Your later years could be the best years of your life, and
Harvard Medical School psychiatrist George Vaillant, MD, has the case studies
to prove it.
As director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development,
Vaillant has spent 35 years following the lives of several hundred people as
they’ve progressed into their 70s and 80s. And he has come away with a cheering
message: Life after 50 need not be a period of steady decline and shrinking
social horizons. Quite to the contrary, he says, adults who master life’s
stages of emotional maturation find old age a richly fulfilling time, even as
life nears its end and the body inevitably wears out.
Vaillant says his research, distilled in his recent book Aging
Well, presents a view of old age from the perspective of those who are
already there. As such, he says, “it shifts attention away from the middle-aged
gurus who are scared about aging and talk about cellulite and diet and
exercise, and it pays attention to people who actually know how to play the
game.”
Not all the life stories he has followed have been happy. He
saw (and writes about) cases of old age blighted by alcoholism, depression and
social isolation. On the whole, however, the 67-year-old Vaillant was impressed
by his subjects and what they had to tell him. “The people I talked to were
much more grown up than the [younger] people who were interviewing me on the
talk shows and asking me for five points on aging.”
Common themes emerged in Vaillant’s studies. One was that
the personality doesn’t stand still. It doesn’t freeze at some point in
adulthood, never to change. Nor, says Vaillant, is the life cycle an
up-and-down affair, with growth up to middle age and declining powers from then
on. Instead, he says the story of successful adulthood and old age is a
“sequential mastery of a series of life tasks.”
Taking a cue from the Danish psychoanalyst Erik Erikson,
Vaillant says adult development is (or should be) a “widening radius over
time.” In youth, the task is to achieve what Erikson calls “identity,” a sense
of one’s own self and values. The next task on Erikson’s (and Valliant’s) list
is intimacy, or learning to live with another person for the long term in an
interdependent, committed, contented way. Then comes “career consolidation,” a
task not on Erikson’s list. This is the job of assuming “a social identity
within the world of work.”
It’s at this point, when one has hopefully achieved
identity, intimacy and has made some mark on the work world, that one faces the
tasks associated with aging. The first is “generativity,” another of Erikson’s
stages, which Vaillant says requires one “to unselfishly guide the next
generation.” This is the community-building stage, in which people start
focusing less on personal achievement and more on mentoring, teaching and
leading a younger generation.
Vaillant says that, in all three cohorts, mastery of
generativity “tripled the chances that the decade of the 70s would be for these
men and women a time of joy and not of despair.” Later, as their days increase,
people assume the task of wise judge, or what Vaillant calls “Keeper of the
Meaning.” People at this point take responsibility for the wider culture and
past traditions, not just for the people around them. Grandparents teaching
grandchildren about the past are keepers of the meaning, as are the folks who
write local histories.
The final task is Erikson’s “integrity”—coming to terms with
one’s life, accepting it as it was, Vaillant says, “as something that had to be
and that permits no substitutions.” The goal is to die at peace with oneself
and, as Erikson suggests, to show the young how not to fear death.
How can we recognize someone who has mastered these tasks?
Vaillant says those who “grow old with grace” tend to have these
characteristics:
Fifty-somethings who read about such shining examples of
successful aging naturally ask, “Will that be me in 20 or 30 years?” The
Harvard study results suggest that the answer depends more on attitudes and the
quality of relationships than on “objective” factors such as income or physical
health. A good marriage at 50 predicted positive aging at 80, for instance, and
objective health was less important to subjective health—that is, not feeling
“sick” even if you are, in medical terms, ill. Avoiding alcohol abuse is also
important, in part because of the damage alcoholism does to future social
supports.
Other research offers similar insights about the quality of
life in aging. George Maddox, who ran Duke University’s research programs on
aging for 20 years until he retired in 1996, puts more stress than Vaillant on
economics. “There’s an enormous advantage to growing up middle-class,” Maddox
says, mainly because it gives one a belief that “failure is not necessarily
devastating.” As one ages, he says, some wealth is undeniably helpful. “If you
come to late life with reasonably reliable resources, you have tremendous
advantages.”
But the Duke studies, which ran from 1955 until 1980 and
followed some 1,250 people living in the Raleigh-Durham region of North
Carolina, also showed the importance of close relationships, especially with
next-of-kin. “Families are the No. 1 source of support.” Like Vaillant, Maddox
also found that healthful behavior was more important than ancestral traits
(like long-lived forebears) in predicting a long and healthy life. “Lifestyle
trumps genetics almost every time in terms of the things that really matter,”
he said.
These prescriptions for healthy aging don’t work in all
cases. They require healthy brain function, so they cannot really make the
future brighter for victims of Alzheimer’s disease. But most of the elderly
stay lucid, and most are able to live independently. And on the whole they’re
happy. “The majority of older people, without brain disease, maintain a sense
of modest well-being until the final months before they die,” Vaillant writes.
Maddox notes that only about 20 percent will have contact with a nursing home,
and far fewer will have extended stays.
In other words, old age may have its tasks that must be
mastered, but so does life in general. And those with the right attitudes,
habits and ties to kin and community can look forward to leading a well-aged
life.
Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life From the
Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development by George E. Vaillant.
Little Brown and Co., 2002.
The View from Eighty by Malcolm Cowley. Viking, 1980.
This book is currently out of print, so check your local library or used book
seller.
For a classic literary portrait of “integrity” in action,
Vaillant recommmends Sophocles’ play Oedipus at Colonnus, written when
the Greek dramatist was near 90.
Sources: George E.
Vaillant M.D., director, Harvard Study of Adult Development, Cambridge, Mass.;
George L. Maddox, professor emeritus of medical sociology and epidemiology,
Duke University, Durham, N.C.
By Tom Gray
© 2002 Achieve Solutions