Don't call people 'old' until death is near, says gerontologist

People should not be called old until they are seriously frail, dependent and approaching death, one of the UK’s leading social scientists has told Hay festival.

Sarah Harper, a gerontologist who is director of the Oxford Institute of Ageing, proposed a different approach to the language we use about ageing, suggesting that people in their 60s and possibly 70s and 80s should still be considered active adults.

“We should not even be calling people old until they reach what [the historian Peter] Laslett calls the fourth age; that time where we will become frail and enfeebled,” Harper said. “Old age should be the fourth age. Everything else should be active adulthood.”

She said there was a danger of neglecting what true old age should be: a time of withdrawal and peace and reflection. It can be a difficult time but “it is a time we need to claim as a special time because we are finite beings … we will die”.

The question of what is old age – when are we truly old – arises because death is increasingly being pushed back. “We are talking about extending lives in a way we have never experienced before,” said Harper, who is also the new director of the Royal Institution.

The statistics suggest that general life expectancy is rising by two and a half years per decade.

In the 18th century, there were about 10 centenarians in the whole of Europe. Now there are 14,500 just in the UK. Predictions are that by the end of the 21st century there will be 1.5 million centenarians in the UK.

Another prediction is that half of the babies being born now in the UK will live until they are 104. In Japan it is 107. “We are ageing dramatically and we are ageing without radical science,” said Harper.

Harper said the concept of retirement, and what it meant, had changed over the last 50 years. When William Beveridge recommended the 65 retirement age for men, half would die before they were 70.

In the 1950s and 1960s, retirement was considered a period of rest after a long working life, said Harper. In the 1970s, it became a reward for the hard work which had gone before. In the 1980s and 1990s, a time of huge youth employment, came “early retirement” – it became what people saw as a right to a period of leisure.

What people do when they retire – if they do retire – is changing. “I think it is likely we are going to have far more fluid lives,” said Harper.

The issue of longer lives raised lots of issues which needed to be debated, she added. What happens if you do not inherit from your grandparents until you are in your 80s? Do we need to rethink marriage when not every couple may relish the prospect of being together for 60 or 70 years or longer.

The debate at Hay resonates with the Guardian’s series on “the new retirement” this year.

Harper was delivering a talk under the theme of Reformation, scheduled by Hay festival to tie in with the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, regarded as the start of the Reformation.

Harper said active adults in later life should not be considered old and they were often the victims of prejudice. “We live in a society where we know sexism is wrong, we know that racism is wrong, but actually there are many, many examples where stereotyping according to age is seen as acceptable.”