On the morning the Listener spoke to California-based gerontologist Kerry Burnight, the world media reported the latest research finding from amateur ageing expert (and sometime pop star) Mariah Carey. Asked how she deals with getting older, the 56-year-old Carey, sounding uncannily like a Marvel super-villain, said: “I don’t allow it – it just doesn’t happen. I don’t know numbers. I do not acknowledge time.”
Has Carey cracked it? How does Burnight rate the star’s advice on ageing? “She certainly has a good singing voice,” says the author. So hers is not the right attitude?
“Having watched the head in the sand approach to ageing, I don’t recommend it. The ageing journey isn’t easy, but it can be so much better if we open our eyes and do the opposite of Mariah Carey and recognise our limited time.”
Burnight taught geriatric medicine and gerontology for 19 years at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, and her mission to share science-based knowledge about healthy ageing has made her a sought-after authority in the US. The 55-year-old has described herself as a gerontologist from birth – aware of the issues of ageing from the start due to her family circumstances. “I came as a surprise to my middle-aged parents and my siblings, who were high school age. I was the only 4-year-old in preschool whose sister was married,” she writes in her new book Joyspan: A Short Guide to Enjoying Your Long Life.
Hearing people talk negatively about her older father made her aware of misconceptions around age and prejudices that didn’t align with her own experience. She cites the time she was in first grade and about to take part in a three-legged race with her father at a school event. “Somebody looked at my dad and said, ‘He can’t do it.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And they said, ‘Because he’s old, and old people get hurt, and they can even die.’ I looked up at my dear dad, this very ancient 48, and I asked him, ‘Can you do this? Because you’re old.’ And he said, ‘I can give it a try,’ and we didn’t win, but I’m certain that we laughed the most.”
Anti-ageing bias is so internalised, even Burnight isn’t free from it. “I’m a gerontologist – ageing is all I’ve thought about for 30 years. And still I’ll be talking to [an older person] and I’ll see their chin and think, ‘Oh, no’. And then I think, why ‘Oh, no’? Thank heaven you have a neck that can bend like that.”
During those 30 years, as she has aged herself, has her view on ageing changed?
“I think I am a better gerontologist now than when I started. I think the biggest shift has been to stop ‘othering’ people. It used to be that I would talk about ‘they’, but the book is not about your ageing parents. It’s about you. Even at age 20 you are ageing.”
Driven by fear
There is so much negativity around getting old. Who benefits?
“The multibillion-dollar ageing industry. Companies benefit from being able to sell all their crap to make your teeth white and make you feel okay. Especially as a woman, it’s a full-time job, if you want to not age. Its very engine is fear, so it’s lucrative and it’s not going anywhere.”
Her book is a manual for how to live life focused on enjoying our years, rather than merely extending them. The focus is on quality, not quantity, built around four key concepts: growing, adapting, giving and connecting.
She adds these to the familiar and time-consuming physical priorities: flexibility, cardiovascular health, strength training and agility training.
“People are saying, ‘I don’t need any more things to work on. Could you stop?’ But the reason I wrote the book is the suffering I’ve observed – people sitting, hunched over and alone and taken advantage of. That is not okay, and we can do a whole bunch better.”
The reason I wrote the book is the suffering I’ve observed: people sitting, hunched over and alone, taken advantage of.
She says she tried lots of alternative names for her concept: wellspan, wellbeing span, contentment span, “and they all sounded dumb”. She’s aware that if you define joy as ecstasy, where “‘every day is a joy’, that is kind of gross”.
But she liked an American Psychological Association description of joy as “wellbeing and satisfaction, which I think are not too high a bar. I don’t think it’s too much to say we should expect wellbeing and some life satisfaction for ourselves and our loved ones.”
As goals, “grow, adapt, give and connect” could sound somewhat happy-clappy, and not everyone will be comfortable with the idea of “joy” itself as a priority. Aware she risks sounding as if she is “joysplaining”, Burnight is keen to pre-empt accusations of toxic positivity. “Next week, I’m going to New York for the CBS Mornings show and I’ll have five minutes. I’m wearing a yellow suit, they’re gonna have me looking so pretty and I was like: ‘People are gonna hate me.’”
So she asked the producer if she could start by talking about her work in the field of elder abuse “and the very real challenges of growing older, otherwise I’m gonna be vilified and I’ll even hate myself”.
Isolated & vulnerable
For the record, there was no discussion of elder abuse, which is a shame because it has been a big part of Burnight’s career and helped shape her thinking. She was co-founder of the US’s first Elder Abuse Forensic Centre, in Orange County, California. It originated during her time at the University of California.
“We had law enforcement come in with all these photos [of abuse], because they needed some expertise. And they were so tragic. A woman who had burnt to death in her home because she was entirely isolated, and she had some cognitive impairment and put materials on the oven that caught fire. A man who was swindled out of his life savings and was homeless, and yet he had been a veteran.
“We had 1000 reports of elder abuse every month. It was all kinds of people. You had millionaires whose families had done these things. It’s very common and very hidden.”
