Aging in America. Lawrence R. Samuel

aging in America can be easily justified given its cultural significance and the demographic dynamics of our time and place, but I believe that any project has to speak to readers in a special way at some level. From the conversations I’ve had with individuals of all stripes and from my more formal research, it is clear that aging is one of those subjects that nearly everyone can relate to in some way. My story is hardly unique, with its themes well documented in many studies of older people. More than anything else, perhaps, this book is a resource that adds valuable context to the thorny issue of aging by tracing its history over the past half century. My modest goal is to shed some additional light on the subject, and in doing so perhaps help some readers come to terms with this most fundamental and fascinating part of life.

      Introduction

      Aging in America: A Cultural History is, as the title makes clear, a cultural history of aging in the United States. No such book has been recently published, something surprising given the centrality of the subject in contemporary life. Much interest currently revolves around aging in America, as the tens of millions of baby boomers head into their sixties and seventies. While I spend considerable time following the trajectory of the generation born between 1946 and 1964, all Americans are somehow and necessarily involved in the story. Everyone is aging, after all, making the subject something with which we all can identify. Aging goes to the heart of individual identity, a good reason why its cultural history is a worthy venture. On a deeper level, aging goes to the essence of humanity; it is one of our very few common or even universal experiences. I am interested in stories that bring us closer together rather than push us apart, and from this perspective it is difficult to imagine a more pertinent topic, as each of us gets older every day regardless of our race, gender, or other socially defined division.

      Focusing on the past half century of American history makes sense for a number of reasons when thinking about aging, the most obvious being the demographics. Never before has there been a generation so large and so influential, making its evolution over time an attractive topic for any historian. Ten thousand Americans will turn sixty-five years old every day for the next twenty years, an astounding figure. More remarkably, perhaps, eighty-five to ninety-four-year-olds represent the fastest-growing age group in America, according to the most recent census, with that segment of the population increasing almost 30 percent between 2000 and 2010. Although much has been understandably made of American youth culture, the nation’s past fifty years have in many ways been heavily defined by the idea of aging, with key moments ranging from politics (the passage of Medicare) to science (the genetic revolution) to medicine (the rise of “antiaging” medicine) to education (the creation of gerontology as a field of study).

      Given its significance, tracing the story of aging in the United States over the course of this era reveals key insights that add to our understanding of American culture. One of the key points here is that the idea and reality of aging have contradicted prevailing social values, attitudes, and beliefs, a phenomenon that has largely disenfranchised and marginalized older people from the rest of the population. One could reasonably conclude that the aging of the largest generation in U.S. history would have significantly altered American values over the past half century, but this simply hasn’t happened. Our ageist society has deep roots, going back decades to produce what is perhaps the most youth-oriented culture in history. On the cusp of old age, baby boomers like myself are now increasingly the target of ageism (thinking or believing in a negative manner about the process of becoming old or about old people), a likely byproduct of a culture in which getting older has little or no positive value.¹

      More than that, I suggest, there is currently no useful narrative of aging in American culture, leaving a large social vacuum as our population becomes older. Older people “find themselves with no mythology to support their presence, no place—figurative or otherwise—for themselves in the culture,” the spiritual teacher Ram Dass wrote in his 2000 book Still Here.² The absence of a clear definition of aging is reflected by our difficulty in arriving at an acceptable label for those whom I call older (versus old) people. The once popular term “elderly” is no longer considered appropriate for many in their seventies and eighties today, and even “seniors” and “senior citizens” (the latter coined during LBJ’s Great Society programs that promoted the first Older Americans Act) carry connotations of dependence and cantankerousness. Both “older adults” and “mature adults” have recently increased in usage, especially among academics, but to me each sounds more like a movie rating than a group of people. “Geezers” (a term coined in the 1880s) has also gained some currency in recent years, but some are pushing for more politically correct terms, such as “seasoned citizens,” “wellderly,” and “superadults.”

      Many of the problems associated with aging can be seen as rooted in a lack of knowledge about the experience. It is fair to say that we simply do not know how to age, as we are never provided with the informational tools to gain any kind of fluency in the process. There are now many books devoted to aging “gracefully,” but that body of work is overwhelmed by the plethora of resources advising individuals on how to stop or slow the process. Without any real “story” to aging, except as something to be delayed as long as possible, all kinds of antiaging therapies have flourished, further denaturalizing the perfectly natural act of getting older. Much of this is the boomer generation’s own fault, as this cohort has largely failed to turn the idea of aging into a relevant and meaningful part of life. Rather, boomers have clung desperately onto their youth, an ultimately futile pursuit that does not bode well as they rush headlong into their senior years.

      Marketers and the media have each encouraged the idea that aging does not and should not have to happen, further entrenching the peculiar idea that getting older should be avoided at all costs. My local PBS station frequently airs antiaging shows such as Aging Backwards, for example, whose producers promise viewers they can “reverse the aging process and look nineteen years younger in thirty minutes a day.” Olay, the maker of skin care products, urges consumers to look “ageless,” an appeal that reflects our general antipathy toward getting older. Despite their popular appeal, “aging backwards” and “age-lessness” are, of course, absurd concepts that have absolutely no foundation in how the human body or any other living organism works. Those who yearn to reverse the aging process are attempting to negate a fundamental part of life that every human in history has experienced. “Antiaging” is, quite simply, antihuman, making any and all efforts to achieve such a thing contrary to the basic mechanism of life as we know it. More people should embrace the idea that aging is a natural part of life, versus trying to turn the clock back. Even if it were possible, achieving antiaging would result in myriad truly horrific scenarios, one more reason we should not just accept but welcome the fact that our bodies get older.

      Women especially have been urged to try to evade aging, a reflection of our youth-obsessed society that places so much emphasis on appearance. “Such evasion comes at considerable social, material, and existential cost,” argues bioethicist Martha Holstein in her 2015 book Women in Late Life as she considers the all-too-common sight of old (and usually wealthy) women in young-looking bodies. A leading force in the field of aging for decades, Holstein can understand why many women pursue such strategies, however. “Women face particular difficulties that derive from the intersection of age and gender across their life spans,” she writes, with a host of economic, physical, caregiving, and health-related inequalities in play.³

      For both women and men, the problematic subject of aging can be seen as a natural result of our devaluation of older people and our inability or refusal to confront the reality of disappearing youth. The first two acts of our lives are sharply defined (growing up and getting educated in the first act, working and raising a family in the second), but what should we do in the third act of our lives? Continue to work as long as we can? Play as much as possible as a reward for our hard work? Spend time with grandkids or travel? Give back to society in some way or leave some kind of legacy? The answer is not at all clear, and, what is worse, few people are even asking the question. Some have argued that boomers will pursue a path of “unretirement” in their senior years, but there is little evidence to suggest such an option is realistic.

      The need or desire for baby boomers to work into their senior years is further complicated by blatant, although