Aging Purposefully

In the last blog on how we think about aging, I referenced a graph Professor Guy Micco has for how people see aging. It wasn’t pretty. 

When Micco then asked his medical students what came to mind when they heard “old,” they responded with words like wrinkled, bent over, and bald. However, when he substituted “elder,” the responses became respect, leader, power, and knowledge.

This is more than just a language lesson; it’s a mindset shift. As I said in a previous blog, in the last 100 years, we’ve added 24 years to our lifespan. For thousands of years, we’ve defined “old” as beginning around age 60. With these modern lifespans, many of us will be elders for 3 decades or more—longer than we spent in childhood. It’s time we stopped seeing this stage as a disease to be dreaded and started treating it as a distinct and valuable phase of life, defined by wisdom and experience. As Sharon Blackie writes in Hagitude, the last decades of our lives might be the most dynamic of all.

A purposeful mindset needs a strong foundation, and that starts with our bodies. Movement and purpose go hand in hand. As fitness expert Nikki Naab-Levy points out, it’s about agency. “Strength and muscle give us agency and autonomy,” she writes. “It means having the capacity to do more, more easily – often with more mobility, less pain, and fewer injuries.” 

Mandy fondly thinks of some of her classes as the movers and shakers of Holland. Many PIH clients are also members of The Hope Academy of Senior Professionals (HASP), a peer-led lifelong learning organization that enriches the intellectual, cultural, and social lives of its members. Sure, they’re in our studio moving, but they’re also out in our community moving and making a difference. Pilates is all about lifelong conditioning for functional movement. At PIH, we see people at all levels of ability and capacity and meet them where they are so they can age powerfully and purposefully to keep being those movers and shakers.

Living better for longer, according to Dr. Jill Ver Steeg (who I’ve mentioned in a previous blog), involves 3 main components: a growth mindset, a sense of belonging, and a sense of purpose. I’ve written A LOT about the first two: growth mindset (also here and here), belonging (also here and here), so let’s talk about purpose.

Purpose is good for us, especially as we age:

• Research shows that individuals with the strongest sense of purpose have a 46% lower mortality risk.
• Purposeful adults are 24% less likely to become inactive and 33% less likely to develop sleep problems.
• Purpose protects cognitive function and may reduce the risk of dementia.

This seems to be because having a purpose helps us make more healthful choices. Purpose, in other words, isn’t optional; it’s protective.

Finding your purpose is also really good for the world. Pablo Picasso said, “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” For street photographer and thinker Eric Kim, the purpose of life is to live fearlessly, create new work, and passionately pursue philosophy and constant self-growth. He views human life as a tool for making a positive impact on humanity. While explaining ikigai, a Japanese practice that helps you find your purpose, author Candice Kumai describes it as combining “what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what sustains you.”

This incredibly interesting article from Time says that John Rowe (professor of health policy and aging at Columbia University’s Aging Center) is one of a growing global cohort of experts… reframing seniors not as a burden, but as untapped sources of talent, experience, and social glue. It also means thinking more creatively and flexibly about life’s three-piece jigsaw, so that it no longer has to follow the familiar trajectory of learning, work, and retirement. Instead, learning and work are sprinkled throughout a lifetime, rather than confined, respectively, to the beginning and middle; periods of leisure, meanwhile, no longer need to be relegated to the end.

The article describes Mirabella at Arizona State University, which is the first university-based retirement community in the U.S., where seniors live on campus in a 20-story building that’s a blend of a senior living facility and a dorm. 

Everyone benefits—professors give lectures at the residence, and several doctoral music students live in the building rent-free, teaching seniors and gaining performance experience by giving concerts several times a week. “We get to practice our craft and receive feedback in real time,” says Caleb Bailey, a doctoral student in guitar performance who is one of four artists in residence at Mirabella.

Bailey and his classmates also benefited from having Mirabella residents in their classes. Two retired nurses took a musicology course on the history of arts and health with Bailey, for example. “They were able to provide a wealth of information that even the professor was not able to add,” he says.

Seeing people as knowledgeable elders completely changes how we interact with them and how they interact with the world.

A growing number of older adults are embracing lifelong learning. As this Axios article on going back to school in our later years highlights, education is a powerful tool for mental stimulation and community engagement.

While some find new passions in the classroom, others, like the Milwaukee volunteer profiled by AARP, find immense purpose in serving their communities. This is “aging purposefully” in action—using accumulated life experience to make a tangible difference, which in turn provides a profound sense of identity and connection.

Aging isn’t a process of gradually diminishing capacities. It’s an accumulation of power, wisdom, and experience. You are the architect of how you spend your energy, attention, and years. We will all age; the important question is how? How will you step into your own elderhood with power and purpose? And how can we as a society see the value in that elderhood? I’d love to hear your thoughts.