Aging, Contributing, and the Importance of Now

Mark D. Roberts blogs about a study by a Harvard psychologist and a 2012 BBC TV special which, decades later, attempted to replicate. Roberts cites a lengthy and interesting article from The New York Times.

The original study was done by Ellen Langer back in 1981. The gist of it was that Langer welcomed eight men, then in their 70s, to a monastery in New Hampshire. Langer, in a time before the connection between mental and physical health was less well understood, predicted that in five days' immersion into a life in this place, objective empirical measures would show them to be in better physical health. The Times article says:

The subjects were in good health, but aging had left its mark. “This was before 75 was the new 55,” says Langer, who is 67 and the longest-serving professor of psychology at Harvard. Before arriving, the men were assessed on such measures as dexterity, grip strength, flexibility, hearing and vision, memory and cognition — probably the closest things the gerontologists of the time could come to the testable biomarkers of age. Langer predicted the numbers would be quite different after five days, when the subjects emerged from what was to be a fairly intense psychological intervention.

In the New Hampshire house, the men were surrounded by the music, television, magazines, books, and movies that would have been current twenty-five years earlier, in 1959, when they would have been younger and healthier. On arrival, they were told that no one would take their luggage to their rooms. They would have to do so, even, as the article has it, if that meant they took up articles of clothing one piece at a time.

“We have good reason to believe that if you are successful at this,” Langer told the men, “you will feel as you did in 1959.”...

At the end of their stay, the men were tested. On several measures, they outperformed a control group that came earlier to the monastery but didn’t imagine themselves back into the skin of their younger selves, though they were encouraged to reminisce. They were suppler, showed greater manual dexterity and sat taller — just as Langer had guessed. Perhaps most improbable, their sight improved. Independent judges said they looked younger. The experimental subjects, Langer told me, had “put their mind in an earlier time,” and their bodies went along for the ride.

The results were, as Langer says, almost too good to be true. She shied away from writing much about it in scholarly journals, fearing her colleagues would automatically dismiss the whole thing as too fanciful.

...she and her students would write up the experiment for a chapter in a book for Oxford University Press called “Higher Stages of Human Development,” they left out a lot of the tantalizing color — like the spontaneous touch-football game that erupted between heretofore creaky seniors as they waited for the bus back to Cambridge...

As I say, in 2012, the BBC produced a short series in which the producers essentially replicated Langer's study with a group of older British celebrities, achieving similar results.

All of this is highly suggestive, of course.

How much of the aging process is about simply disengaging from life, exchanging the joys and challenges of the daily struggle for the alluring and often deadening perks of senior citizen status?

Frankly, as a pastor, I have seen people age well and others do so waving a white flag of surrender and entitlement...and early graves. Those who desire to contribute have seem to be the ones who remain young and vibrant, while their peers seem to age overnight.

So, I think there's a lot to this whole mind-body connection.

But there is something that disturbs me about Langer's approach. She achieved positive results in the health of those who disengaged from the world and immersed themselves in one that no longer existed. Is nostalgia the key to making people experience sustained good health?

I hope not, because nostalgia is bad history, for one thing, and, more importantly, it hardly empowers seniors to make the kinds of contributions that are only possible, I think, for those who live fully in the only moments we can inhabit at any given time, the moments we call now.

It must be true...

...it was cited in an amicus. That appears now to be the moral equivalent of, "It's a fact. I read it on the Internet."

Evidently, justices of the US Supreme Court have, on at least several occasions, buttressed their opinions with assertions passed off as facts in friend-of-the-court briefings. The problem is, no one seems to know where the supposed "facts" come from.

A few examples:

In a 2011 decision about the privacy rights of scientists who worked on government space programs, Justice Alito cited an amicus brief to show that more than 88 percent of American companies perform background checks on their workers.

“Where this number comes from is a mystery,” Professor Larsen wrote. “It is asserted in the brief without citation.”

In a 2012 decision allowing strip searches of people arrested for even minor offenses as they are admitted to jail, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy cited an amicus brief to show that there are “an increasing number of gang members” entering the nation’s prisons and jails. The brief itself did little more than assert that “there is no doubt” this was so.

