easy to miss.)

It's not really 'silent', just pronounced differently to English (and a modifier to the 'd' rather than its own letter). gāñdhī is the transliteration of गांधी (correct name) vs. gāñdī looks like गांदी, and द is not pronounced like ध (which is is kind of a softer, more aspirated 'd').

(The ā, ñ, ī and similar 'accents' more often dropped in transliteration than the aspirative 'h' - I added them above just for accuracy, to talk purely of the d/dh, using the IAST standard for transliteration. But 'nobody' uses this for texting Hindi on qwerty. (And as someone learning the language the resulting ambiguity and variation is frustrating!))

My mom moved out of her parents' house and got by with odd jobs in Chico and renting with students when she was 16 in the 70's. Though to be fair she might be omitting some details. Apparently she decided she'd had enough of living with her parents. Life was different when everything was cash.

I really think we do our offspring a disservice by raising them like they're babies until they're 20.

> I really think we do our offspring a disservice by raising them like they're babies until they're 20.

Why? People and society in general seem to be doing much better nowadays...

Because people spend years of their life artificially constrained by a system that infantilizes them.

"Go West, young man, and grow up with the country"

For a lot of US history you could get land for free. It wasn't a matter of buying it.

I assume the vast, vast majority of people did not go west by themselves or even as a couple at age 16. A family unit spanning various ages was probably moving together.

Lots of people did. You have to understand they were the children of people who went on a boat to move halfway across the planet, early America had a selection bias for the adventurous. It used to be a proper country.

Sorry, I am not buying it. I assume even the earliest settlers had some form of tribal relationship to each other, either via family or friend or even business networks.

The picture being painted above is one of lone wolves (at the age of 16) securing and developing an already populated land (meaning waging war) into a new country is ludicrous.

Here is an example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Penn

> In 1681, King Charles II granted a large piece of his North American land holdings along the North Atlantic Ocean coast to Penn to offset debts he owed Penn's father, the admiral and politician Sir William Penn. The land included the present-day states of Pennsylvania and Delaware.

My great-grandparents got married at 14 and 18 and supported themselves. This would have been the 1920s, but nothing was apparently scandalous about their ages. The only scandal was that she was Scotch-Irish and he was Italian!

> I don’t know anywhere in the world where 16 year olds were sent or even able to live on their own.

Like, any rural area circa ~80 years ago. My grand-grandmother married with 14 and had her first child with 15.

It used to be that people didn’t live on their own at all but instead lived in multigenerational households.

> Used to be, someone who was 16 was considered a (young) Adult, ready to live on their own, start a family, be responsible for themselves and others. Now that point is at least a decade later.

Where on Earth do you live?

Afaik most people would probably call a 16yo a 'young adult' even if the bar is technically at 18. The 18yo is certainly ready for all that (as far as desire/affordability takes them anyway), and the 16yo too with parental permission.

What 25yo is not ready to live on their own, or start a family, for any reason other than money (or that isn't going to go away at 26)?

Certainly if you want to go back younger teens were married off etc. (Juliet of Romeo & being an oft-cited example) but I don't recognise where or when this 16 to 26 year old shift supposedly happened.

Your history knowledge isn't great if his statement seems outrageous to you. Having babies at 16 was far, far more common just 50 years ago in all of the western world.

The answer to "where" this shift happened is "in the entire 'developed' world", and the answer to "when" is of course not a single point of time, but you can observe the graphs to find the derivatives.

The baby boom era had people getting married and having babies at a younger age than both before and after that time period.

It's a mistake to extrapolate the recent trend backwards beyond about the 1940s.

I think the defining factor of 'old age' is the degree of one's utility to the community. Past the point of this utility one becomes a sort of 'living paperweight' - cherished for aesthetic and emotional reasons. With the retirement age increasing in the west, we may see 'older young people'.

>> I think the defining factor of 'old age' is the degree of one's utility to the community

By this definition I was quite elderly as a young man.

That's a great point. I saw something a few weeks back that I (coming up 70) want on a t-shirt: "I hate being the same age as old people". That definitely expresses how I feel very well.

I am almost 40, and I still regularly get called young.

Anyway, I think it is really hard to read from the article if the perception of when someone is old increases over:

time of history (e.g, a 25 year old in 1996 considered 30 old, but a 25 year old in 2020 considers 35 old),

or increases over time of ones age (e.g, a 25 year old considers 30 old, but a 30 year old considers 40 old)

> a 25 year old in 2020 considers 35 old

Tangential, but as someone in their mid 20s I wouldn't think of a 35yo as old at all. In-shape 35yos can be incredibly healthy. I'd probably put "getting old" at late 40s, and even later if you've got good knees/back.

