‘Aging in the 21st Century: A Celebration and A Challenge’

In ancient times, open-minded map makers labeled unknown territories simply as “Terra Incognita”, meaning “land unknown”. More fearful cartographers literally marked those territories: “Here be dragons”.

In America, with our youth-oriented culture and associated denial and dread of growing older, there appears to exist a comparable fear of the unknown territory of… aging. “Here be dragons!” seems to be the underlying message of the anti-aging products and ageist stereotypes that flood our media.

Interestingly enough, at the same time,  there is a huge global, aging population swell happening.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and HelpAge International, London just published the results of their 2012 study called “Ageing in the Twenty-First Century: A Celebration and A Challenge”.

Here are just a few of the mind-boggling statistics from this report:

1. Around the world, two persons celebrate their sixtieth birthday every second – an annual total of almost 58 million sixtieth birthdays.
2. By 2050 for the first time there will be more older people than children under 15. In 2000, there were already more people aged 60 or over than children under 5.
3. In 2012, 810 million people were aged 60 or over, accounting for 11.5 per cent of the global population. The number is projected to reach 1 billion in less than 10 years and more than double by 2050, reaching2 billion and accounting for 22 per cent of the global population.
4. In the past decade, the number of people aged 60 or over has risen by 178 million – equivalent to nearly the entire population of Pakistan, the sixth most populous country in the world.
5. Japan is only country in the world with more than 30 percent of its population aged 60 or over.By 2050, there will be 64 countries where older people make up more than 30 per cent of their population.
6. The number of centenarians will increase globally from 316,600 in 2011 to 3.2 million in 2050.

As you can see, the numbers of us in older age are growing dramatically – not just here in Marin, but around the world. Here in Marin County, our population’s fastest growing age sector is 85+ years old. And of that 85+ group, the fastest growing segment are the centenarians! This aging population wave has often been referred to as the “silver tsunami”.

Extraordinary advances in medicine and sanitation, education about nutrition, declines in some types of unhealthy behavior, such as smoking, are contributing to rising life expectancies. The average life expectancy in the United States in 1900 was 49 years, now it’s about 80 years.

All of this is to say, not only is growing older uncharted terrain because each of us is experiencing it for the first time, but there are so many more of us experiencing it for the first time… ever. Human beings, in general, have never lived this long and there have never been so many of us experiencing it together!

More and more guides for how to age well will be sought. Books written, interviews conducted, studies done, opinions opined. Rest assured, growing older will become more visible just through the sheer numbers of us. Hopefully this will result in more awareness of the opportunities, the challenges and the needs of older people – and we will come up with many new, creative alternatives and solutions for for taking care of ourselves and each other as we age.