Last week we marked a major milestone here at the stately Mead manor in the glamorous and exclusive residential borough of Queens. I reached the grand old age of 50.
I see a lot of you out there using your pencils and calculators… 2012 take away 1952: that doesn’t leave fifty, you are saying. That’s sixty, you senile old windbag.
Well, it is in the old math. Here at the stately manor we’ve decided to move from the outmoded (and, may we suggest, French) system — decimal, like the metric system — to something more human, more realistic. We have dropped the decimal system and gone to base twelve.
As those of you fortunate enough to have encountered the “new math” in grade school know, in base twelve the number ’50’ signifies the same number as ’60’ in the old and now outmoded French system or ‘base ten’ as we advanced mathematicians call it. Instead of having 6 tens in the tens’ place, as my fifth grade teacher used to put this, we have five twelves in the twelves’ place. 5 times 12 is sixty, or, as we now write it in base twelve, 50. (You can listen to Tom Lehrer explain the “new math” here.)
I look forward to my 60th birthday just twelve short years away.
The shift to base twelve is not just caprice or hiding from the march of time; there is an important truth here. People today generally take longer to get started in life than our ancestors did; we spend more time in school and our adolescence can linger well into the twenties or longer. On the other hand, our active working lives, barring accidents, also tend to last longer. A person born in 1800 was often close to the end of active working life by 1860; somebody born in 2012 may well be active and healthy enough to make important contributions well into the 2080s.
Of course, I could be run down by a truck tomorrow or be felled by some dread disease, but barring accidents or unusual events, people at 60 (old style) can reasonably expect another fifteen years of active life, and quite possibly more. In thinking about where one stands in the arc of life, base twelve actually provides a more accurate measure.
As people get used to these longer life expectancies and longer periods of preparation at the start of life, we will adjust, but right now our arithmetic is out of touch with our life experience. I notice this as much among college students and people in their twenties and thirties as among aspiring geezers like myself. Lots of young people go through all kinds of angst as their thirtieth birthday approaches because culturally they are conditioned to associate the age of ’30’ with a certain stage of life; by then your career ‘should’ be well launched.
But in a world in which many people are in college until 22 or 23, then take two to five years to figure out what to do next, and then start professional school (a perfectly sensible and appropriate way for somebody to make life choices in our world today) that milestone birthday of ’30’ approaches and there isn’t much to show for it.
My advice for young people and their (often anxious) parents: use base twelve for these calculations. In base twelve, ’30’ turns into ’24’ — and by that reckoning, somebody in law school or even medical school is pretty much moving along through life at an appropriate pace.
There are many thirty year olds today who are in the late stages of their formal education and are about to embark on the great business of life (including marriage and child rearing); this is where much younger people stood two hundred years ago, when even those attending college had often finished their studies and were ready to launch out. (Even the biological clock has become a little more forgiving; young women as well as young men have more time than their grandparents.)
Shifting to base twelve is a refinement and an improvement on the advice I’ve shared with many of my students and colleagues over the years: to think more clearly about where you stand in life, take ten years off your age. The disparity between our inherited, cultural sense of how a human lifespan works and the facts before us grows more significant as life goes on. Many more people now live into their seventies and eighties with much better health and much more vigor than ever before. In the field of foreign policy, one can think of George Kennan who authored books well into his nineties and of Henry Kissinger who seems to be doing the same. Zbigniew Brzezinski is not far behind.
There have always been a few exceptional individuals who, like Winston Churchill, Konrad Adenauer, Lee Kwan Yew, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II or Fidel Castro, managed to remain intellectually vigorous and politically relevant long past the Biblical threescore and ten. But their number is increasing as medicine improves and as people learn to take care of themselves better as the years go on.
This is not just a statement about how people feel and what they are capable of; it is also a guide to how people should plan for their future. Today’s 65 year old (to drop into the old base ten numbers for a moment) is likely to have a good ten or fifteen years of active life still ahead. Instead of putting finishing touches on his or her life’s work at that point, today’s 65 year old should be thinking about what ambitious, long term projects should come next. Over time, more and more people will start thinking in exactly this way.
This change will have substantial implications for the way the world works. David Landes has written that the development of spectacles in late medieval Europe laid the foundation for much of the technological progress that came later. Skilled craftsmen used to begin to lose their ability when vision started to decline around 40 with the onset of presbyopia; spectacles made it possible for the most skilled and experienced workers to continue to hone their skills and apply them for ten or twenty more years. That led to huge breakthroughs in all kinds of machine making and artistic production and helped power the surge in human capabilities we are still experiencing today.
Today’s extension of lifespans is going to have the same kind of profound effect on a larger scale. The wisdom and experience that people develop over decades of life is going to be around longer and the insight and skill that accumulates over time will play a more active and creative role in the world of affairs. This represents an immense addition to the world’s human capital stock in the 21st century, and in some ways the impact will be greatest in developing countries where lifespans will be growing most rapidly.
In my life, this reality is having a profound impact. At my new age of 50 I now feel as young and as vigorous as ever; anyone looking to rejuvenate out there should consider launching a blog. I’m learning new things, engaging new ideas, working with new colleagues and exploring a new medium.
Is thinking of your age in hexadecimal, base twelve numbers a form of denial? I don’t think it has to be, and hope that it isn’t in my case. By thinking about my recent landmark birthday in this way, I’m not trying to ignore the solemnity of thought that advancing years should bring. It’s often seemed to me that people in our culture and time impoverish life by failing to give due heed to the presence of death, the reaper that will some day gather all of us into his barn.
By thinking about the possibility and even probability (though never certainty) that my most productive and creative years may lie before me, I don’t mean to obscure the inevitable realities of death and dissolution that are coming. These things are real, they are important, and to live in the consciousness of death is part of what it means to be fully human. For those of us blessed with faith that life means something and that what is most true and meaningful about our lives will somehow live on and bear further fruit in the sight of God, the realization that the footfalls of the Reaper are coming closer year by year is also a realization of something greater. We do not just approach a little closer to death and old age each year; we come a little closer to the source of life and the true fountain of youth. And the reflection that the dear ones who we lose year by year still live in the vision of God and will meet us over the river is one that brings progressively greater comfort with the passage of time.
But these reflections, comforting as they may be for the faithful, do not obscure the basic tragedy and truth of the human life cycle. At the moment when we feel that we have the most to offer, the powers and the knowledge that we’ve accumulated over a long life are taken from us. It may come suddenly, it may happen slowly and gradually over time. But strength will become weakness, the light will fade, those busy, competent hands will fall slack and the night will come.
To live in the presence of these truths is one of the important sources of such wisdom as advancing years may bring. To deny these truths or to try to hide from them is to miss exactly the kind of encounter with reality that makes the human spirit grow richer and more comprehending in the golden autumn light.
Celebrating my fiftieth birthday this week was not a childish act of defiance against the inexorable march of time. I have no plans to dye my hair and buy a Porsche. This haunch of mutton will not try to dress itself as lamb. The accomplishment of medicine has not been that we stay young into our sixth and seventh decades; it is that we can now be more vigorous even as we cease to be young.
This is a wonderful thing; however long or short the time that remains to me may be, I am glad, grateful and even a little surprised to be living in a world in which autumn, while remaining as rich and as bittersweet as it has ever been, is also becoming a longer and perhaps even a little milder season of life.