Bolder

Carl Honoré

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781471164385
• eBook ISBN: 9781471164378
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

* BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK *
'A joyously life-enhancing book [that] shatters the myths about ageing' Daily Mail Carl Honoré captured the zeitgeist with his international sensation, In Praise of Slow. In Bolder, he introduces us to another rising movement: a revolution in our approach to ageing. Ageing is inevitable. In this time of longer lifespans, however, we have the potential to age better than ever before. Having travelled the globe to meet the pioneers who are redefining ageing, Carl Honoré explores the cultural, medicaland technological trends that will help us make the most of our longer lives. He shows us that the time has come to cast off prejudices and blur the lines of what is possible at every age. We can tear up the old script that locks us into learning in early life, working in the middle years and pursuing leisure with whatever time is left at the end. Instead, we can learn, work, rest, care for others, volunteer, create and have fun all the way through our lives. Bolder is a radical re-think of our approach to everything from education, healthcare and work, to design, relationships and politics. An essential and inspiring read to help all of us make ageing a bonus rather than a burden.

CHAPTER 1

HOW AGEING GOT OLD

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

—T. S. ELIOT,

‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’

Shoreditch is the sort of place Mark Zuckerberg had in mind when he sang the praises of younger brains, a place that can make anyone north of 35 feel a little superannuated. In recent years, this corner of east London has blossomed into a miniature Silicon Valley. The narrow streets are thronged with tech companies and startups along with the usual camp followers: cocktail bars, sushi joints, cafés serving cold-brew coffee. Young people from all over the world glide past on scooters and fixies. In between hackathons and beta tests, they blow off steam and plot world domination over gluten-free pretzels and craft beer. All eyes are on the same prize: launching, or at least owning stock in, the next unicorn.

I am in Shoreditch tonight to watch that entrepreneurial energy unleashed on the business of ageing. The occasion is a pitch-off that promises to ‘accelerate innovation to improve the lives of older adults around the world’. Ten startups will present business plans to an audience of entrepreneurs, investors and policy wonks. Judges will then pick one winner to progress to the European final. Two questions are already burning a hole in my notebook: What do the young turks of Shoreditch understand by the phrase ‘older adult’? And how do they propose to improve their lives?

The venue is Campus London, Google’s hub for entrepreneurs. When I arrive, a young man in a tight waistcoat is pacing up and down outside like a nervous sentry, barking into a smartphone about a meeting with venture capitalists. ‘They totally love the idea of doing something with old people,’ he shouts. So far, so Shoreditch.

Inside, the lobby is festooned with gadgets from my youth that are now antiques – an original iMac, a transistor radio, a cathode ray television set, a Super 8 film projector. One wall bears a slogan straight from the startup playbook: ‘Bigger. Brighter. Bolder. Braver.’ People are already gathered round a table, nibbling nachos and burrata. It’s a young crowd. I approach a bearded twenty-something to ask what brings him to an event on ageing. ‘I’m a serial entrepreneur so I’m always looking for the next big thing,’ he tells me. ‘And ageing is hot right now.’

His mercenary tone makes me wince, but then I remember this is a pitching event. On the upside, the room is packed with clever, can-do folk who are thinking hard about ageing and how to improve our experience of it – what’s not to like?

I sit down to listen to the pitches. First up is a gadget that measures your risk of having a fall and fracturing a hip. Then comes an app to reduce social isolation among older adults by simplifying messaging and photo sharing. Next is a fresh-faced, fast-talking entrepreneur who explains that the best way to tackle abuse, depression and malnutrition among older people is to digitise the supply of home carers. After that we are shown an ‘omnidirectional’ wheelchair that goes up and down as well as forwards, backwards and sideways. The eventual winning pitch is for an aggregator site selling products to help with dementia.

Every one of these ideas can help make the world a better place, and the zeal of the entrepreneurs is infectious. Even as they hail the potential for profit, most talk of being inspired by the plight of someone close to them. The winner spent years caring for his dementia-ravaged mother. As applause sweeps the room, I find myself joining in the messianic swell.

