Editor's Choice
The Silver Century Foundation is committed to producing articles of merit on significant subjects that have to do with aging. They will appear in this space.
Every day, there are news stories and other reports about aspects of aging, and the range of topics is extraordinary. We learn that companies all over the world are trying to adapt to an aging workforce. Scientists are attempting to lengthen our life span. Clinical psychologists consider the problems couples face in later life a hot topic. A novelist shows us how the worlds of aging and the circus intersect. A new study finds that over the past 20 years, the number of people who experience disabilities in old age has decreased. The list of topics goes on and on, and over time SCF will consider many of them.
Midlife and Beyond: A Time for “Second Growth”
In 1900, life expectancy in the U.S. was forty-seven. By 2000, Americans could expect to survive to seventy-seven. Blessed with thirty more years to live than earlier generations had, some people today are questioning the usual approach to the second half of life—the assumption that our abilities and career peak in middle age, and that afterward we slow down and gradually decline in every way.
Sociologist William A. Sadler, Ph.D., has identified a new paradigm that’s beginning to change the way people approach their “third age”—a term Europeans often use, which Sadler has adopted. It refers to that long stretch of life from the late forties to about eighty. (The first and second “ages” are childhood and early adulthood, while Sadler apparently sees the fourth age—beyond 80—as a time of life more like the conventional notion of old age.)
Sadler is a professor of sociology and business at Holy Names University in Oakland, California, and director of research at the Center for Third Age Leadership. Years ago, he began a study of two hundred Americans who were mostly in their late forties and fifties to see how they handled middle age. When he discovered that about thirty of them were doing something quite different from the rest, he focused on those people.
In midlife, many individuals seek simplicity and security and are complacent or perhaps resigned to their situation in life. Instead, those thirty individuals experienced a period of what Sadler called “second growth.” They reassessed their lives, rethought their goals, and began to move in new directions. A landscape architect named Ted is an example Sadler likes to use.
At forty-eight, Ted was a workaholic, putting in one-hundred-hour weeks on the job. He was on the brink of losing his health, his second marriage, and his happiness. During an Outward Bound course, he had the opportunity to reflect on his life, and he realized that it was seriously out of balance.
Gradually, he cut back his time on the job and developed a much closer relationship with his wife. Although he was spending fewer hours on it, his career flourished. Meanwhile, he began to exercise regularly and changed his diet. He became involved in community projects and also made time to do some of the quiet things he enjoyed, such as drawing or reading.
Eventually, Sadler identified six principles that illustrate how people initiate second growth and then sustain it. All six are paradoxical, he says, reflecting the fact that in their third age people are pulled simultaneously in different directions. These are his principles:
1. Balance mindful reflection and risk taking. To achieve second growth, Sadler’s subjects took time out, laid aside their usual assumptions, and questioned the life they were leading. As they began to identify changes they wanted to make, they experimented and took risks.
For instance, Ginny, an assembly-line worker, had supported four children as a single mother. By the time she was forty-six, they were grown and she was in a rut, still working but just marking time. Then she began to volunteer at a hospital and to think about other possibilities.
Ginny decided she would like to do social work with older people. Taking a risk, this grandmother who had been raised on a struggling Southern farm, enrolled at a state university. Some of the courses were tough going, and because she continued to work full time on the assembly line, it took her eight years to get a degree, but get it she did. Ginny’s story demonstrates that second growth isn’t confined to people who are well-off, though financial resources certainly make it easier.
2. Develop realistic optimism. The people in Sadler’s study exhibited a mature optimism, based on confidence they had gained by meeting challenges over the years. It was not just wishful thinking or the optimism of youth, which assumes that everything will turn out for the best, but a realistic belief in themselves.
3. Create a positive third age identity. When we’re young, says Sadler, we form our identities according to our roles in institutions, such as family, work, and community. A woman may be a wife, mother, daughter, sister, wage earner, and volunteer, for example, but is that all she is? In second growth, individuals transcend their earlier social roles to create a richer, more idiosyncratic identity that often reflects more fully their unique potential. To do this, they must also defy unflattering stereotypes of older people.
4. Create more meaningful work and more play. Sadler found to his surprise that, as people got closer to retirement, having meaningful work became more important to them, not less. They wanted to redefine their work, however, so that they could meet other needs that they had. To do that, they might cut back their hours, switch jobs, or start a new career altogether. Many also got involved in new leisure activities: Ted was an enthusiastic golfer, but he and his wife also learned how to train and run sled dogs. Ginny discovered hiking and traveled abroad.
5. Balance greater personal freedom with deeper, more intimate relationships. “There seems to be a natural urge within us after fifty to have more freedom, to do what we really want rather than what we have to,” Sadler says. He notes that it’s possible to grow closer to others at the same time, but it means balancing independence with interdependence.
6. Expand the capacity to care. Sadler’s subjects spent more time caring for others, for their community, and for the environment. Some also began to take better care of themselves through regular exercise and a healthy diet, or by meeting neglected needs of their own. For example, an Episcopal priest who had spent his adult life as a caretaker for family and parishioners realized in his fifties that he had to do something for himself, as well, and that the first step was to confront his own alcoholism.
Over the years, Sadler enlarged his original study, adding people from different regions and from abroad, and including individuals in their sixties and seventies. He has now filled two books with stories of second growth.
Sadler found that his subjects developed something he conceptualized as a “life portfolio.” It contained all of their important interests: work, play, community service, significant relationships, opportunities to continue learning, and more. The contents were diversified, like those of an investment portfolio or an artist’s portfolio, and they were not static but kept changing as individuals fine-tuned their values, interests, and priorities.
The people Sadler studied were able to sustain their second growth but it wasn’t always easy. Ted, for example, had to go back to working long hours when a recession hit his architectural firm hard and many of the staff were let go. Ginny had to drop out of the university for a year because of illness.
“What had I expected, a smooth ride uphill?” Sadler asked himself. What he saw instead was “a pattern of reversal and progression, ups and downs within the spiral of second growth.” And that, he decided, was where realistic optimism had to come in. Sure enough, Ted managed to hang onto his new priorities until his firm recovered, and Ginny returned to the university but changed her goal, deciding to become a geriatric nurse rather than a social worker.
Second growth holds great promise for the future. Imagine how our culture would change if most people, once they were in midlife, took a deep breath, sat back, and gave a lot of thought to what they wanted to do with their thirty years beyond retirement, that gift of time made possible by our lengthened life expectancy. How many would choose endless rest and relaxation over a chance to remain productive and do something meaningful? With all that creative energy released, later life--and the communities we live in--would be changed profoundly.
References:
Sadler, William A., Ph.D. The Third Age: 6 Principles for Growth and Renewal after Forty. 2000.
Sadler, William A., Ph.D., and James H. Krefft. Changing Course: Navigating Life after Fifty. 2008.
The Center for Third Age Leadership applies Sadler’s six principles to the work force with workshops, seminars, and retreats. http://www.thirdagecenter.com/
