People Are Living Longer. Can Old Age Be an Opportunity?
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What does IT mean to live for a century or more?

The continued .

advancement of medicine and technology means more and more people are living longer and longer lives. According to the pew research center, the number of americans living to at least one hundred is expected to quadi rule over the next thirty years, from an estimated one hundred one thousand now to about four hundred twenty two thousand by the mid nineteen fifties. But living long doesn't necessarily mean you're living well. A luck .

was wrong. As we get older, their physical problems, there are losses of loved ones, there is age discrimination and ages. And Laura carston .

son is a professor of public policy and psychology and founding director of stanford universities center online. SHE says despite humans having the potential to live longer than ever before, aging can take a toll on mental health. But SHE says aging doesn't have to be something to dread.

What we need to do is to rethink how we live our lives from the beginning all the way through, in order to optimize these longer lives and to be able to use added years to improve quality of life at all gages.

From the wall street journal, this is the future of everything. I'm dana Lewis. What will I take to turn longer lifespan ds into opportunities instead of burdens? Today i'm talking with professor carston about how reframing the way we think about getting older can make us happier and healthier.

Stick around.

How do you start to lay the foundation for responsible AI in your organization? Here's fator. Bonnier is IBM consultants global leader for trust or the AI IT .

starts with asking the question, what is the kind of relationship that we ultimately want to have with A I? The purpose of the eyes is not meant to display human beings. That is meant to all meant human intelligence.

Students, you have a glimmer in your eye about how you think you might win A U. Z. I. Then asking the questions like what would be required in order to earn people's trust in such a model.

Professor carston, what do you think most people get wrong about aging and mental health?

Most people believe that growing older is associated with loneliness and depression and anxiety, uh, that mental health suffers as people grow older. And the very good news is that looks like people do Better emotionally as they get older. If this has been so surprising to researchers and to the general public as well that it's probably been the most scrutinised finding about aging, a luck goes wrong as we get older.

There physical problems, there are losses of loved ones, there is age discrimination and ages. And there's a lot that isn't good about growing older um but people seem to do Better emotionally. Older people have shorter time horizons.

They perceive less time in the future. And for many years people thought what that must make people miserable and scared. The interesting thing is there's a paradox there and actually makes people feel calmer not to have to prepare for this long and nebulous future to be able to live more in the present.

So the statement center on longevity has developed an initiative you call the new map of life.

Uh, what is that? The premise of the center on longevity at stanford is that longer lives are the great gift of time. But what we've done with these longer lives is basically make them fit into our existing life course ideas.

And so the only stage of life that actually got longer is old age. We tacked on all these extra years at the end. IT doesn't appear to be good for individuals or governments or societies to have a large group of people kind of sit IT out for thirty years. What we need to do is to rethink how we live our lives from the beginning all the way through, in order to optimize these longer lives and to be able to use added years to improve quality of life at all ages.

So how should we rethink our lives and how we spend our time during our best years?

I think we make childhood longer, make high school longer. What if we had two years off during high school? One year you'd volunteer in the community, so be some sort of public service um and the other year you might serve as an intern in a workplace that you think you might like to end up working in.

And so you'd get to see what that was like and also get you out of the classroom for you. A couple inner first years, let's say we don't retire at sixty five as a matter of course, right? Instead, we would have a new norm where people retired, but IT was they're retired when they got sick or impaired physically in some way or or just couldn't stand the job in anymore and they would stop that job.

And instead of working the way we do now, we work, let's say, four day work weeks and six hour days at certain times in life. For example, when you might have Young children in the home, people might go down to thirty hour work weeks or twenty hour work weeks and together to parents might be able to split childcare. And we could do something remarkable, and that is rather our own children, instead of outsourcing them and having one person working mostly just to pay for childcare.

Those are just a few examples of ways that these longer lives could make early life much Better. But we have to rethink the whole thing. And instead, what if we began to think about building a world that would support century long lives with the majority of people? And we have to have something we're striving for.

And we know some people make up to one hundred and do fine because some people do that now, right? So the question really is, how do we make IT ier for people to get there? The world we live in today works pretty well for for fifty years.

And it's because the culture that guides us through life, the social norms that tell us when to get an education, went to marry, when to retire, evolved around lives half as long as they are today. IT doesn't work when we're living to be one hundred. IT can put strains on individuals and societies.

But to me, that almost feels immoral to have this gift handed to us and squander IT. That means we need cures for new diseases. Dementia was not a problem one hundred years ago.

People didn't live long enough for IT to be. The chronic diseases weren't a big problem either for people hundred years ago because of life expectancy. We need to rethink education. So if we're going to work for another know thirty years, that doesn't make sense to end our educations and our late teens or early twenty years and then no good to go, that doesn't work anymore.

But at the same time, there are some pretty specific stresses that older people are more likely to deal with. The Younger people may not. I mean, you do have to deal with your body aging, the loss of loved ones s loneliness, financial stress, being on a fixing. Often humans .

are pretty good at dealing with the cards we've been dealt. The humans are not very good with the whatever. And Young adult, her and middle adult is just filled with what ifs.

And the older we get, the more certain and the more predictable life feels, even when it's not particularly appealing, at least it's more predictable. One of the things it's important to keep in mind, as life is hard at all ages. Life is also hard for teenagers.

