By Wendy Marinaccio

The Difficult Dialogues program at Stanford hosted a town hall meeting May 4 called “Why is aging a young person’s issue?”

The meeting addressed issues involved with a graying population, especially those affecting young people. While life expectancy increased by 30 years during the 20th century, social programs and cultural views of old age have not changed. Three panels of experts on aging discussed health care, retirement, and the need to change society’s views of the elderly.

“Why should young people care about aging? You should care more than anyone else,” said Laura Carstensen, a Los Altos Hills resident and Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the group that organized the meeting. She said young people should be aware that decisions they make early in life will directly affect their experiences later on. Today’s youth are the first generation who expects to grow to an old age. Exercise, developing bone mass during childhood and young adulthood and saving money during one’s 20s will determine the quality of life years in the future. Carstensen said the town hall meeting was intended to get students to think about aging.

Young people will be affected by the benefits and problems of our society’s demographic change towards an older popluation, Carstensen said.

Engineering student Michelle Johnson brought up technology’s role in lengthening life and aiding the elderly, an issue that had not been addressed earlier in the meeting.

Corinna Lockenhoss, a doctoral candidate in personality psychology at Stanford, also attended the meeting. “I’m very interested in the aging process,” she said. “I’ve noticed a lot of age segregation - people think there’s a fundamental change at 65.” Lockenhoss worked in a nursing home at 16. “My friends were pitying me, but I felt there were a lot of meaningful relationships,” she said.

Carstensen said, “We tend to equate aging with decline. There are losses that occur with aging, but there are gains as well, which we tend to overlook.” These include being more satisfied with your relationships, having better control over emotions, and a constantly increasing storage of knowledge. It’s not a steady decline, the image our culture currently gives us, she pointed out.

The Difficult Dialogues program brings together Stanford faculty, visiting scholars and policy-makers to discuss aging. The group is creating a consensus document to disseminate to policy-makers and others, encouraging people to think about the issues of an aging society and consider creative solutions.

The panelists pointed out people essentially have 30 extra years to live, which they’re currently using as leisure time. “We can think about it more creatively,” Carstensen said. For example, why not retire at 20 to get an education, travel and have a family, then resume work at 40? “We have everything in young adulthood and middle age. Why do we have to compress that incredibly complicated and stressful period? We’ve got to rethink.”

The town hall discussions also addressed Social Security. Panelist Ron Lee pointed out that since the population is getting older, we will either have to pay higher social security taxes, get fewer benefits or work longer. He said we need to fundamentally restructure social programs. “Decouple chronological age from social policy, and instead associate it with health and disability,” he suggested.

For more information, visit www.stanford.edu/group/IRWG/programs/DiffDialog/features/meeting.html.