I’m 62. Stop Telling Me I’m Old.

Ken Stern on New York Times - Nov. 27, 2025

Oltre 4,1 milioni di americani compiranno 65 anni ogni anno da qui al 2027 raggiungendo il “Peak 65”: un’ondata senza precedenti.

Ma cosa significa davvero essere “vecchi” oggi, quando 65 anni non è più un confine netto tra attività e declino? Scopri come la rivoluzione della longevità ridefinisce lavoro, pensione e possibilità.

We have reached Peak 65: There are more than 4.1 million Americans turning 65 each year through 2027, a record surge. Baby boomers will have all sorts of ways to mark the occasion, but underneath the cake and usual Social Security jokes lies the unease about the fact that the birthday boys and girls will now be officially “old.”

American society uses all sorts of markers to define old age. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act began to protect me from ageism in the workplace when I turned 40. I qualified as “near elderly” under the rules of the Department of Housing and Urban Development when I turned 50, and happy day, I started receiving a senior citizen discount at my local Harris Teeter grocery store the day I turned 60 — though for some reason, only on Thursdays.

But if there is a commonly accepted age for becoming old in America, it’s 65. That’s when I will become eligible for Medicare coverage, and it’s been, roughly speaking, the most common retirement age for American men for the last 60 years.

It is strange that we use the calendar in such a deterministic fashion, since we all age so differently. If you’ve met one 70-year-old, you’ve met one 70-year-old. I’m 62, active, healthy and still working. But in the last few weeks, I’ve been shamed on the pickleball court and at the gym by people in their 70s, and also visited with a 70-year-old whose body had betrayed her so much that the simplest acts of showering and toiletry are far beyond her capacities. As life expectancy continues to extend, chronological age is telling us less and less about people’s physical and cognitive abilities.

Sixty-five has long been a generally accepted demarcation for old age. But it’s been with us so long that the definitions make little sense — and now operate to our collective detriment.

Let’s take work and retirement. We have been conditioned to believe that retirement should begin around the age of 65, and that belief holds extraordinary sway over our behaviors and economy. Mandatory retirement has largely been illegal in this country for decades, and yet we treat retiring at age 65 as some sort of biological imperative. The average retirement age for American men in 1962 was a little over 65 (when average life expectancy was 67), and the average retirement age for men in 2022 was a little under 65 (even though their average life expectancy is now about 75).

This doesn’t make great sense, especially when we begin to understand the historical origins of this expectation. We can trace our understanding of the right time to retire all the way back to the 1880s, when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Germany created the world’s first public pension plan. He set a retirement age of 70 — subsequently reduced to 65 — at a time when the average life expectancy was only around 40. Some workers beat the actuarial tables to reach retirement age, but most did not, as von Bismarck most likely expected.

Almost a century and a half later, his benchmark still defines how we think about life’s transitions and old age, even though we are much more physically adept than our recent ancestors. You’ve certainly heard people say that 70 is the new 60 or some such similar sentiment. It would be easy to dismiss such statements — except that it understates the physical advancements that we have made over the last half-century.

The best data on this comes from the Japanese, who have been tracking the physical progress of older generations for decades. They do so by measuring both walking speed and grip strength, two widely accepted measures of physical capacity among older adults. Over a period of 20 years, the walking speeds of older Japanese men and women increased at significant rates. Today’s 75- to 79-year-olds walk faster than those five years younger did a generation prior. The data in Japan is particularly notable, but similar studies have shown progress across generations in the advanced economies of the world.

Being prematurely classified as old has negative consequences for both individuals and society. American businesses’ tendency to disfavor “old” workers cuts millions of people off from social networks, exposing them to greater risks of loneliness and social isolation. And older people in the United States often perceive themselves to be old and declining, as you might expect from a lifetime of living in what is often thought of as one of the most ageist societies on earth.

Becca Levy, a psychologist at the Yale School of Public Health, has found that older adults who take in more negative attitudes on aging tend to be less mobile, have poorer memory, recover more slowly from injury and disease, are more susceptible to cognitive decline and tend to die an average of 7.5 years sooner than similarly situated peers with more positive attitudes on aging.

All this raises more questions than it answers. If 65 is not old anymore, is 70 or 75? Do I have to give up my Harris Teeter discount if I’m still working and healthy? I’ll keep the discount, but I will reject the notion that there is any longer a useful universal demarcation between middle age and old age. I’ll know it when I see it — but it might be different for you than it is for me.