Good news for Indiana Jones fans, possibly. The fifth and (this time they mean it) final outing for Harrison Ford as the swashbuckling adventurer is going into production, and will be released in 2022, when Ford will be 80 years old.
You might have thought that, having appeared in a film called Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989, our hero would have drawn a line on all this activity around about then. That film ends with Indiana and his father, played by Sean Connery, literally riding off into the sunset.
But no, this was not the end. In 2008 he returned in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull—to a rather mixed critical reception, albeit cushioned by huge commercial success—before allowing another decade to pass until he picked up the whip again. We can speculate what additions to the script might be needed this time: “Snakes. I hate snakes. And rheumatism.”
But there I go, instinctively lurching into an ageist joke about someone who is probably, even now, fitter than I am, though he is a generation older. Next month we will have to recalibrate our views on age once again. On 20th January 2021 Joseph R Biden Jnr (don’t you love that “Jnr”?) will be sworn in as the 46th President of the United States, at the age of 78.
CNN recently broadcast some footage of a younger Joe Biden running for the Presidency in 1987, when he was 44 years old . He looked very different. He had brown hair, a slightly fleshier face, and he spoke quicker. He was to pull out of that race early on, after, on one occasion, borrowing some lines from a Neil Kinnock speech without attribution (although he attributed them properly at other times). Embarrassed, Biden returned to his career in the US Senate, eventually becoming Vice President to Barack Obama in 2009.
Which Biden is better, the 1987 version, or the 2020 one? Today he knows a lot more and has experienced a lot more. If you believe in the coming of wisdom with age, you should be happy he got the job now and not sooner.
And yet when you see him speak or move carefully around the stage, there is no denying that he looks like an old man. He will inevitably have less energy—physically and mentally—than he did a few decades ago. Unlike his predecessor, however, Biden has aged with dignity. There is no ridiculous hairstyle or weird orange tint to be seen.
Biden may well come to be seen as a symbol of greater life expectancy and the richer possibilities many of us will have as we live and remain active for longer. A similar career journey could be followed by many others. None of us should expect a steady, linear progression, but interruptions, transitions, plateaus, setbacks and, we must hope, success. And this could all take place over a much longer period of time.
Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, both professors at London Business School (Gratton’s field is management while Scott is an economist), have published two books which discuss these and related questions. In The 100 Year Life—living and working in an age of longevity (2016), they set out their thinking on the need to reassess our assumptions about life and careers.
In their follow-up book, The New Long Life—A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World (2020), they argue: “If you take a chronological approach to your age, then this encourages you to believe ageing occurs at the same fixed, invariant rate for everyone—one year, every year. But from the perspective of the malleability of age, this is far from the case.”
Clearly we should not make hasty assumptions about anyone on account of their chronological age. “It is fascinating to realise that only a quarter of how you age is genetically determined,” Gratton and Scott add. “That leaves considerable scope for your own actions, as well as events beyond your control, to exert an influence.”
At this point some younger readers may be feeling uneasy, or worse: not only did Boomers and some Gen X-ers get free higher education and then snaffle up all the affordable housing before prices went crazy, but, one might feel, now they are going to be clinging on to the best jobs long into their seventies and eighties. It’s another kick in the teeth for the young.
But to view it that way would be to misread the emerging situation. Longer lives could and should open up more possibilities for all of us. The difficult part will be making sure that there is a fairer distribution of opportunity.
It is not as though the young are being excluded from all the plum positions. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, is only 40. But he is a veteran compared with the Lithuanian politician, Virginijus Sinkeviius who, at 28, is the youngest-ever EU commissioner (in charge of the environment, oceans and fisheries portfolio).
We need to be more imaginative and more flexible in our attitudes to people’s age and their capabilities. As the sports coaches say about young talent: if you’re good enough, you’re old enough. In addition to marathon runners in their nineties, we should get used to seeing creative careers last a lot longer—Margaret Atwood publishing a new collection of poetry at 81, Paul McCartney releasing a new album at 78.
The fictitious Henry (“Indiana”) Jones Jnr and the very real Joseph R Biden Jnr both had forceful and impressive fathers. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Harrison Ford and Sean Connery, after discovering that father and son have both slept with the same woman, reflect on the inter-generational implications:
Indiana: It’s disgraceful, you’re old enough to be her...her grandfather.
Prof Henry Jones: Well, I’m as human as the next man.
Indiana: Dad, I was the next man.
Life has changed. Homo sapiens is evolving and living a lot longer. As Gratton and Scott write: “Today, a 78-year-old [in the UK] has the same mortality rate as a 65-year-old in 1922. Adjusting for age inflation, the new ‘old’ is 78.”
So that’s Paul McCartney, Harrison Ford, and President-elect Joe Biden: “old,” perhaps, but still capable of offering an awful lot more.