I recently had the opportunity to visit my alma mater after many years away and realized the professors are now the age I thought they were almost two decades ago when I was their student. It was wild to realize just how skewed my sense of age had been! Not only did I apparently think people in their 50s were "old," but I actually thought they must have been in their 70s!

My dad had knee problems when he was older because of a career with a lot of manual labour - that means when you do get old you are less mobile which leads to other health problems...

I'm in my 50s myself now and while I have some other health problems my knees appear to be fine - not something I can say about people who were in the infantry or played sports professionally who are now all suffering quite badly.

You might be surprised what you can do even without good knees and back. My knees currently feel like a balloon is inflated in them every time I stand up. I lean forward and brace myself against the railing when climbing my stairs. Nonetheless, I largely just read Hacker News in the morning when I'm waiting to take a crap before I can leave and I'm about to go run 8 miles, which I should be able to do in about an hour at a fairly easy pace. My weekly distance runs are creeping up past 20 miles and my tempo runs close to 6 minutes per mile. This is the best I've been since high school.

As for my back, well, Mondays are supposed to be cross-training days and I typically use an indoor rower for about an hour or so, but had to cut it short because my lower back seized up. I've had multiple lumbar interbody fusions and currently have ten screws, two rods, and two metal spacers in my spine. I still lift six days a week anyway, not exactly heavy and it probably never will be (certainly not if I continue focusing as much as I do on running), but you do whatever you can do.

The biggest differences getting old are it takes longer to warm up, you're more sore at the end of a session, recovery takes longer, and injuries do not heal as fast, typically lingering for months rather than days. But it doesn't mean you stop functioning. You just take your time and build up slowly. You have to learn to set goals in terms of years and decades. I worked out with resistance bands for six months before I tried to lift barbells. I walked for four years before I tried to run again. For a long time, I thought I would never be able to, but here I am.

If you saw me out on the street, I'm sure you could tell I'm in my 40s, but I don't think you'd see me as degraded or old. I've definitely got some crow's feet around my eyes and lines on my forehead, but still no gray hairs, no bald spots or receding, and the body of an underwear model. I'm not as strong as I was in my 20s when I focused on lifting and I'll probably never be as fast as I was earlier when I was a two-time state champion in high school cross-country and still ran pretty seriously in college, though non-competitively. You have to learn how to accept some level of inevitable decline, but nonetheless do as much as you can given the limitations you can't get past.

This is a terrible headline. It sounds as though perception itself has increased, not the age that's considered old.

Some people admit they're old when store muzak is from their twenties; others wait until they don't even recognise the muzak anymore to do so.

I'm 39 and I feel like I'm 20. Not physically, but in terms of excitement about living.

My grandmother said approximately the same thing to me when she was ~85. Life goal.

I'm 43 and I feel like I'm 60. Both physically, and in terms of excitement about living.

Wanna talk? What happened?

I've often pondered that I've been fortunate in life in that I never had health issues, and so I never had any difficulties in following the easy path in life/society (meaning study, work, pay taxes, enjoy). But other than that I'd be curious how a person would come to a situation where he'd say something like what you just said.

(Also no war...)

A few things. I got diagnosed with osteoarthritis about a year ago, not long after I'd started weightlifting in an attempt to improve my confidence and wellbeing, and it was working. The doctor I saw before the diagnosis was a patronising asshole who made me feel like an idiot for weightlifting. The doctor who gave me the diagnosis did so via SMS with the corresponding level of empathy and interest.

I live in the United Kingdom and there's a very palpable sense that quality of life has nosedived over the past few years.

My comment was quite flippant. My life isn't that bad, especially compared to a lot of people, and I don't go around feeling sorry for myself, but I'm definitely not hopeful or excited about the future, and I've developed a degree of contempt for, and distrust of, people that is probably unfair, unattractive, and isn't very pleasant to feel.

I'm also in the UK and there's a very real decline as the level of inequality grows.

I used to be able to book appointments using the NHS app to see my GP before the lockdowns. Now the app just says appointments aren't available to be booked that way and everyone just has to call at 8am and hope they're lucky enough to get through. People who don't need to be at work can go and queue up physically too at 8am, but that doesn't help people who aren't mobile enough.

