The Wisdom Years: Unleashing Your Potential in Later Life by Zvi Lanir

Author:Zvi Lanir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Exisle Publishing Pty Ltd

THE SYNERGETIC FACTORS DETERMING A PERSON’S FUNCTIONAL AGE

Illustration © Zvi Lanir

In the 1980s, based on his thorough documentation of patients nearing the end of their lives, family doctor and gerontologist Marian Rabinowitz put forward the then revolutionary idea that for the elderly, chronological age is not a reliable indicator of a person’s health status and life expectancy. What actually determines one’s state of health in old age is a combination of different ‘ages’ — functional age, social age, emotional age, cognitive age and biological age. For each indicator, an individual may be a different ‘age’. Only when they are seen in combination does the functional age and ‘personal chronology’ of the individual concerned emerge.

Very few humans age uniformly across all the dimensions of their make-up; most people will be young in one component and old in others. Therefore, Rabinowitz argued, conventional definitions of ‘old’ and ‘young’ are meaningless, and he suggested abandoning the old/young dichotomy altogether.

Despite the very positive reception of Rabinowitz’s book, The Six Ages of Man and the Inner Time,7 by the gerontology community in Israel, his ideas were not taken up and research on this subject has progressed little beyond what Rabinowitz himself proposed.

Notwithstanding this, his ideas have substantially influenced my own research. However, while Rabinowitz’s approach was mainly therapeutic, mine is proactive and pre-emptive. My aim is to show people how they can actively manipulate their functional age and create a ‘personal reserve’ that will enable them to enjoy the wisdom years and postpone the infirmities of old age.

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