Ken Dychtwald: At the Tipping Point: liberating A New Age of Aging

As a result of extraordinary public health and medical breakthroughs, more of us will live longer than humans have ever contemplated. This new longevity offers an opportunity for us to create a new vision of aging: one with a vital role for older adults, where their wisdom and experience are respected, valued, and put to good use. We are truly at a remarkable moment in history.

Are we on track to make this vision a reality? Is our society prepared? What about our infrastructure? Are the institutions we set up decades ago prepared to meet the new challenges of an aging America? On our current course, the answer is no. For more than 50 years, I’ve been studying and thinking about the changes headed our way as a result of population aging. The challenges facing us today are daunting, but I’m an optimist. I believe those of us working in the field of aging can lead the way to a healthy, hopeful, purposeful, meaningful era of longevity—if we focus on five important course corrections.

REFRAME AGING AND LONGEVITY TO INCLUDE NEW EMERGING LIFE STAGES

In the past century alone, the average life expectancy in the United States has jumped from age 47 to age 78 (Blakemore, 2019). So, everything in the fields of aging and longevity is a new frontier, demanding new, innovative thinking.

Evolving Stages of Life

At the end of the 1800s, sociology recognized only three stages of life: childhood, adulthood, and old age (Neugarten, 1981). Then society began to shift its view of childhood and the role of education in upward mobility. The prevailing thought became that kids should go to school for a longer time before entering the workforce. Childhood took on a different purpose, and in 1904, G. Stanley Hall introduced a new stage of life called “adolescence” (Hall, 1904).

When Social Security was created during the Great Depression, policymakers chose age 65 as the marker of old age (Social Security Administration, n.d.). At that time, the average life expectancy was only 63 years (Tapia Granados & Diez Roux, 2009).

In the late 1940s, Baby Boomers burst onto the scene, destined to become the largest and most influential generation in American history. Boomers weren’t in a hurry to grow up—and many were born into enough affluence to have the time and means for extended education and a wide range of lifestyle explorations. A new life stage was coined by psychologist Erik Erickson in 1950, called “young adulthood,” generally thought to be between ages 18 and 34 (Erickson, 1950).

By the 1970s, for the Greatest and Silent Generations, retirement caught on as a time to rest and relax. As life expectancy continued to trend upwards, though, older adulthood changed again. People started going back to school, taking up new ideas, meeting younger friends, and relocating. If they had been divorced or widowed, some were falling in love again. In the 1970s and 1980s, another life stage found traction: “middlescence” (Kirwan, 2025). Situated approximately between ages 44 and 65, this phase is characterized by a need to rethink identity and find new challenges, new purpose, and deeper meaning in life’s second half.

In 1998, astronaut John Glenn returned to space at age 77. When I asked him if he was too old for the mission, he said, “Just because I’m 77 doesn’t mean I don’t still have dreams.”

As more of us are now living into our 80s and 90s and beyond, I propose a new, even more expanded map of the life course, where yesterday’s old age is replaced by dynamic and nuanced life stages—”middlescence,” “late adulthood,” and “elderhood”—that emphasize continued growth and purpose throughout our longer lives.