An international team of researchers from the University of New York in Stony Brook and the Vienna Institute of Demography at the Austrian Academy of Sciences have redefined what it means to grow old, report Reuters and Britain's Telegraph.
The new definition: It's not how long you've been alive that counts, but rather how many years you have left. As life expectancy has lengthened, the whole idea of middle age has shifted, making 40 the new 30. And 50 is the new 40. It's true! People who are nearing retirement are as vigorous and healthy as middle-aged people were a century ago.
Do you seem younger than your parents were when they were the age you are now? It's not your imagination. Reuters reports that in many ways, people today act younger than their parents did at the same age. And that is because of our psychological shift in judging our age not by how long we have lived but rather by how many more years we have to look forward to on this Earth.
"Using that measure, the average person can get younger in the sense that he or she can have even more years to live as time goes on," Warren Sanderson, of the University of New York in Stony Brook, told Reuters. We told you it was new math.
Along with Sergei Scherbov, Sanderson used this methodology to figure out how the elderly population in the United States, Germany and Japan will change in the future. This is what they figured out for Germany:
- In 2000, the average German was 39.9 years old and could expect to live for another 39.2 years.
- By 2050, the average German will be 51.9 years old and can expect to live another 37.1 years.
- That means by 2050, middle age occurs at 52 years instead of 40 years as it did in 2000.
"As people have more and more years to live they have to save more and plan more and they effectively are behaving as if they were younger," Sanderson told Reuters. "A lot of our skills, our education, our savings and the way we deal with our health care depend a great deal on how many years we have to live. This dimension of how many years we have to live has been completely ignored in the discussion of aging so far."
The study findings were reported in the journal Nature.
