“Surveys attest to how difficult it is to accurately identify someone as old in today's Spain,” says sociologist and CSIC researcher María Ángeles Duran in her study The Nameless Ages, published by the Spanish Federation of Sociology in 2021. And that that, according to the most widespread criterion - chronological age -, one in five people would fall into this category given that 20% of the population is over 65 years old.
But it is enough to talk to any sexagenarian, septuagenarian and many octogenarians to see that they do not identify with the stereotypes associated with old age.
“These people are more adults than old: they do not believe that their maturation period has ended but rather that they are in a growth phase, they project themselves into the future, they know that they have years but also a lot of life ahead of them that they want to take advantage of, fill with content and live. with meaning and in accordance with their values; and they don't feel old either because many still have children in their care and their parents are alive,” says Javier Yanguas, gerontologist, psychologist and scientific director of the “la Caixa” Foundation's Senior Citizens program.
Because it is not only that life expectancy has increased but, as explained by Elisenda Rentería, a researcher at the Center d'Estudis Demogràfics (CED) specialized in aging, people arrive in better health and economic conditions at older ages and do not They fit into the idea of dependent people that is associated with old age.
Greater longevity also makes the group of people over 65 years of age increasingly broader, more diverse and heterogeneous and more difficult to fit in or be considered a single social group.
“From zero to 35 years old, society divides us into babies, children, adolescents, young people and adults. And from 50-55 to 100 unifies you as a major or senior. And that is not possible, because a person in their fifties has nothing to do with a 70-year-old, nor that person with a 90-year-old, nor a 93-year-old with a 100-year-old,” emphasizes Manel Domínguez, professor emeritus of Communication at the Universitat Abad Oliba CEU and author of Senior. The life that does not cease, an essay on longevity that will be published shortly by the Diëresis publishing house.
“The elderly do not constitute a true social group; They are a statistical category, a set of chronologically defined individuals who share few associations (...); Its identity is due more to creation from the outside than from within,” says Durán.
And that identity that is attributed to them, the current models of aging, do not fit well with the life experience and how people aged 65 or older feel. Among other reasons, because longevity and social changes are altering life cycles.
“You are a child and adolescent for longer, your youth lengthens, you have children later and your entry into adulthood is delayed, but we continue to consider entering old age at 65 as if nothing had changed,” says Yanguas. .
And he emphasizes that considering someone 65 years old is not realistic, because physically and cognitively they are between 8 and 10 years younger than those of 30 years ago. “Some scientific societies such as the Geriatric Society of Japan have already proposed not treating people under 75 as elderly patients,” he says.
Yanguas points out that in people's lives there does come a time when fragility takes its toll, the person has more physical difficulties, less drive, lives more and more in the present, sets their life goals more and more short-term, He has a perception of finitude, it is increasingly difficult for him to be contemporary, to be up to date, and he feels vulnerable. “When you have these experiences, you enter old age, but age does not define that moment, because there are people who are very well at 80 and others who are broken at 70-something,” he details.
The sociologist Marcos Bote, professor at the University of Murcia and specialist in social change and old age, assures that social changes force the redefinition of life cycles. It already happened with adolescence, a concept that emerged in 1904 because, as the formative stage lengthened, there was no longer a direct transition from childhood to adulthood by joining the workforce.
"Now, changes in life expectancy, health, and the breadth and heterogeneity of the group mean that retirement does not serve to mark the entry into old age, and academics are debating whether to create a new term to refer to the stage between retirement age and old age or denying age as a category, stopping identifying people as a social group by their years, in the same way that we talk about fluid gender so as not to categorize them by their sex,” says Bote.
Bote emphasizes that more and more people believe that other characteristics related to social class or health status, and not age, define what individuals are like.
Rentería and fellow CED researcher Jeroen Spijker assure that in the scientific field they are looking for a way to not associate old age with age but with other variables such as health status, activity level or dependency.
“Aging is perceived as something problematic, associated with poor health, dependence on others or low productivity, but not all older people are economically dependent people – while many young people are; On the contrary, the group of seniors between 65 and 79 years old is richer and healthier than ever and not only are they an important group of consumers for the economy but studies show that they are contributing more to their communities than any other age group. through volunteering and the provision of unpaid care and services,” emphasizes Spijker.
“The productive capacity of the person does not only include paid work, and studies reveal that people today continue to be productive, in unpaid activities, until advanced ages and it is from the age of 80 when the inflection occurs,” confirms Rentería. .
For all these reasons, Spijker assures that there is no age cohort that can be associated with old age. “There is no fixed age at which people age, but rather it is a flexible age depending on the health of each person, and old age comes when you lose autonomy or stop doing things and begin the last stage of your life,” he points out.
For this reason, he believes that, if age is used to identify old age, the reference should not be chronological age, the years since birth, but rather the years until death (based on life expectancy indicators).
Joaquín Solana, professor at the Abad Oliba CEU University and author of the doctoral thesis Longevity, new challenges and opportunities for management and entrepreneurship, considers that the first step to break the inertia of associating old age with having a certain age is to eliminate the retirement age, allow freedom of choice to extend working life, and establish adaptations and more flexible work formulas for older employees that allow them to live in a different way those intermediate stages until true old age without suffering as much from the harms of ageism .
The fact that the baby boom generation, the almost 14 million people born between 1957 and 1977, is the one that is reaching 65 years of age contributes to intensifying the debate on updating the concept of old age and prejudices about age.
“They are a very new generation that has witnessed great social transformations and is very demanding (especially in the case of women, who have already lived through the sexual revolution, massive incorporation into the world of work and the fight for equality and are now demanding gray hair). or sex in adulthood), and the fact that there are so many of them and therefore more heterogeneous, as well as being non-conformists, means that they have their own way of understanding old age” and that they promote changes, says Bote.
