He is chief of geriatric medicine at Penn Medicine and is himself 69. That jibes with Jerry Johnson's experience. The age at which men have a 4 percent risk of dying in a year rose from 65 in 1930 to 76. Men now hit that mark around 60, women at 65. In 1930, an average man reached the 1 percent threshold at 44. The striking thing is that the age at which people reached those milestones has climbed impressively. He doesn't think we're old until our risk climbs to 4 percent.
He thinks if your chances of dying are less than 1 in 100, you're still young. Shoven himself - he's 70 - likes to think of middle age as the middle of our adult years, not the middle of our whole life. Shoven thinks achieving 1 percent risk roughly corresponds with the end of what most of us think of as middle age. He looked at three groups: those who had a 1 percent, 2 percent and 4 percent chance of dying in the next year. Work by John Shoven, a Stanford University economics professor, shows how aging has changed since 1930. She prefers not to categorize people, but says referring to older adults and the aging population is acceptable. "We need a word or words to describe this period, and we just don't have them yet," said Tracey Gendron, a gerontologist at Virginia Commonwealth University. I asked some experts for help with my terminology problem and found that they've been struggling with it, too. As long as that remains true, no word for people with graying hair and wrinkles can remain untainted for long. We desperately want to look and act younger than our chronological age and pretend we'll never need a walker or forget our children's names. Most of us still don't even want to talk about, let alone face, what inevitably comes after old age: death. Tell us what you think, either in the comments or by email at guess is that our inability to embrace a word isn't so much about the word itself but about how Americans feel about the last stage - or two - of their lives. It would make my life as a writer who sometimes has to write about age groups easier if we had more than one word for the huge swath of the population over that arbitrary line: age 65. I am clearly beyond middle-aged, from a math perspective, unless I got every possible good gene in my family. I asked her how she thinks people should describe her and she said "ancient." She wasn't joking. I also think it's crazy to use the same word to describe me that you'd use for my frail, almost 88-year-old mother. We need to rethink what old means.īut I personally think that some of my baby boomer peers - the oldest are now 71 - are ridiculously sensitive about words that imply they've lived a while. We live in an era when both our recent presidential candidates were past traditional retirement age, when rock stars tour in their 70s, when Tony Bennett is beloved and charismatic at 90, when doctors, lawyers and professors routinely work well into what used to be old age. So, I see why advocates dislike the word old and all its pejorative implications. I get that ageism is a serious problem, especially if you feel good and want to - or have to - keep working after 65 in a setting that prizes youth. I am old enough to remember when it was OK to call people not much older than I am now (62) old. (Definitely not all.) Some writers use "mature." Do we really have to wait till we're 65 to be mature? I rather like "elders," but when does that start?
Senior citizen has fallen out of fashion, but "seniors" is OK in some quarters. Older than what? Everybody's older than somebody. Some of you are mad at me already, but it gets really tiresome to have to alternate among the hazy euphemisms that are supposed to stand in for the hated word "old." Older, as in older adults or older people, seems to be the most acceptable term, but it offends the part of me that prefers words with some precision.
As someone who writes a lot about the medical and social issues of aging, I am constantly faced with a problem: What am I supposed to call old people these days?
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