Life is hard for little kids. It's hard for Young adults. And so when we say that older people are doing Better than Younger people, I don't mean older people are not ever experiencing negative emotions is just they're doing relatively Better. The kinds of things that you just mentioned, say losing a loved one, having a physical disability, all of those things have been looked at and compared. Younger and older adults facing the same kinds of problems and chAllenges, and older people tend to do Better than Younger people with those specific kinds of problems.

Why is that?

The older you are when you experience, uh, a traumatic event, the more likely you are to also have a sense that you've been here before and so some of this is kind of perspective changes uh, where you know bad things happen and you know bad times pass uh you know good times happen too, but you also know they pass so people come to appreciate the good and to be able to uh cope with the negative times in life Better as they get older.

We often think about aging as a decline, but new research suggests that might be more like a roller coasters with all sorts of upset downs. How might that affect the way we perceive the aging process in the future? Stay with us.

Professor curtain son, as of twenty twenty one, about fifteen percent of people fifty five or older experiences some form of mental illness. That's according to the institute for health metric and evaluation, which is an independent organization based out of the university of washington school of medicine that researches population health. And also, the world health organization says for older people, mental illness is often unrecognized and undertreated, possibly partially because of stigma, which prevents people from seeking help. What's different about dealing with mental illness as an older person compared to when you're Younger?

Some people have psychiatric disorders and they're less likely to receive treatment than Younger people are. In part, I think, because of these stereotypes that old people are just miserable. So, you know, you might go in until your doctor, you're unhappy.

And if your dog looks that you goes well, would expect eight years old, you know, then you're not as likely to get treatment. There was a long standing belief in a psychiatry and psychology that was more difficult to treat older people, that IT was harder for them to learn new things. So that would be harder for them to respond to, say, cognitive behavioral therapies.

There has now been uh a lot of research into that very question is not the case. Older people do respond to both cognitive and behavioral al kinds of interventions and pharmacology ones. And so the uh treatment is effective for older people who are experiencing psychiatric uh, distress. And uh, you are correct that they're less likely to be referred for treatment and less likely to actually be able to access that treatment and benefit from IT.

Some of your other colleagues at stanford university just recently published a study suggesting that there may actually be specific times in life when the effects of aging kind of Christian. How might that change the conversation about how, when, when people should start mentally preparing for old age and just rethinking about that whole experience of this larger, larger chunk of our life?

I loved reading that finding because i've said to my friends and colleagues for years, I knew aging wasn't linear, and this suggests that that might actually be Operating. Now, one of the things that group has considered is that that might be these times in life that seem to have accelerated aging biologically, might actually be reflecting times in life that are more psychologically stressful.

So IT isn't necessarily that the biology is generating the psychology of that. But I could be going the other way around. There's so much we don't know when so much we have to learn.

For a long time, people thought if you get sick in your seventy, you're probably just gone to keep getting sicker and sicker and sicker, right? And there have now been launched tunnel studies looking at people's health through old age. So safe from sixty five to ninety five and it's it's not a linear downhill trajectory.

People get sick and and they often get Better again and then people will get sick again. Now there are some chronic diseases that just show this stEddie down here hill decline um but it's not more likely you'll have ins and outs and eventually we will decline and fit in our physical health. And here's the thing, eventually we will all die.

So and so far, one hundred percent. And for most of us, we get sick before we die. So at the very end of our lives on average, that looks like it's about three years um where people aren't doing very well physically and then we're done .

and to take a to back what is the future world with more older people look like regardless of .

whether we make IT to one hundred, one hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty, I don't think there's a whole lot of evidence that were going to go out a lot farther than but science can't say something won't ever happen. Where we are headed now is is a population that is fairly evenly represented across age. Throughout most of human evolution, we have had lots of lots of Young people, and they were dying and not able to live out their lives.

And medical scientists and biologists are finding ways to stay healthier or longer. And that means that we could imagine a world, let's say, in the twenty second century, where people who are born are expected to live, there'll lives and to be functionally healthy for most of IT. That's an ideal that would absolutely stunned my great grandmother.

It's a remarkable gift. Science and technology, uh, can help us get there. IT won't be a gift unless we also change society and the cultures that guide us through life.

We need to change the norms, and it'll be good for older people by changing those norms. And it'll be much Better for Younger people and for the societies that they live in. If we can tap the skills and the assets that people have at different stages in life.

Laura carston son is the founding director of the stanford center on lunch evd professor carston son, thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

The future of everything is production of the wall street journal. This episode was produced by me. Danny luis, our fact checker is a partner. Anything sound designed by Jessica fenton like the show, tell your friends and leave us a five star review on your favorite platform. Thanks for listening.

Earlier, we discuss what responsible AI looks like in practice. Here's fator bing to do is from IBM consulting again on why that begins with data.

My favorite definition of the word date up. It's an arrange of the country experience. A I is like a mirror that reflects our biases back towards us. But we have to brave enough and introduction cof enough to look into the mirror to decide, does this reflection actually alive to my organization? Values, if IT aligns, be true parent about why did you pick the data that you did if IT doesn't a line that when you know you needed to change your entire approach.

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