Ageing Is Becoming Noisy - And Hip

Can It Be Spiritual Too?

From Tate Modern

After last week’s missive on figuring out how to pace yourself for the marathon of longer lives, I was impressed to see how many of you are thoughtfully designing this chapter. Mostly by becoming much more selective about what you choose to do, and getting much more radical about getting rid of the rest. For real. And acknowledging (and accepting) that energy levels aren’t what they were. With a couple of significant - and opposite - wings fluttering between burn out and muscling up.

Here’s how you voted:

Ageing As A Spiritual Practice?

So I was delighted by the synchronicity of hosting a Modern Elder Academy (MEA) talk with Deborah Berryman, who co-leads the EMEA alumni network with me, titled Ageing as A Spiritual Practice. She’s a longtime yoga and meditation teacher and teacher-trainer. Her presentation was based around the framework suggested by Lewis Richmond in his book of the same name. It resonated with the assembled group - deeply.

Afterwards, I looked up the book and realised I had read it (with much enthusiastic underlining) back in 2021, in the midst of my pandemic-forced retreat to the countryside. It offers a useful frame to the ageing topic as I like to think about it. Not as something to be feared, avoided and ignored. But as something that carries a deep gift if you are willing to welcome it, embrace it and learn what it is trying to teach you.

So here’s Richmond’s 4 stages of Ageing (ignore the typo in ‘Lightning’):

During the discussion, it was obvious that the majority of us were pretty squarely in the ‘Adaptation’ phase. And trying to figure it all out, pretty much on our own. See more on that below…

To this sequence, I’d probably add a fifth, which is the level that Abraham Maslow added, at the end of his own life, to the top of his famous hierarchy of human needs: Transcendence. That’s what I spent a morning discussing with fellow-substacker Jane Trombley, of Three Score And More, who was visiting the UK and came over for a cup of coffee. She’s just entered Q4, and was asking me (sic!) what it was all about. I admitted I had no idea, not having reached it myself, and that I was looking for guideposts from older role models… like her! Or some of the (few) thinkers on adult development.

The Meaning Of Maturity

In his final years (late 1960s until his death in 1970), Maslow began to explore self-transcendence as a higher state, involving going beyond the self, seeking meaning, connection, and purpose, experiencing peak experiences, altruism, and spiritual or mystical states. He described it as the pursuit of "a cause beyond the self,” such as service to others, truth, art, or the divine.

It’s less well-known because it doesn’t appear in the famous Pyramid model of human needs. Because Maslow didn’t create that image. It was popularised by other management theorists. His own writings on transcendence were published posthumously, so it’s often left off the widely circulated picture of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs you are probably familiar with:

Maslow’s Famous Hierarchy

And, like most models of adult development, most of us aren’t anywhere near the top!

Harvard professor Robert Kegan, a psychologist best known for another theory of adult development (see The Evolving Self), laid out 5 different stages. Ya gotta love all these models, but I admit they are helpful for memory! At each stage, you reach a deeper capacity for meaning-making and self-reflection.

But perhaps my biggest takeaway from his work was how few of us get to the top which Kegan associated with transformational leadership and deep wisdom. The so-called wise elders or systemic thinkers. Only about 1-3% of humans. Most adults (around 60–70%) hover at his third order (socialised mind), while only a small minority (3–7%) manage to reach the fourth.

Robert Kegan’s 5 Phases

So imagine. What if that was what Q4 was all about. Getting to a new kind of ‘top'.’ If we could get better at this ageing thing? Turn it into something else altogether. What Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi wrote about in a book called From Ageing To Sageing.

Wouldn’t that perhaps make some evolutionary sense to this whole new demographic era. Why are humans suddenly both living so much longer and having fewer children? What if we are going to learn how to better balance the early enthusiasms and energies with the later wisdom and systemic understanding? OK, I know this isn’t the current zeitgeist at all, but it’s early days. What would happen if we multiply the number of people becoming wise elders in an older, more generationally balanced world? What if it were 10% rather than 3%? Would it make any difference to the chaos and the craziness? Inject a bit of much-needed calm and connection?

