NEW YORK – We’ve reached Peak 65: More than 4.1 million Americans will be peaking 65 years old Every year until 2027, a record increase. the Baby births They’ll have many ways to mark the occasion, but beneath the cake and the usual jokes about Social Security lies the annoyance that the birthday kids will now officially be “old.”

American society uses all kinds of signs to determine aging. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act began protecting me in the workplace when I turned 40. The Department of Housing and Urban Development standards considered me “almost” when I turned 50, and I started receiving a deep discount at my local Harris Teeter grocery store the day I turned 60, but for some reason, that was only on Thursdays.

But if there is a generally accepted age for aging in the United States, this is it 65 years old. This is the age at which I will be eligible for Medicare coverage, and it has generally been the most common retirement age for American men over the past 60 years.

It’s strange that we inevitably use braces, because we all age very differently. If you’ve met a 70-year-old, you’ve met a 70-year-old. I am 62 years old, active, healthy and still working. But in recent weeks, I’ve been insulted on the pickleball court and in the gym by 70-year-olds, and I also visited a 70-year-old woman whose body has betrayed her to the point that even the simplest acts of bathing and personal care are beyond her capabilities. As life expectancy increases, chronological age tells us less and less about people’s physical and cognitive abilities..

Sixty-five years has been a generally accepted demarcation of old age. But these definitions have been with us so long that they no longer make sense, and they now work to our collective detriment.

Let’s take as an example Work and retirement. We’ve been conditioned to believe that retirement should begin around age 65, and this idea has an extraordinary impact on our behaviors and finances. Mandatory retirement has been illegal in this country for decades, yet we treat retirement at 65 as a kind of biological determinism. The average retirement age for American men in 1962 was just over 65 years (when average life expectancy was 67 years), and the average retirement age for men in 2022 is just under 65 years (although their average life expectancy is now about 75 years).

This makes no sense, especially when we begin to understand the historical origins of this prediction. We can go back to the 1880s, when German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck created the world’s first public pension plan. The retirement age was set at 70 years, later lowered to 65 years, at a time when life expectancy was only about 40 years. Some workers beat actuarial tables to reach retirement age, but most did not, as von Bismarck surely predicted.

Physical progress

Nearly a century and a half later, its standard still shapes how we think about life transitions and aging, even though we are more physically dexterous than our modern ancestors. You’ve probably heard that 70 is the new 60 or something similar. It may be easy to dismiss such claims, but they underestimate the material progress we have made in the past half-century.

The best data on this matter comes from the Japanese, who have been tracking the physical progress of older generations for decades. They do this by measuring walking speed and grip strength, two accepted measures of physical ability among older adults. Over the course of 20 years, walking speed in older Japanese men and women has increased at a significant rate. Today’s 75- to 79-year-olds walk faster than 5-year-olds a generation ago. Data from Japan are particularly noteworthy, but similar studies have shown progress across generations in the world’s advanced economies.

Being classified as prematurely old has negative consequences for the individual and society. America’s corporate tendency to dislike “older” workers is alienating millions of people from community networks, putting people at greater risk of loneliness and social isolation. Older Americans often view themselves as old and decrepit, as is expected of their lives in what is often considered one of the oldest societies on the planet.

Becca Levy, a psychologist at the Yale School of Public Health, found that older adults who have more negative attitudes toward aging tend to be less mobile, have poorer memory, recover more slowly from injuries and illnesses, are more susceptible to cognitive decline, and tend to die 7.5 years earlier on average than their peers with similar attitudes who have more positive attitudes about aging.

All of this raises more questions than answers. If he is no longer 65, is he 70 or 75? Do I have to give up my Harris Teeter discount if I continue to work and are healthy? I’ll keep the discount, but I reject the idea that there are still useful universal boundaries between middle age and old age. I’ll know it when I see it, but it may be different for you than it is for me.

Written by Ken Stern