Stuff I'm reading

Judith Warner’s “I Feel It Coming Together” post on her "Domestic Disturbances" blog, excerpted in Sunday’s New York Times, bemoans the fact that it’s all downhill after age 44. “I now see the passage of time more as a kind of bell curve,” she writes. “Years of ascension, soaring anticipation, followed by a plateau — which is not so bad, really — and then, no way to sugar coat this: a rather precipitous decline.” So long forever to “excitement, discovery, intensity.”  

Oh please.

I’ve blogged several times about “U-shaped happiness curve” studies  that show Americans to be most content at the beginning and end of their lives. Another one, the “August National Well-Being Index,” was released by Gallup on September 10th.  (Great news: Americans’ grip on their flotation cushions has relaxed by .07% since January!)

Yay for the Center for Retirement Research, which is doing its part to rectify the dearth of research on workers age 65 and up.  Dubbing their subjects “the elderly,” a paper by economists Steven Haider and David Loughran titled “Elderly Labor Supply: Work or Play?” looks at who in this group works, at what, and why they stop. Here are some of their findings, some predictable and some considerably less so:

That’s how you spell “aging” in the UK, and that’s Guardian columnist Zoe Williams’s take on this week’s US Census Bureau report on the unprecedented aging of the world population. Calling out an alarmist press for presenting this demographic shift as either a crisis or a burden, she exposes the standard fallacies, pointing out that people will continue to work well past traditional retirement ages and be healthy enough to do so.

The card sharks of Laguna Woods, an Orange County, CA, retirement community, can’t even play bridge in peace. They’re part of the world’s largest decades-long study of health and mental acuity in the elderly. Begun by University of Southern California researchers in 1981, the 90+ Study has tracked more than 14,000 people aged 65 and older — the first group “large enough to provide a glimpse into the lucid brain at the furthest reach of human life,” as Benedict Carey wrote in the New York Times.

That’s Truthdig’s headline for Ellen Goodman’s column, more moderately titled “The benefits of working longer” in the Boston Globe. Goodman points out the mixed message going out to older Americans:  keep working to lighten the load on the next generation / retire to make room for the young.

Just coincidence that end-to-end stories in this week’s New Yorker magazine feature two men in full stride at 80? Street-fashion Photographer Bill Cunningham, who turns 80 this month, produces a wittily-themed, weekly feature for the New York Times and covers his beat on a bike. The other was architect Frank Gehry, whose field (unlike, say, mathematics) favors those over 50. “I have plenty of work,” he told critic Paul Goldberger at the star-studded eightieth birthday party he threw himself last week. “I don’t feel like eighty. I guess you never think you’re the age you are, and, as long as you don’t look in the mirror, you aren’t.”

Having just returned from India, land of the over-the-top in so many ways, I wasn’t all that startled by a story in the Indian press about an octogenarian organ donor. Upon her death this month at 82, Gyanant Kaur donated both corneas and her liver to three different people.