Is turning 50 the end of the road? Or a new chapter?
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The Pat Kenny Show on News Talk. Well, new research suggests that there is a striking generational divide in how Irish people view turning fifty, with almost six in ten young adults believing that by forty-nine someone's most exciting years are largely behind them. Well, joining me now to discuss is Frances Brennan, the hotelier, and Roseanne Kenny, Professor of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin, and founding principal investigator of the Irish Longitudinal Study on Aging. I'm gonna bring you in first, Frances, somebody who is living their best life, I would imagine. You're going to dismiss this out of hand, aren't you?
Absolutely, I haven't listen, retirement was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because I when I was working I spent my whole life working. I was a devil to work and I enjoyed every minute of it. But now all of a sudden I have plenty of time to come to Renvale House Hotel where I am as I talk to you for five days and don't have to worry about anybody. It's absolutely fantastic.
Do you still consider life exciting at this point?
Yeah, I do. Because the opportunity is there to do anything. I you know, and I I can go for a bike ride, I can play bingo tonight if I want to. I can uh my sister started she's in in her seventies too, she started the other day taking piano lessons. You could do all sorts of things and there's no reason why you should sit at home and say, Poor me, I'm old. Do you guess up and get out?
Do you consciously though? Francis, do you fight that idea of getting old?
Well, I I don't think I'm old, you see. That's the problem. I'm often talking about people and I say sh it's like Well he's in his seventies. Well I was seventy three yesterday, all right, so I'm in my seventies, but I don't think that in the head. I'm absolutely back in my fifties, I'm sure. I'm somewhere around there in my mind. So I don't at all think that, oh I'm old now and I should be doing this and I should be or not doing this or not doing that, whatever. I just keep going and enjoy my life and do uh able now since I retired to do things that I wasn't able to do when I was working.
Okay, I want to bring in Roseanne Kenny because I was looking at this. Research Roseanne, right? And I looked at the word exciting and I thought, yeah, okay, in my twenties, you know, there was freedom, there was opportunity, there wasn't a huge amount of responsibility. In your 30s, maybe you meet somebody, you buy your first home if you're lucky, maybe you have a child, and that continues into your 40s. And yes, I think life is exciting and there's career changes and opportunity. Does that then begin to shift when you go into your fifth sixth, seventh, eighth, maybe even ninth decade?
What was disappointing about this research from my perspective was the misperceptions of what it's like. to uh get older because in fact life gets better after fifty when we look at quality of life measures In people aged fifty and older, we find they continue to improve year on year after age fifty and peak only in the mid seventies or eighties for some people that your quality of life gets better. And the factors which determine it declining after that are physical ill health mostly. Um and but what's interesting is you're nearly in your mid eighties before your quality of life is at the level it was at fifty. So life gets better after fifty. Sad for me was that that message still hasn't got out there for the younger group age group that the study included.
So why do you think that hasn't?
doesn't given the fact that that age group that was surveyed here will see how their parents, perhaps their aunts, uncles, maybe even their grandparents, are continuing to survive, thrive, enjoy life.
That's a very, very good point. I think that sort of an ageist attitude about old age as such, don't like calling it that, is is almost gets in under our skin at a very young age. And it's it's from a number of different sources, obviously media sources, social media, the focus in the cosmetic industry on m being young, looking young, irrespective of what.
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