Food prices are going up and up and I can often see prices change between each visit.

Energy price cap is coming down, but standing charges are going up, so I'm paying less per KW/h but actually paying more each month because I use as little electricity as possible.

Potholes are everywhere and when they do get repaired it lasts weeks, not even months.

Local library opening hours are shrinking.

I could go on and on about the decline I can witness around me.

We need change.

Big business seems to call the shots, look at what is going on with UK Water Companies.

I'm not sure are current political structure will deliver that change though.

It's just crazy to me that water (water!) was privatised. How do you look at something so basic and essential and think that what it needs is a layer of people added who are trying to extract as much profit from it as possible? I mean, the answer is obvious, but it's so depressing that it just happened without the streets being filled with people protesting.

https://www.ft.com/content/91a2779a-4077-11e7-9d56-25f963e99...

"Consumers in England are paying £2.3bn more a year for their water and sewerage bills under the current privatised system than if the utility companies had remained in state ownership, according to research by the University of Greenwich."

It just seems so obvious to me that for basic necessities, you don't want them owned by people trying to get away with doing the bare minimum, charging the most they can get away with and weaselling their way out of repairing, maintaining and improving the system.

The road near where I live was repaired recently and I swear it has more potholes now than it did before!

I volunteer at a charity and was appalled to speak to someone last week who had tried (and failed) to remove some of his own teeth because of no access to an NHS dentist. :-(

Oh speaking of which....

A few month ago I was told that I should remove a wisdom tooth. The waiting list on the NHS is 6 to 9 months...

I don't know if this makes any difference, but I'm also 43 and experienced some pretty bad shit in my mid to late 30s. Read my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40156553

At one point, I needed three spine surgeries and two other nerve transplacement surgeries in my left arm, all in the span of 16 months. I was walking with a cane for a few years, a walker at times, and sometimes I couldn't walk at all. My spine surgeon thought I was insane wanting to lift again after all of it, though he said I was only the second stupidest patient he'd had, with the stupidest being a guy who started skydiving again only a month after getting a disc replacement.

I also felt much the same way about decline in the US. This all started happening in 2016 when Trump was elected, and I'm ethnically Mexican. My niece's father is a "dreamer," an undocumented immigrant who was brought here as a child, lived in the US nearly his entire life, but never given citizenship. The climate felt pretty damn hostile to me and my family. I walked in a few protests, entirely peaceful affairs, hobbling down the street with a cane, not saying anything, not even holding a sign, and had MAGA counter-protesters throwing beer bottles at me, the police who were supposed to be escorting us ignoring it and doing nothing.

But hey man, here I am. I stopped watching the news, got off of social media, and got back out there anyway. Life is a whole lot of ups and downs. Being in a down doesn't have to mean that's the end. The same is true in the opposite direction. I'm well aware at this point that my future may be far worse than my present. Bad things can and do happen. But I'll take what I can when I can and cherish the good times when they come. As long as you're still alive and continue trying, more good times should come at some point.

It does make a difference and I appreciate you taking the time to write it.

I do intend to get back on the horse, it's just hard work trying to overcome the social anxiety of starting to go to the gym all over again, especially when I have all these extra negative voices in my ear and no positive/supportive ones. I go walking (5-10km) pretty much every day and I'm down to a healthy weight, which does help with self-esteem, but I'd much rather be and look strong than thin.

Where are you? I'm in London.

100% agree on the mood right now. I don't think it's imaginary.

Aberystwyth in Wales.

You too, huh?

2019: 35 and feel like I'm 25

2021: daughter born

2023: 39 and feel like I'm 50

A lot of this is perception but I definitely don't exercise like I used to, partially made up by lifting her and chasing her around (and I wouldn't trade this for anything).

So am I, but I sometimes attribute the feeling to delusion, and non-acceptance of the fact of aging.

But then I counter my own disillusion and fatalism with a good: "Being young is in the head!", and I go about my business, blissfully ignorant of the passing of time (for now)..

Nothing bad happen to you in your life?

Just curious.

I had a similar take on life until I had a dose of Reality hit. Now, I have mere Nietzche Will To Power-style guidance pushing me forward. Life was prettier as a Idealist Stoic.

Nothing really bad, no...

What happened to you?

Its too sad to share, IMO. Maybe I'm defending bad people.

Its easier to say I lost religion/God to explain the significance. To this day I'm hesitant to recommend people read Philosophy/Science, reality is not as pretty as they taught us as children.

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