As Goethe wrote, “Age takes hold of us by surprise.” For most of human history, average global life expectancy has never exceeded 30 years. Though we rarely think about it, the great figures of history have almost always died young: Cleopatra at 39; Alexander the Great at 32; Jesus in his early 30s. People lived long enough to produce and protect children; even long enough to seize a throne, found an empire, or create a global religion.
No less a speculative thinker than Sigmund Freud reported feeling horrified when he realised that the elderly gentleman he’d glimpsed in the train window was actually his own reflection; and Gloria Steinem – surely a world away from Freud in every other respect – echoed this feeling when she confessed her shock that, “one day, I woke up and there was a 70-year-old woman in my bed.”
“We also think of old people as obsessed with the past,” she adds. “But thinking about the people I know – especially my partner Sean’s mum, who died a couple of years ago – that really wasn’t the case. She was not interested in the past. Her life was very urgently about the present, and the future.
In real terms, this means that older people are often a lot more capable than our cultural stereotypes suggest. The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health is a survey of more than 57,000 women’s mental and physical health across their adult lives. Professor Julie Byles is head of the Priority Research Centre for Generational Health and Ageing at Newcastle University, and a director of the study.
In 2017, only 6 per cent of people over 65 were in permanent residential aged care in Australia. Even so, concerns raised in the royal commission and elsewhere in recent years have seen the start of a movement searching for new ways to live as an older person.From top left, clockwise: Carl Jung, Simone de Beauvoir, Henri Matisse, Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem..
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