One of life’s key features is that it comes with both gains and losses. You are constantly changing, and so is the world around you. This fact could be associated either with acceptance or dread. In either case, it is an immutable fact, and the only question is whether there’s a way to keep plusses from being eroded by minuses.
Think about possible changes associated with various points in life. During the typical years of early adulthood, people go to school, explore close relationships, and start to build toward the future. Most people during what might be considered “middle age,” or somewhere between the 40s and late 60s, are heavily involved in overlapping spheres of work, family, and community. Late in life, there are further changes in all of these spheres, but physical abilities may reflect the toll that time takes on the body. Throughout adulthood, there are constancies, ranging from one’s sense of self or identity to the need to build and keep financial solvency.
As you ponder these various developmental processes, what ideas come into your mind about what your life is now and where it might be going? If you think back on what’s already happened to you, what seem like the most important areas in which you’ve evolved?
According to University of Cologne’s Roman Kaspar and an international team of colleagues (2023), “experiencing … gains and losses while getting older is foundational for experiencing oneself as an organism shaped by ongoing development.” Both in developmental psychology and in the minds of laypeople, the balance begins to tip more heavily toward losses than gains as people grow older. Yet, this view is overly simplistic. People do experience losses in early life, such as not getting jobs they wanted or finding the partner they hoped to share their future with. Midlife isn’t perfect either, especially if people experience disappointments or become stressed with too many obligations. Aging, typically associated with loss, can also come with gains such as finding new friends after longtime ones disappear or finally getting to move to a new location not associated with one’s work.
Development, rather than being seen as a steady downhill progression where losses outweigh gains can therefore be viewed more as a scorecard. You might not always be particularly conscious of your score, but the research team believes that there is “awareness of age-related change” (AARC) that can be easily tapped into.
Kaspar and his research team tested AARCs in a representative sample of German adults known as the 2018 Innovation Sample in the German Socio-Economic Panel. The 1,612 participants represented the age groups of 16-39, 40-69, and 70+ years, with approximately equal proportions of men and women equally representative of jobs, education, marriage, and parental status.
Based on earlier work with a 50-item AARC test, Kaspar et al. were able to narrow the number of items down to 10 (AARC-10-SF). Their study attempted to demonstrate the AARC-10-SF’s validity for people of different ages as well as to compare age groups on gains-losses ratios.
You can take the test, reproduced here, by rating each item from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very much):
With my increasing age, I realize that …
As you can see, the even items are losses and the odd items reflect gains. Unfortunately, the authors did not provide mean scores for you to evaluate your own responses, but they did report on the overall gain-loss ratios by age group.
The number one finding to emerge was that, in contrast to what you might expect, the oldest group had the highest gain scores, even up to the age of 90. However, consistent with what you also might expect, losses increased, too. There was no “midlife crisis” bump, although losses started to creep in by the 40s (as did gains). Losses took on a more prominent role in the scorecard after the age of 80. However, demographic factors also played a role in affecting the gain-loss ratio, with employment status (having no job) negatively affecting the balance sheet, consistent with the view that sociocultural factors are important influences on development throughout life.
The study partly confirms the view of later life as a time of loss but also sheds light on the possibility that gains continue to mount across the decades. The question is whether you can maintain your own positive score regardless of what those overall trends may suggest.
As you answered the questions on the AARC-10-SF, where did your thoughts roam? Were you reminded of some of the things that bother you, or were you surprised to realize that you’re actually doing better than you imagined you would, such as having more freedom to do what you want? Do you appreciate your goals more clearly than you did in the past?
Looking at the negative side, what can you do to lower your loss score? If you have less energy, perhaps it may be a signal to get more sleep, recalibrate your schedule, or change your eating and exercise habits. In other words, a loss doesn’t have to remain a loss once you become aware of its presence.
To sum up, your own life scorecard is going to be one that is unique to you. It’s also one that can be tinkered with. Seeing both gains and losses as an inevitable feature of life doesn’t mean you have to let the losses play out, nor does it mean you have to let your age define the balance. Change can come about at any age, and the right kind of change can help you keep a winning scorecard.
References
Kaspar, R., Schilling, O. K., Diehl, M., Gerstorf, D., Rupprecht, F. S., Sabatini, S., & Wahl, H.-W. (2023, November 2). Differences in Self-Perceptions of Aging Across the Adult Lifespan: The Sample Case of Awareness of Age-Related Gains and Losses. Psychology and Aging. Advance online publication. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pag0000783
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