She and her colleague, Dr Laura Mosqueda, realised they were in a medical silo, cut off from others in the field. “So we connected with law enforcement, the district attorney, public guardian and a shelter, and we created the Elder Abuse Forensic Centre. And I was the director for many years, and I loved it.”
It was a unique and productive combination of cultures, each with its own language. “I would say ‘the patient’ and then someone would say ‘the victim’ and another would say ‘the defendant’. So, basically, we all came together, and every week we would go over cases. We found that the solutions, like trying to get people’s money back, usually didn’t happen. The whole trick would be: how do you get up to the top of the ramp instead of putting Band-Aids down at the bottom.”
The experience led to Joyspan and its principles. “The more you dig into it, these four things are what fortify people against being open to victimisation.” For instance, connection. “Just like any form of domestic violence, perpetrators groom people by isolating them from others, so the adult son cuts you off from your other kids, and then drains your bank account.”
Presumably, growing, adapting, giving and connecting are already front and centre in her own life. Asked to describe how she practises what she so persuasively preaches, Burnight counts the ways.
“How I am growing is that I am really trying to not decide on my next step, because all I thought about for the last five years was the dream of writing a book. Now, I’ve got an offer to write another book and to work at a university, and my old me would go, ‘Yes, what’s next!’ But I’m trying to grow as a human to say, ‘I don’t know. I’m just going to be.’ I’m really trying to stop the treadmill that I have always been on.
“With connecting, I’m working on quality over quantity. I’m trying to focus on people who help me grow. I made a few new friends, and I’ve one in particular who’s in her 70s, and I want to be like her because she’s so neat. So, I’m trying to really foster that friendship. And I made a book club and I invited new friends.
“In terms of adapting, my retina detached and I lost vision in one of my eyes, and I had a lot of surgeries. Now, the other one is detaching, and we’re gonna go into surgery again. I didn’t do great the first time – I watched TV and gained a lot of weight. I failed a little [at] adapting; now I have an opportunity to be better.”
And giving? “There’s an organic regenerative farm near our house, and they have all these different programmes including some for children, but none for older people. I have this fantasy when all this book hoopla is up of volunteering there, with 80- and 90-year-olds coming and maybe working with the kids.”
Is there an ideal time to start growing, adapting, giving and connecting? “I think of it the same way as if you were to pose the question physically: when do you think we should start with cardiovascular health?” It’s never too early.
In fact, she acknowledges, the four components of “joyspan” are all things we are more or less doing anyway, if only in a less focused and directed fashion. Joyspanning merely allows us to do them better.
Setting an example
Clearly, Burnight has no time for the eternal-life industrial complex and the tech bros, particularly Bezos, Altman, Thiel and Musk, with their multimillion-dollar quests for perpetual youth. Paradoxically, however, the message of the book makes living longer more appealing.
Imagine a world full of happy octogenarians whose default small talk was not, as it is for many, about the ailment of the day. “I call it the organ recital. And I have to watch it, too, because I’m only 55 and I’m already experiencing things. I’ll squat down with the dogs and go ‘ow’, and I’ll think, ‘I’m doing it.’”
Or a world where people didn’t fret about minor issues such as erratic recall. “Shut up about it, if you can’t think of a name. Who cares? Just skip over it. It doesn’t really matter that much.”
Happy old people are setting a good example, especially for grandchildren who have only known them in later life.
“I call that the joyspan legacy. I have unfortunately seen too many patients live seemingly neat lives, but the last part of it – where they are mean or complainy or nasty – is how they’re remembered. Conversely, my 96-year-old mum has definitely got cooler as she’s got older. She would say she used to succumb to materialism and [being] a little bit judgy. So, growing in her spirituality and humility, she will be remembered differently than she would have, and that’s a good thing.”
The four components of “joyspan” are all things we are more or less doing anyway, if only in a less focused and directed fashion.
Which brings us, fittingly, to the end of the conversation. One of the reasons we’re not happy about getting older is that it means death is closer. Is there a joyspan way of death? Yes.
“People who I think of as having a good joyspan are the people who stepped into it: ‘Yeah, I’m going to die, and before I do, I’m going to live.’ It’s not a mistake and it’s not a tragedy.
“And it’s okay to talk to older people about death and to ask questions. I asked my mum recently, ‘Tell me about your thoughts about dying. Do you feel a little scared?’ And she goes, ‘No. Almost all my friends are dead, and my husband is dead. It’s not that I’m “bring it on”, but I’m okay with it.’”
The fact we don’t know how long we have, says Burnight, is even more reason to celebrate joy today. “I sometimes think it would be ironic if I died early, because I’ve spent so much of my life thinking about old age. Then I’ve thought, ‘That’s good, because I have thought about it, even if I didn’t get to experience it.’ On the other hand, maybe I’ll be one of those people who lives to 100. And that would be good, too.
“Experiencing life, cultivating joy, appreciating it – whether you’re going to die tomorrow or whether you’re going to live a long time – seems like a good insurance policy.”
Joyspan: A Short Guide to Enjoying Your Long life, by Dr Kerry Burnight (Hachette, $39.99), is out now.