FIGHTING THE FOURTH AGE
AT UCL, HIGGS BECAME especially interested in the social dynamics of aging with the realization that, for boomers, retirement no longer meant the end of something, but the beginning. “It had been that you worked and then you retired and then you died, and this all happened in a relatively short period of time,” says Higgs. “But retirement became something to look forward to, not something to dread.”
Known as the “Third Age,” boomers have embraced the post-work period of freedom to try new things, travel, learn, volunteer – and, Higgs adds, to demonstrate how well they can age. “One of the things that exists in various stages of the life course is demonstrating how good you are at various things. And now people are demonstrating how good they are later in life, how they’re able to run marathons in their 80s, and join Masters athletic clubs and swim as fast as younger people.”
Boomers envision a kind of “ageless aging,” he says, which reflects a youth culture that seems itself to be immortal. “They listen to the Rolling Stones still singing about youth rebellion in their 80s.” Yet as the Third Age flourishes, it throws what comes next into “ever sharper and sharper relief” and that’s what Higgs describes as the “Fourth Age” – the late-life period of decline, when physical and mental limitations may lead to dependence. “It’s the stage where people go from living their own lives to being assessed by others,” he says. “Often it’s a shift from a first-person narrative of ‘I want’ to a third-person narrative of ‘That person needs … ’”
Society doesn’t embrace that aspect of aging at all, Higgs says. “It’s feared.” News reports may cheer the 100th birthdays of locals and the famous, especially those performing remarkable age-defying feats, but the majority of those who live extremely long lives are not in this camp. “It’s not discussed, and yet it is implicitly known.”
Indeed, most 100-year-olds are a somewhat invisible group. According to Statistics Canada, almost 60 per cent of centenarians live in nursing homes. “The focus on successful aging creates a barrier among those who have not aged as successfully,” Higgs says. “They are sequestered away by society because nobody really wants to think about that because it threatens the idea of ageless aging.”
As life expectancy continues to rise, and the number of centenarians continues to grow, Higgs feels society has a moral obligation to improve the quality of life of those in the Fourth Age, in part by finding ways to interact with them in everyday life. “Sometimes the only people who have close contact with them are their families, and even that can be done in a very performative way, you know, ‘Once a month, we go and see granny.’”
A 2018 study, based on interviews with 78 centenarians in Germany and published in the Journal of the
American Geriatrics Society, found that one in four reported longing for death. Yet nearly 90 per cent of their close family or primary social contacts were unaware of how they felt. Ideally, Higgs says, with longer lives becoming more common, imaginative solutions will arise to ensure the very old remain socially engaged so that “there is more intergenerational exchange.”
At SFU, Brooks-Wilson also sees the aging population as an opportunity. “Kids could help them with so many things, and elders can help kids with their perspective and their self-esteem. They have so much wisdom to share.” The irony is that while the extremely elderly tend to socialize less, most studies have found that socializing is what enables people to reach an extreme old age in the first place – from the Super Seniors Study in B.C. to the Blue Zones.