Conversations
Prolonged old age, the sandwich generation and biohacking—the realities of an aging Australia
08 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: Why are Australians living longer and what are the implications?
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Everywhere around the world, people are living longer and longer. In the past half a century, human life expectancy across the globe has jumped from 46 years to 73. That's especially the case in societies like ours. On average, Australians are now living until they're 84 years old. And a shout out right now to my own mum, who's 91, and my dad, who turned 96 on Anzac Day.
On the surface, all this living longer seems to be a very good thing. Most of us want more life. We want to have as much time as we can to enjoy our loved ones, to look at the stars, to feel the sun. But prolonged old age, as is more and more common, can be a lonely, unhappy and painful time.
Chapter 2: What are the emotional and societal costs of prolonged old age?
Not the rich end note to a life well lived, but a bitter diminishment. Our living longer is also costing society as a whole in many ways, and the price is highest for our youngest citizens. Lucinda Holdforth is a writer who specialises in looking at what makes societies flourish, everything from manners to politics to equality.
Now, after supporting her own parents in their long old age, Lucinda has turned her attention to the negative impacts of our new longevity, and she has some surprising suggestions about how we could do things differently. Her book is called Going On and On. Hi, Lucinda. Hi.
Paint the picture for me first of just how different the situation with life expectancy is now compared to the rest of human history.
Well, for most of human history, your average life expectancy was about 35 years old. Now, a big part of that factor was obviously women and babies dying young, women in childbirth, babies and childhood illnesses.
Chapter 3: How has life expectancy changed over the years in Australia?
So actually, it's funny because often in the statistics, they act like that doesn't matter. But of course, that does matter. So the big burst that affects us now came after the Second World War in Australia, where we suddenly had a long period of peace and prosperity because war is another factor which takes a lot of lives. Peace, prosperity, huge advances in public health.
and in medical science. And that medical science is still accelerating with genetic treatments, immune treatments, and we're seeing this sort of bonanza of ways in which we can be kept alive. So after the Second World War, people would be, you know, expected to live to about 68. By 2019, it was about 81. And now today, it's 85. So this is massive.
And some of those public health schemes are things that we just take for granted now, like seatbelts in cars, for example.
Yes, absolutely. When I was growing up, you know, I saw a lot of these things happen. So it was in the 70s in the suburbs. So the sewerage came on. Who would have thought? We had these awful warm milk bottles at school that the kids were all given. There was no debate about vaccines. You just got them. You'd line up at school.
Chapter 4: What does the gap between health span and lifespan mean for the elderly?
I never knew what the hell I was getting in my arm, but I'm very glad I did. So we had a whole range and also obviously drink driving, seatbelts, all of that stuff.
We should note, of course, that there are major disparities in life expectancies here. And I'm thinking of that huge glaring disparity between First Nation Australians and other citizens.
Absolutely. And it's become more, you know, as I was thinking about these issues and writing this book, I thought, my God. it really brought home to me how terrible and wrong that disparity is. And it is played out in life expectancy and wellbeing.
Let's look, Lucinda, at what this new vastly extended lifespan means for older people themselves, first off. Because back before the increase in longevity, how long were older people typically in serious health decline before they died?
In fact, I'm not sure that there's particular statistics about that. But what I do know is that because of medical treatments these days, the gap between your health span and your lifespan in Australia is now about 12 years. What do you mean, the gap between health span and lifespan?
So the period of life when you're pretty well, you're doing okay, you're mobile, you're active, you can do things – So we live on average now 12 years longer than our health. And that's something lots of older Australians will recognise. The first fall might be the beginning of something, or it might be the cancer diagnosis, or it might be heart disease, which is another big factor.
And now we also have this curse of dementia. And one in 12 Australians... Over 65 has dementia and that is a terrifying statistic. So when I think about my mother and her parents and the people I knew, old age, that period of debility before you die was absolutely shorter. It was just four or five years maybe. Or even in the old days, men used to say, I'll probably just drop off the perch.
I'll just have a heart attack. And actually lots of them did. It was very sudden.
Tell me more about your experience with your own parents. What did you witness as their years went on and on?
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Chapter 5: What challenges do the sandwich generation face in caring for aging parents?
And I said, okay, is he okay? She said, I don't know. I said, where is he? She said, he's in the bathroom, his head's wedged in the door. So I said, Mum, have you rung the ambulance? And she said, no. I said, why don't you hang up and I'll ring the ambulance and then we'll get there. And that's another panicked drive. So that's just my experience.
Other women, because it's nearly always women, have had it much tougher.
Your mother outlived your father and outlived many of her relatives and friends. How did you see that impact her, that loss after loss after loss?
A great loneliness came upon her. There was... When her best friend died... Oh, it's too sad. And she was told, and she just compressed her lips very quietly, and she wasn't going to make a big fuss about it, but... And she was very devastated. And when her big sister died, that was sort of the great figure in her life that she loved.
And I think it was at that point that she thought, you know what, I'm ready. And actually, she said to me, you'll be okay when I go. And I said, yes, mum, I'll be okay.
When death does finally come for people in extreme old age, advanced old age, it is now often part of a medical process, one handled by doctors in hospitals. How has that fact shaped the way we experience old age and death?
Well, it is my impression that we have a highly interventionist medical system today. And the medical ethos is sort of a combination of life at all costs and the customer is always right. And so part of my role with my parents was taking them to endless clinics scans, blood tests, x-rays and so on. And they're in their late 80s.
And so time that they could have spent just sitting quietly in the sun, reading a book, having a cup of tea was spent with the stress of a lot of medical interventions, some of which I look back and I think probably weren't necessary.
