A book review from The Wall Street Journal.

My own comment: Many people will respond to such a book by citing all the reasons they cannot possibly fight back against aging, and may not even want to, to include serious illnesses, true disabilities, personal tragedies, and perhaps just being tired of life. But for those who don’t have those reasons or might want to persevere despite them, the book and its review raise a number of things I have long concluded myself.
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BOOKSHELF

By Richard Lea [reviewer]

Riding High Into the Sunset
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Breaking the Age Code

By Becca Levy [author]

(Morrow, 294 pages, $28.99)
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Constant messages that associate advancing age with decline and depression create a self-fulfilling prophecy—one that can be undone.

Jake Kasdan’s 2019 movie “Jumanji: The Next Level” opens with returning hero Spencer already at low ebb—he’s lonely at college, browbeaten at work and sharing his bedroom with Grandpa Eddie. But the thing that pushes him over the edge, driving him back into the dangerous alternate reality of the movie’s title, is the idea that life’s inevitable decline has already begun.

“Getting old sucks,” Eddie says, as he fiddles with the portable oxygen machine on his bedside table. “Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

Social psychologist Becca Levy spends much of “Breaking the Age Code” doing exactly that, weaving together case studies and her own research to demonstrate that old age doesn’t have to suck at all. The expectation that aging means decay, Ms. Levy shows, is actually a major reason it so often does—our negative view of aging is literally killing us. Chipping away at this widespread and deeply ingrained conviction has a measurable effect on health after just 10 minutes. The first part of the book is so full of flabbergasting results that they become almost monotonous. In 2002 Ms. Levy combined results from the Ohio Longitudinal Study on Aging and Retirement with data from the National Death Index to reveal that, on average, people with the most positive views of aging were outliving those with the most negative views by 7½ years—an extraordinary 10% of current life expectancy in the United States. In 2012 memory tests showed that positive age beliefs allowed people to outperform their peers with negative beliefs by 30%. The stereotype of failing memory is so strong in the West that occasional lapses are called “senior moments.” But in China, where attitudes to the elderly are much more positive than in the U.S., Ms. Levy says older people “can expect [their] memory to work basically as well as [their] grandchildren’s.” Experiments in the lab, across cultures, and following participants over many years give similar results for dementia, hearing and physical function.

Ms. Levy leavens this research summary with portraits of inspiring elders, from the actor who started memorizing the whole of “Paradise Lost” when he was 60, to the 91-year-old nun who runs triathlons. She also shows the scientific method at work, as when she describes how statistical analysis helped her establish that positive age beliefs bring better health—instead of the other way around—and how lab results demonstrated that those who were exposed to positive age beliefs walked faster and with better balance.

A combination of factors makes us “particularly susceptible . . . to negative age beliefs,” Ms. Levy argues, citing the World Health Organization bulletin that declared ageism “the most widespread and socially accepted prejudice today.” We first encounter ageism when we are least likely to resist it, decades before it might apply to us and our peers. Older people are often segregated in Western society for living, working and socializing, leading younger people to conclude these divisions are “caused by meaningful, inherent differences between age groups.” And these stereotypes are then reinforced over the course of our lives, as we are “ bombarded by messages in advertisements and media about older people.”

All is not lost, however, for despite the “pervasiveness and depth” of ageism in Western society, these beliefs are “in fact quite brittle: they can be chipped at, shifted and remade.” In one striking study from 1996, Ms. Levy primed some people with positive words such as “wise” or “alert,” and others with negative ones such as “senile” or “confused.” Ten minutes of priming saw participants in the positive stereotypes group improve in memory tests, while the negative stereotypes group declined.

In the second part of “Breaking the Age Code,” Ms. Levy steps out of the lab to examine the “silent, complex, and often deadly ways” ageism operates in society, and how we can change it. We may be living longer and healthier, but over the last 200 years views of older people have steadily worsened. Ms. Levy blames this shift on the media, the anti-aging industry and a “multibillion-dollar ‘medical disability complex’ ” that prefers expensive medical interventions to prevention and tackling underlying causes. She makes a compelling case against doctors who “dismiss treatable conditions as standard features of old age,” but readers who are less inclined to point the finger at “corporate greed” may feel her political analysis is on shakier ground.

The market may play a major part, but Ms. Levy leaves to one side the role of technology. The status of older people traditionally depended on their role as keepers of memory and experience, as she acknowledges. But the vertiginous pace of change since the industrial revolution has devalued both, making ageism go hand in hand with modernity. There’s no need to ask the village elder what happened 50 years ago when you can Google it. And when work, relationships and even the seasons are in permanent revolution, the village elder can often be the one who needs advice—as anyone who has struggled to set up Netflix while a teenager rolls his eyes can attest.

For individuals, Ms. Levy offers alternative ways of thinking to increase your age positivity, while for society she prescribes an “age liberation movement” modeled on movements for gender, racial and sexual equality. But there’s little engagement with the political peculiarities of a minority we all hope—one day—to join, and which wields disproportionate power at the ballot box.

Ms. Levy finishes with a vision of paradise: “A place where ageism does not exist.” But this is no idle fantasy, it’s Greensboro, Vt. She stops for homemade lemonade with an 81-year-old writer for the local paper and swims at Caspian Lake with a real-estate agent in her 80s. When older people and society around them are “harmonized in a productive way,” Ms. Levy continues, it shows how “aging can become a homecoming, a rediscovery, a feast of life.” Or—as Grandpa Eddie puts it after his adventure has left him closer to Spencer than ever before—“Getting old is a gift.”

Mr. Lea is a writer and editor in London.

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