Adapting to Ageing

First, we have to learn how to age better. We are getting there, slowly but certainly. The topic is taking off since the pandemic, and interest, money and understanding are increasing exponentially, even amongst the extraordinary noise and crises all around us.

• The big conferences are helping get the topic onto the global stage, like the Unicredit Longevity Conference I wrote about in Milan recently, and many others, including a longevity discussion at Davos this year.

• A slew of reports on longevity are being published, the latest being a new one from Ashoka, that has added a welcome Longevity Hub to its work.

• More universities are adding midlife transition programmes to their curriculums, the latest additions being Cambridge U. and NUS in Singapore. I’ll be writing more about them in the coming weeks, and doing a special series on 4-Quarter Lives talking to all the directors of the different programmes this fall, in Season 10.

Presence vs. Performance

People are also adapting individually. Everyone in my little breakout MEA group was thinking very hard and intentionally about ‘who they were becoming’ now and what that meant ‘letting go of.’ Everyone admitted a bit of an addiction to a cocktail combination of work and busyness and making money, and that stepping back required a great deal of will power - and resistance to getting sucked back into systems you had vowed to leave behind.

I was interviewing Yvonne Sonsino this week from Mercer about their latest longevity report, Health on Demand 2025 (see Chapter 2, very interesting). She’s one of the global experts and pioneers on ageing. She told me that she was retiring at the modest age of 65. I asked her how that went along with her (and my) shtick about ageing better = working longer (literally, the No.1 rule from her book The New Rules for Living Longer). She laughed ruefully, admitted she had struggled with that question, and then decided that 43 years of work in this particular professional dimension was enough. She’s off to teach yoga, learn pottery and serve as a Trustee of the International Longevity Centre. Oh yes, and she got a puppy last year… That’s a very thoughtful decision.

The book I started this piece with, Ageing As A Spiritual Practice, lists a number of practices that help people make these kinds of decisions. I suspect that many of my readers do many of these things. I think I subscribe to all of them, increasingly. Which do you do?

Reading & Recommended

So many great minds and writers are exploring different dimension of ageing, from different cultural, psychological or strategic perspectives. Here’s just a few from this week, who all seem to be mulling around the questions of ageing better, and wise and responsible eldering:

• Kavita Krishnan writes about ageing in India, where older millions are multiplying fast. She’s set out some guidelines around retirement in her Never Too Late substack. I love reading her because so much of the writing on longevity comes from the anglo-saxon world. And much of the next-era ageing will be elsewhere.

• Changing habits writes Margaret Heffernan, is how to build resilience and cope with uncertainty. She has vowed to eliminate all long-haul traffic to be ‘able to meet her kids’ gaze’ and not wipe out their climate futures. She’s also knows enough about herself to programme weekends to tear herself away from her addictive desk, so she and her husband spend every weekend visiting every cathedral in the UK. They have two left!

• and if it’s all too much noise, read Dr Denise Taylor’s piece on how to calm down and become more selective about what you read. You don’t need to know it all! Remember, most of you say that part of ageing well is to get good at picking, choosing… and eliminating. Thanks for keeping me on your list! And getting to the end of this one.

On a different and very personal note, I’m excited to see the UK and Senegal cementing closer ties… through sport! There’s a big Senegal ‘Lions’ vs. UK’s ‘3 Lions’ game next June 10th. So the UK Ambassador to Senegal is busy selling some surveillance systems on the back of the ball. I’m just hoping we’ll finally get a direct flight… to my granddaughters. The little one is learning to… stand. I miss her.

In the meantime, I’m off this weekend to another Late Love wedding. That’s the second this spring! This time, it’s two of my Harvard ALI colleagues who got together during the programme. Yet another reason to go back to school in Q3! And why I’m happy to share that more and more universities around the world are starting these ‘midlife transition’ programmes.

Here’s to your Q4. Are you thinking about it? Preparing for it? This week’s 4-Quarter Lives podcast introduces Soalma. com, a new platform that helps plan and prepare multiple dimensions of ageing - the physical, administrative and emotional. The legacy you leave is about a lot more than money. Let’s get ready. Early.