Were you able to have frank conversations with they, your parents, able to have frank conversations with the doctors who were organising these tests and these interventions?
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Chapter 6: How does biohacking relate to the quest for longevity?
He was very lovable and he loved life and he didn't want to hear about death. Mum, I think, was ready, but she, again, I would never have spoken to a doctor in front of her and I never really got the opportunity to talk to a doctor separately.
Old age is, of course, not always terrible. It's not inevitably this sort of decline that many people experience. It can be this beautiful, bountiful stage of life. You write about your nana who lived on a farm. What was it like visiting her when you were a kid?
Oh, yes. My nana had a farm in Coonabarabran on the Oxley Highway. She was a complete legend. She dyed her hair red till the end. She scandalised the country party locals with a poster of Gough Whitlam on the Oxley Highway outside her farm. Actually, she'd be cross with me for calling it a farm. It was a property. She had cattle.
So what I noticed when I was thinking about these issues, I thought, gosh, as we get older, and here I'm not really talking about mum and her generation, but me and my generation, the expectation is that you have to try and look young. Um, and you have to somehow, um... Treat ageing as an enemy.
That's not to say it isn't fantastic seeing how many of us as we age are living well, looking after our health, feeling happy. And that, you know, that health span may well increase over time. But at the same time, I think, you know, when I look at Nana, she lived, she saw life and death. She was on a property and it wasn't something to be afraid of or defeated. Or ignored.
And how did she look physically, your Nana?
Oh, she looked plump and round and rosy-cheeked. She always had a swipe of pink lipstick on. Scotch was the first drink she offered anyone when they came in the house. She was, you know, she was... And she was the true grandmother with hordes of children and grandchildren, that loving matriarchal figure. So she embraced that period of her life.
And, you know, we all, when the cousins all get together, that's what we talk about.
But it's interesting, I think, as you're suggesting, Lucinda, we kind of are used to this crazy expectation there are on celebrities to never look older or somehow if they do do things that trying to make themselves look younger and that looks crazy, then they get mocked for that. I mean, it must be an impossible place for them to be in.
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Chapter 7: What are the economic impacts of an aging population on younger Australians?
I think it means 35. So I do see people suffering quietly, trying to look the part, trying to act the role.
Well, it's more than look. So in what ways are people expected to perform a certain kind of youthfulness, do you think, even in retirement?
Well, I don't think... I think once people do retire and they've got, you know, they've got their income and they're secure, that's... You see the restfulness come over people. It's when people are struggling, and I think there are a lot of women in particular, because our generation's had more divorce and so on.
When we have people... Women had children later, so they are the sandwich generation. They're still working or trying to work. They've got children who need them. They probably have parents who need them as well.
LAUGHTER
And they're expected to try and look great, all of which is an enormous burden.
This approach to ageing but somehow never actually getting older is being taken to a sci-fi extreme in some notable cases. What's so-called biohacking?
Actually, I don't really know what that means. And I watched an entire documentary, so nobody else needs to, with a man called Brian Johnston, who was this kind of hairless, bizarre figure. And he just seemed to be taking all these... drugs of various kinds. He had a very strict vegan diet. He'd go to bed every night at 8.30. He exercised to the point of exhaustion. He had no social life.
He was a multimillionaire and he wants to live forever. And the biohacking includes things they showed in the documentary, his son nearby, and it turned out the son was donating his youthful plasma to dad. You just couldn't make it up. That's vampiric. It is vampiric.
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Chapter 8: What solutions are proposed to address the challenges of aging in society?
What's the Blue Zone approach?
Ah, the Blue Zones. Well, the Blue Zones has a lot going for it at one level. It's a guy called Dan Buettner who went around to Sardinia and Costa Rica and remote Japan and decided that... they were very old people and they seemed quite happy to him and they were well because they ate, you know, simple food and they moved naturally and they had community.
So I also watched the documentary series of The Blue Zones and while others might have seen this romantic lifestyle of happy old people, all I could see was in Sardinia poor old women labouring up a vertical hill to the church while Dan said, look how fit they are. I'm like, what are you talking about? Or in Costa Rica, a poor woman making tortillas and he's like, look at her muscles.
And it's like, and she had a guy, there was an old guy working in the fields and his argument was that this was all so good for your health and wellbeing. It just seemed to me such a disconnect. And in Japan, some poor old fella picking up a few weeds outside and to chuck into the miso soup. And then you looked at their houses, no books, no music. LAUGHTER no television sometimes.
And this little, you know, retrograde fantasy of we're all going to live some version of that. And actually, I found it very patronising. And there's stuff in there that's good and sensible. But I felt that if someone told me I needed to live a blue zone life, I would rather run for the final exit. Poverty is not a picnic for most people who are living it. Poverty is not a picnic.
And to glorify that in that strange way seemed to be very, well, it seemed very American to me, I have to say, which may sound racist, but there you are.
So this increased longevity, which even if the tech bros believe they can escape it, is likely to include a prolonged period of frailty and ill health. Let's look at the impact that has beyond the elderly themselves onto sort of wider parts of society. First off, and you've kind of intimated this a few times, is who predominantly is looking after the growing cohort of older people?
Mm-hmm.
It's the daughters. It's the good daughter or the good daughters. And that's not just an Australian phenomenon. In America, Atul Gawande said, if you want to be comfortable in your old age, you need at least one daughter. Another one said 85% of caregiving is done by women. So that's the statistics. And I've seen that here as well. And they're known as the sandwich generation for a reason.
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