And in a 2013 decision, Justice Stephen G. Breyer cited an amicus brief to establish that American libraries hold 200 million books that were published abroad, a point of some significance in the copyright dispute before the court. The figure in the brief came from a blog post. The blog has been discontinued.

Read the whole thing.

Great Article on Mariano Rivera

As Mariano Rivera closes an amazing career still at the top of his game, The New York Times ran this terrific article about him on Tuesday.

Rivera was his usual impressive self on the mound in the eighth inning of Tuesday's All Star Game.

"The Cohabitation Effect"

Meg Jay is a clinical psychologist on the faculty at the University of Virginia. She wrote recently in The New York Times:

...Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages — and more likely to divorce — than couples who do not. These negative outcomes are called the cohabitation effect.

Researchers originally attributed the cohabitation effect to selection, or the idea that cohabitors were less conventional about marriage and thus more open to divorce. As cohabitation has become a norm, however, studies have shown that the effect is not entirely explained by individual characteristics like religion, education or politics. Research suggests that at least some of the risks may lie in cohabitation itself.

What is it "in cohabitation itself" that cause couples who have ostensibly taken each other out on test drives before saying, "I do," to be less satisfied in their marriages or more likely to divorce than couples that don't live together before marriage?

Jay doesn't approach the subject from a Christian perspective and I don't know what her religious affiliation, if any, may be. She suggests that one factor in the cohabitation effect is the casualness with which many couples decide to cohabit in the first place. They carry that casualness over into the subsequent marriage; they don't take their relationship as seriously as couples who wait to live together until after they've made their marriage vows.

That may be. And, if so, it dovetails with an observation made years ago by Pastor Arthur Rouner, also a counselor, in his book, Struggling with Sex. 

A married couple came to Rouner saying that they were both deeply dissatisfied with their sex life. He learned that they had lived together before they got married. This, he concluded, was the source of their problem: They had robbed sexual intimacy of some of its meaning and power; it was not a sign of their commitment to one another, only a recreational activity. 

From a biblical perspective, sexual intimacy is a gift from God to men and women in a lifelong marriage covenant. It appears to have three purposes: 

• to bind wife and husband in an act of intense intimacy, 
• to bring spouses mutual pleasure, and, 
• sometimes, to bless the couple with children. 

When couples choose to rob God of the gift of sexual intimacy in anything other than the marital relationship, the intimacy is also robbed of its significance and its fun.

Something similar happens, I believe, in every aspect of relationships when preceded by cohabitation. 

Couples may believe that they're testing out their compatibility by living together. But cohabitation doesn't reliably prepare couples for marriage any more than watching episodes of PanAm prepares a people to be pilots. 

When couples cohabit, everything about their relationship is contingent. "I can always bail" is the unspoken subtext of their every day together. Often, couples carry this mentality on into the marriage and the result is the dissatisfaction or even divorce that Jay writes about.

Just three additional points.

(1) It isn't about the marriage certificate. I'm a pastor and authorized by the State of Ohio to, as the law puts it, "solemnize" marriages. But to me, this is just an additional service I offer to couples, helping them with a legal hoop. What's more important to me is that couples make vows to God and to one another binding themselves together as husbands and wives. It's not about a paper issued by the local court, but a covenant and a commitment involving God and the couple.

(2) Jay notes evidence indicating that "cohabitation effect" may be diminishing. If so, there are all sorts of possible explanations to be considered. But those will have to await further data and a later post.

(3) Some of you reading this may say, "But I know couples who lived together before getting married and have been happily married for years." I do too. And some of them subsequently became committed Christians who would never recommend living together before marriage.

But Jay's article raised the question of why the marriages of those who cohabit before their wedding days, a step many take in order to vet the marriage-worthiness of their relationships, fail more often than other marriages. I've offered my view.

What do you think?

Be sure to check out Jay's article.

The Fight Against Sagging Pants

Sagging pants are becoming illegal in some parts of the country.

I wrote about the phenomenon back in April.