Director’s Blog – Successful Longevity

As a first post, I want to muse a bit about what constitutes successful longevity. Many writers have speculated about terms such as successful aging, functional aging, healthy aging, and the like (see a recent issue in the journal The Gerontologist).​

When I helped sketch out the big idea that eventually became ISL (with my colleague, Wally Boot) about 5 years ago, I was careful then to call it the Center for Successful Longevity. Why? Well, everyone I know wants longevity, a long life, but few want to age. Public relations requirements are a powerful shaper for word choices. I’m pretty sure I was inspired to use the term longevity from Robert Butler’s International Longevity Center. Successful was borrowed from Rowe & Kahn’s discussions about successful aging.

Longevity is pretty understandable as a term. However, success has both public and private meanings. We also need to be able to measure success if we hope to intervene to promote it per ISL’s mission statement on the ISL web site.

So, I’m adopting the following:

Someone is experiencing successful longevity across their lifespan when they can plan, pursue, and (hopefully) achieve their goals.

I chose those specific words for several reasons.

Goals. The focus on personal goals is intentional, because successful aging definitions have had what many consider to be too strong a focus on medical criteria (e.g., Rowe & Kahn criteria), such that when normative age-associated disability occurred, someone was then designated as aging unsuccessfully. I suspect that many people, considering the high risk of significant disability in very old age, did not want to envision themselves as unsuccessful based on clinical criteria. Further, it would seem to exclude those who start out earlier in life with impairments and disabilities who, with appropriate interventions (some technology-based), can still achieve their goals, if not society’s (Stephen Hawking comes to mind).

Plan. If someone has severe dementia and/or other serious cognitive problems, it is easy to imagine that they would be incapable of planning a goal. Someone curled up in bed with late-stage Alzheimer’s disease is unlikely to be successful in managing their lives in this way. So a minimal criterion for success is the ability to plan for a goal. Now, one could argue whether it is conceivable for someone to plan to be goal-less, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Pursue. Like planning, pursuit of goals is necessary for their (potential) achievement. If someone is really forgetful, they will be unable to pursue goals successfully (or achieve them except by accident). Memory disorders where you are prone to constant distraction can mitigate against successful pursuit. A good example in everyday life occurs when you find yourself standing in front of the fridge trying to remember what it is you were attempting to retrieve. Too short an attention span is not a good thing. Infants sometimes seem to behave as though goals constantly flit into and out of awareness, and where they are at the mercy of a constantly fluctuating environment.

Achieve. I put the qualifier hopefully in front of achieve because for many of us with long-term goals, the joy is often in their pursuit, rather than their achievement. Particularly in science, you are unlikely to achieve a grand goal (grand unified theory in physics) in your lifetime and must rely on the efforts of your fellow scientists (often students) to carry the goal through to fruition. Nonetheless, you can have a very satisfying life pursuing grand goals and achieving small, but significant steps toward their accomplishment. I have certainly experienced that level of “pursuit satisfaction” in my professional life.

Across their lifespan. I selected those words to emphasize the developmental trajectory for successful longevity. One could in theory have a successful, but shorter than average life span, pursuing and achieving many goals along the way. Until the huge leap forward of 30 years of added longevity in the last century, most of our ancestors had lamentably short lives (e.g., mean of 47 years for the 1900 birth cohort in the USA).

So, there you have it, my attempt to define successful longevity in a way that honors the individual (personal goals), science of measurement (you can ask someone how they are doing in pursuing goals and intervene to aid them), and society-defined boundary conditions (an arbiter can decide if you are able to formulate and pursue goals).