Yet I also feel slightly deflated. Why? Because every product, every pitch, every business plan starts from the same premise: being ‘older’ means being lonely, frail, forgetful, immobile, sad or vulnerable – or all of the above. What about the growing legions of happy, healthy people taking later life by the scruff of the neck? Nothing on show here feels relevant to someone like Darunee Kramwong. Or to me, for that matter. Surrounded by the jeunesse dorée of Shoreditch, and with my own 50th birthday tiptoeing into view, I qualify as an ‘older adult’ – yet many years could pass before I need anything unveiled here tonight. Why has no one taken to the stage with a tool to help someone like me build an app? Or to show someone like Kramwong how to pitch a startup in Shoreditch?

After the event, as I join the queue for Ubers outside, it occurs to me that tonight’s pitching line-up illustrates where we go wrong with ageing. When asked to imagine what it means to be ‘older’, we default to the worst-case scenario. Think about it for a moment. What does ageing conjure in your mind? If you’re like me, or the well-meaning innovators of Shoreditch, what swims into view is mostly grim: decline, decrepitude, digital ineptness, dementia, death. It’s the pitiable, repugnant Dorian Gray portrait festering in the attic. The nursing-home resident dribbling through another game of bingo. Granny struggling to recognise a relation or find her way home. Grandad unable to climb the stairs or wipe his own bottom.

To make the most of our longer lives we have to break out of this worst-case-scenario mode of thinking. And, to do that, we must first understand where our aversion to ageing comes from and how it became so ingrained.

Let’s start by naming the problem. In 1969, Robert N. Butler, an American gerontologist, coined the term ‘ageism’ to describe the ‘systematic stereotyping of and discrimination against people because they are old’. Later the definition widened to include the denigration of ageing itself. Though age stereotyping is usually cruel (the old are forgetful, sad, weak, cranky, unattractive, boring), it can sometimes be kind (the old are wise) or even directed at the young (millennials are snowflakes). But the net effect is always the same: to stuff everyone with the same birth year into the same box and make all of us feel bad about growing older.

Ageism has a USP that sets it apart from other forms of discrimination such as racism or sexism: it comes with a hefty side order of self-loathing. A white supremacist will never be black. A male chauvinist pig is unlikely to morph into a woman. But all of us are growing older. To indulge in ageism is therefore to denigrate and deny your future self. As Bernardino of Siena, a Franciscan missionary, put it back in the early 14th century: ‘Everyone wishes to reach old age, but nobody wishes to be old.’

So, what are the roots of ageism? The obvious place to start is with the D-word. Benjamin Franklin said death and taxes are the only certainties in life, and not even the cleverest accountant can help you evade both. Every day, around 150,000 souls shuffle off this mortal coil. And just as certain as death is our desire to avoid it. Evolution has endowed us with an all-trumping, never-surrender instinct for survival. Think of Ernest Shackleton crossing the freezing, storm-tossed seas of Antarctica in a lifeboat. Or the survivors of that Andean plane crash feeding on the corpses of fellow passengers to stay alive.

Even those who believe in an afterlife are seldom in a rush to reach it, which is why the yearning for immortality stretches across time and cultures. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving works in literature, features a Sumerian king seeking to live forever. Later, pretty much every alchemist in medieval Europe was locked in a race to crack the recipe for eternal life and several emperors in China’s Tang dynasty perished after downing elixirs of youth laced with mercury or lead.

If anything, the appetite for cheating death has sharpened in the modern world. Immortality of the virtual kind is already upon us now that companies such as Forever Identity and Eternime are turning clients into digital avatars and holograms that will live on after they breathe their last breath. In the offline world, billions of dollars are flowing into the race to stop ageing in its tracks. One of the many theories now being explored is that we can rejuvenate the old with blood transfusions from the young. The movement to ‘cure’ death even has its own poster boy, a biomedical gerontologist named Aubrey de Grey, who, armed with an Old Testament beard and a PowerPoint presentation, travels the world telling audiences that the first human being to live to a thousand may already be alive.

