“Don’t listen to people like Tom Perls, George Vaillant, Betty Friedan, William Shakespeare, and Simone de Beauvoir. They were all between 40 and 70 when they wrote about aging.”

So says George Vaillant, one of the people he warns about. Instead, he uses a favorite simile to suggest a different approach: “Old age is like a minefield; if you see footprints leading to the other side, step in them.”

In his experience, those footprints will belong to people 85 and over, not to young pedants. “Don’t pay attention to know-it-all professors who try to teach you golf or to fly a plane without ever having been up in it,” he advises.

Dr. Vaillant freely admits having been one of those know-it-alls himself, but his studies of older people have led him to learn humility. A psychiatrist focused on human research, he has a leading role in the famous Harvard University Study of Adult Development, a project that has lasted 50 years.

In a recent talk at the Cambridge for Adult Education, this 68-year-old researcher shared with an audience of mostly older people, from many cities and towns around Boston, some of what he has learned about growing into old age.

Among the possible ways of thinking about the subject, he finds human development by far the most interesting. The only reason why Americans tend to think negatively about later life, he says, is that disease becomes more frequent then.

The same thing happens with automobiles: even a hundred-year-old Rolls Royce will have a bad drive train. “You just accept the fact that the last year of life, whether you die at 7 or 107, is going to be kind of a bummer,” he says. “You pay attention to the other 106.”

The study with which he has been involved has followed three groups of people during almost their entire lives, from teenage through old age. This longest study of aging in the world has taken three separate groups of people – – a total of 824 individuals – – and interviewed them intensively. Building on this work, Vaillant in 2002 published the book “Aging Well.”

In the Study’s web site Vaillant describes the individuals followed by the researchers. The first group is made up of 268 socially advantaged Harvard College grads born around 1920. The second contains 456 socially disadvantaged men from Boston’s “Inner City.” Finally, the third comprises 90 socially middle-class, intellectually talented women from California’s Bay area, born about 1910.

On that same web site, Vaillant lists, in his own personal and characteristic language (including parentheses), some of what he considers the most significant findings thus far:

• It is not the bad things that happen to us that doom us; it is the good people who happen to us at any age that facilitate enjoyable old age;
• Healing relationships are facilitated by a capacity for gratitude, for forgiveness, and for taking people inside. (By this metaphor I mean becoming eternally enriched by loving a particular person.)
• A good marriage at age 50 predicted positive aging at 80. But, surprisingly, low cholesterol levels at age 50 did not.
• Alcohol abuse – – unrelated to unhappy childhood – – consistently predicted unsuccessful aging, in part because alcoholism damaged future social supports.
• Learning to play and create after retirement and learning to gain younger friends as we lose older ones add more to life’s enjoyment than retirement income.
• Objective good physical health was less important to successful aging than subjective good health. By this I mean it is all right to be ill as long as you do not feel sick.

Young people, Vaillant believes, have to be self-centered. “You will never have a self to give away,” he says, “if you don’t start out life by being selfish.” A woman who studied biographies and autobiographies calculated that, when subjects were 25, a whopping 92 percent of their wishes were directed toward the self. But by the time they got to be 60, only 29 percent of their wishes were self oriented.

Adult development occurs very slowly and there is no surefire way of speeding it up. But, when it comes, this inner growth moves us toward empathy for other people and altruism. What Vaillant calls the “emotional brain” gets increasingly well connected to the forebrain and we learn to control our passions.

This student of human change considers retirement as one of the great gifts of modern times. In 1900, only one percent of Harvard grads were retired; now 15 percent are. “We have the opportunity, not to live forever, but to retire and do something different.” Vaillant considers longevity as offering the chance to experiment and to use play to discover  ourselves in new ways.

About the awful things that happen in old age, he reminds listeners that they happen in adolescence too. He quotes the Russian writer Solzhenitsyn: “Aging is in no sense a punishment from on high but brings its own blessing and a warmth of color all its own.”

Richard Griffin