When my friends and I talk about the topic of "growing old", we usually joke each other that we have to make sure we won't grow old and grumpy. 😅 But after reading "Happiness is a Choice you Make" by John Leland, it looks like being grumpy is less likely to happen if we have the mindset of the six "Oldest of the old" interviewed by New York journalist Leland."Oldest of the old" refers to 85 years old and up, the fastest-growing demographic in the US. When these people were born more than 80 years ago, their life expectancy was only 60 years old but people have been living longer due to advancements in health, medicine and technology. Some of them have surpassed their life expectancy by more than 25 years, others by more than 30 years, and a rare breed - by more than 40 years! 😱 That's a lot of unplanned bonus years!
Anyway, so what did Leland discover about the Oldest of the old?
They are happier! How could that be, right? They have experienced and are experiencing various kinds of losses - from mobility, vision, hearing and memory, to losing loved ones like spouses, children and peers. How can they possibly be happier than younger people who have better vision, more physically active, have sharper memory and whose loved ones are still likely to be alive?
The elders' secret? They found a level of happiness not in their external circumstances but in something they carried with them. Of course, no one wants to lose mobility or lose loved ones but they made a choice on how to process their losses. They can either focus on what they’ve lost or focus on the life they currently have and they choose the latter.
Gerontologists call this selective optimization with compensation. In short - old people spend their dwindling time and energy on the things they can still do that give them satisfaction and not on lamenting on those they once did but now cannot. Older people make the most with what they have left and compensate for what they have lost.
What are the other differences between the old and the young based on the book?
The old find happiness in the now while the young hinge it to the future. The old take satisfaction on what is available right now versus the young who look into the future. But as the elders remind us, the danger in hinging it to the future is that the future might not come.
One of the elders shared:
Anxieties about work, marital strains, money worries, time conflicts, day to day stress, these were the things that kept me up at night or made me unhappy (when I was young).... The future is so far away and you don’t know what would happen to you and the world. So when you’re young, you have more worries than the elderly ...but I dont worry now. Imagine that - to be free of the future - meaning the sum of all things that probably wont happen minus the one that will...
The old have a greater sense of contentment. Knowing they face a limited time in front of them, they focus their energies on things that give them pleasure in the moment whereas young people with long horizons seek out new experiences that may or may not pay off down the line. Young people fret about things they don’t have and might need later. Old people winnow the things they have to the few that they most enjoy. Young people kiss frogs hoping they will turn into their princes; old people kiss their grandchildren.
Incidentally, people who score high in wisdom are more content with their lives. By wisdom, it refers to 3 dimensional wisdom scale namely:
Cognitive - ability to understand life
Reflective - ability to look at life at different perspectives
Affective - emotional wisdom
The old are "happy in spite of" vs the young who are "happy if only". "Happy in spite of" means old people made a choice to be happy. They acknowledge problems but they don't put them in the way of contentment. Happiness for them is not the absence of pain or loss (because they have lots of those) but in their acceptance of these. Whereas, "happy if only" - among the young - pins happiness on outside circumstances e.g. if only I had money, if only I had less pain, if only I have a nicer house, I’ll be happy...
None of the old spoke about professional accomplishments. This was a big surprise for Leland considering we spend much of our lives working or obsessing about work, he explains. Nor did the elders mention about obstacles they had overcome. Leland observes that somehow these things which are a measure of life when you're younger, no longer seem to be a measure of life when you're older (in my case, work has never been a measure of my life so I guess I am innately old 😂). Instead, the elders mostly talked about their families and their close relationships.
The old also ask existential questions like - Did my life matter? Was my time well-spent? What did I mean to others? What can I look back on with pride? Did I love the right people?
Knowing that time is finite makes the old have better clarity on what's important. Neurologist, Oliver Sacks, upon learning that he had terminal cancer of the liver wrote that the nearness of death gave him a sudden clear focus. Some cancer patients also shared that cancer is the best thing that ever happened to them as they experienced such clarity. I like the question which Leland posed on this topic. He asked - How can we live in this heightened state all our lives without the blessing of terminal cancer to remind us that life is a great unearned gift?
One of the elders observed that there are a lot of people disengaged from life. He shared - "I grew up with no radio, no electricity, no tv, no music, no photographs... I saw my fist movie when I was 14.... One could live to 200 but yet I see some young people 20 years old and seem to be bored already with life and some of them cannot stand it." 😢
But none of the elders (at least from what I remember) want to live forever.
As a final note, Leland said that the 6 elders reminded him that time is both limited and really amazing. The challenge, he said, is how to live on the way to the bend. So often we measure the day by what we do with it - cure cancer, surf in Maui .. and overlook what is truly miraculous which is the arrival of another day. Enjoy it or not, the day doesn’t care. But if u miss it, it won’t be back again.
P.S. At the end of the audiobook, there were short voice clips of the interviews with the elders. One was asked - What drives you? One 94-year old woman said - I love my plants. I love to watch them grow and bloom. I love to read. Uh-oh. That sounds so much like me. 😂