Yet putting an end to death is still more sci-fi than sci-fact. Despite our lengthening lives, we remain programmed, at our cellular core, to die. Researchers at the University of Arizona have used mathematical models to show that stopping the ageing process altogether in complex, multicellular organisms such as human beings is a pipe dream. ‘Ageing is mathematically inevitable – like, seriously inevitable,’ says Joanna Masel, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior author in the study. ‘There’s logically, theoretically, mathematically no way out.’

The fact that death, the destroyer of worlds, awaits us all turns ageing into the enemy. How can it not? Every year, every month, every week, every day, every minute moves us closer to the end that nobody wants to reach. Even the tiniest sign of ageing – a wrinkle, a grey hair, a creaky joint – is another reminder that the Grim Reaper is coming for us, that the time we have left to do all the things we want to do is running out.

The fear of death is probably more acute today. Not only has secularisation taken away the solace of the afterlife, but we have messed up the whole business of dying. In much of the world, death has been medicalised and institutionalised. When we approach the end, the default setting is to do everything possible – whatever the cost in money, pain, distress and loss of dignity – to keep us alive. ‘We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more doctors can do,’ writes surgeon Atul Gawande in his book, Being Mortal. ‘They can give toxic drugs of unknown efficacy, operate to try to remove part of the tumour, put in a feeding tube if a person can’t eat: there’s always something.’ This can turn our final days, weeks or even months into a hell worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, leaving us to die hooked up to machines and surrounded by medical staff. We have all seen this scenario played out in TV dramas or in our own lives – and it sends a chill down the spine. The take-home: ‘If ageing leads to this, count me out.’

Even without the shadow of death, ageing gives itself a poor press by changing us in unwelcome ways. It starts gently, with diminished stamina, strength and libido, weaker eyesight and hearing and a dip in short-term memory. In our dotage, things can turn really ugly. Shakespeare, as usual, put it best. In the ‘seven ages of man’ speech in As You Like It, he describes the final chapter before death as a ‘second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’. No wonder ageing is excised from every paradise or utopia ever imagined.

Of course, not everyone experiences Shakespearean levels of suffering at the end of life. Teeth are better nowadays, and many of us remain in fine fettle until the day we keel over. Others merely endure a brief period ‘sans everything’. The trouble is that none of us knows for sure how our own final act will unfold – and the temptation is to imagine the worst, especially now that modern medicine has devised a million ways to keep us alive long after we might prefer to be six feet under. ‘There may be more angst about growing older now because it’s pretty certain it’s going to happen: you have to be unlucky not to live into your 70s and beyond,’ says Pat Thane, an expert in the history of ageing at King’s College London. ‘The problem is you don’t know what state you’ll be in when you get there.’

That uncertainty is compounded by our reluctance to think hard about our future selves. I can remember pretty clearly what I was like at 40, 30 or 20, and any gaps in my memory can be filled by looking at videos and photographs, rereading my own writing from the time or consulting people who knew me back then. I feel a strong kinship with the younger me. By contrast, my future self is a blank slate. My life could veer off in a million different directions, so building a portrait of myself at 60 or 70, never mind 80 or 90, feels like the cognitive equivalent of trying to understand Infinite Jest. The task is made that much harder by human hardwiring. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had no reason to ponder or plan for the future because they lived in the moment, focusing on whatever had to be done to survive another day. ‘We have been oriented from an evolutionary perspective to pay attention to right now and the present has a powerful pull on us,’ says Hal Hershfield, a psychologist at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. ‘We are just not designed to think about the long-term future and that creates a fundamental emotional disconnect with our older selves.’

That disconnection fuels ageism in two ways. First, it allows our darkest prejudices about ageing to flourish unchallenged. Second, it makes it easier to stuff older people into a box marked ‘Other’.

But if we struggle to imagine our futures, let alone see much good in them, perhaps there’s hope for our ageing selves to be found in the past.

Conventional wisdom tells us the past was a golden time for ageing, that growing older was less of a burden to our ancestors because the old were held in high esteem. Was that ever true? And, if so, what does it tell us about the drivers of ageism today?

