Longevity as a Responsibility: Constructing Healthy Aging by Enacting within Contexts over the Entire Lifespan

Abstract

Studying aging now requires going beyond the bio-psycho-social model and incorporating a broader multidisciplinary view capable of capturing the ultimate complexity of being human that is expressed as individuals age. Current demographic trends and the lengthening of life expectancies allow the observation of long-lived individuals in full health. These super-agers are no longer an exception. Indeed, individuals can have a good quality of life even over age 70 and living with chronic or neurodegenerative diseases. This change is driven in part by the cohort effect observed in people who are about to age today (e.g., better schooling, more advanced health conditions, and technologization) but more so by the gradual overcoming of ageist views. An aged person is no longer seen as a quitter but rather as one empowered to direct their own trajectory of potentially healthy longevity. According to this vision, this article proposes a situated lifespan perspective for the study of aging that integrates pedagogical models of developmental ecology with psychological theories of optimal experience to understand the individual motivational perspective on aging. At the same time, it does not disregard analyzing the daily and cultural contexts in which everyone situates and that guide aging trajectories. Nor does it forget that aging people are body-mind (embodied) organisms that, with contexts and through motivations, seize opportunities for action (affordances) to evolve in an optimal way during their lifespan. This theoretical reflection sheds new light on the aging process and on future trends in healthy longevity research.

Keywords: affordance; ecological lifespan development; emotional selectivity; empowerment; enactive cognition; flow experience; healthy aging; longevity; motivation; quality of life.

Figure 1

Illustrative diagram of individual–context interaction throughout life. At each stage of life, the challenges provided by the microsystems within which the individual implements their skills vary, contributing from time to time to the evolution of the individual in their growth and aging process.

Figure 2

An exemplification of how the pursuit of a flow experience can be the motivational engine for embarking on a path to healthy longevity.

Figure 3

A flowchart in which the relationships among flow and out-of-flow motivations and SOC strategies are linked for healthy longevity pathways. The role of socioemotional selectivity according to death approaching is described in Section 2.5.