Certainly there could be upsides to ageing in the past. Elders earned kudos by performing key roles in traditional societies: gathering food; teaching the young to make weapons, tools, baskets and clothes; caring for grandchildren; serving as political and spiritual leaders and advisers. Their knowledge of history, song and medicine made them the Google of the pre-literate era. As one African proverb goes, ‘When an old man dies, a library burns down.’

Many of the great civilisations enshrined deference to age in law. The old sit at the top of the Confucian hierarchy and children could be punished for mistreating their elderly parents in Ancient Greece. In both the Mayan and Inca empires, the young were expected to pay absolute obedience to their elders. Just as older men always spoke first in the public councils of Athens, Sparta and Rome, Puritan meeting houses in colonial America reserved the most honoured places for the oldest members of the congregation. Even the architects of the French Revolution, so disdainful of tradition, tried to make respect for age a patriotic duty. They created a new national holiday, the Fête de la Vieillesse, when towns paid homage to their older citizens by decorating their homes, parading them through the streets and singing secular hymns proclaiming their virtue. One sung in Toulouse in 1797 went thus:

But learn that to this honourable age

The sage arrives only through peace

That alone provides a durable health

The wicked never grow old.

Indeed, some saw reaching a very old age as proof of strength, discipline and virtue. Exaggerating your age upwards, as Old Parr likely did, was therefore not uncommon. In 1647, Thomas Fuller, an English clergymen and scholar, warned that ‘many old men . . . set the clock of their age too fast when once past seventy, and growing 10 years in a twelvemonth, are presently fourscore; yea, within a year or two after, climb up to a hundred.’

As well as kudos, age could also confer real clout. You had to be at least 50 to act as a jury member in Ancient Greece. Cicero, a Roman politician in the first century BC, rhapsodised about ‘the crowning glory of old age . . . its power, authority and influence’. During the Renaissance, Venice elected its savviest male elder to the powerful office of doge. Through much of history, and across cultures, fathers wielded power over their offspring by controlling the family land until death. In 17th- and 18th-century Europe, young men tried to grab a piece of that kudos and clout by dressing up to look older. They wore powdered wigs and clothes tailored to give the impression of narrow, rounded shoulders, thicker waists and hips, and even a slightly stooped spine.

Another advantage in the past: you were far less likely to be written off because of your chronological age. Records were so scant, and numeracy so rare, that most of our ancestors never had more than a sketchy idea of how old they were. It was not until 1900 that the US government added a section for date of birth to its census forms. Angsty references to turning 30, 40 and 50 are rare in the historical records because the numbers themselves held less intrinsic meaning or power. The idea of coming down with a case of the ‘birthday blues’ would have seemed risible to a peasant in medieval Europe or a bureaucrat in the Qin dynasty because being a certain age on paper did not expose you to a torrent of prejudices. Instead, what defined you was milestones – work, marriage, parenthood, bereavement, inheritance – that could happen at almost any age.

Compare that to today, when not knowing how old you are is taken as a sign of cognitive impairment and chronological age determines so much about your life: what ads appear in your social media; how much you pay for insurance; when you can buy cigarettes and alcohol, have sex, study, vote, join the army, earn the minimum wage, retire, draw a pension, enter a retirement community. Nowadays, when asked our age, many of us squirm a little before answering because inside our heads we’re calculating what assumptions others will make, what biases will kick in, once the number is said aloud. Will they think I’m too young or too old? That I lack experience or energy? That I’m ageing well or badly? No wonder the first answer that comes up when you type the phrase ‘I lie about my . . . ’ into Google Search is ‘age’. Or that Tinder can charge extra to conceal how old you are. Or that Cali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Introduction: Birthday Blues
• 1. How Ageing Got Old
• 2. Move: In Corpore Sano
• 3. Create: Old Dogs, New Tricks
• 4. Work: Old Hands on Deck
• 5. Image: Ageing Gets a Makeover
• 6. Technology: iAge
• 7. Happiness: Minding Less, Enjoying More
• 8. Attract: Swiping Right
• 9. Romance: The Heart Has No Wrinkles
• 10. Care: We, Not Me
• 11. Mingle: All Together Now
• Conclusion: The Time is Ripe
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Copyright