The Key to Aging Well? Social Engagement Matters More Than You Think

What if how you engage with others matters more than how many years you’ve lived? In this article our expert, radical age disruptor Mariana Aalda, explores the link between social engagement, ageism, and aging, showing how curiosity, connection, and cross-generational interaction can shape health, longevity, and the way we experience getting older because “youngers are elders-in-training and elders are just youngers with more frequent flier miles“. 

The Way You Engage Affects How You Age

I’ve been reflecting on this idea for quite some time: the way you engage with life shapes the way you grow older. It’s rooted in the soil of where I’ve lived and worked for most of my adult life, the world of theater, film, and television, where a 25-year-old and a 75-year-old are peers, colleagues.

Nobody ever stops a rehearsal to ask who’s the oldest person in the room. Nobody cares. What matters is the quality of your work. And here’s what I’ve noticed: the people who engage that way, across generations, without hierarchy, without anybody pulling rank by date of birth, don’t seem to age the way the culture expects them to. Something about the quality of their engagement keeps them vital in ways that defy chronology.

This is a radical notion, and it shouldn’t be. We love our demographic boxes: Millennials, Boomers, Gen X, Gen Z, The Silent Generation. We categorize people by birth year and then act surprised when those categories don’t match our expectations,  when the 75-year-old is the most adventurous person in the room and the 20-year-old is the one most terrified of change.
Ageism gives us faulty appraisals of whom and what to value.

Chronological age only tells you how much time a person has lived on the planet. That’s it. It says nothing about curiosity, appetite for risk, openness to new ideas, capacity for joy, or willingness to sit with discomfort long enough to grow. Those are psychographic qualities, traits of the mind and spirit, and they do not come stamped with an expiration date.

Youngers and elders as a new model of engagement

Science is starting to prove it. Yale professor and researcher Dr. Becca Levy has spent decades studying the relationship between our beliefs about aging and our actual health outcomes. What she found in her research is that people with more positive attitudes about getting older live, on average, 7.5 years longer than those with negative ones. This is more than the longevity gained from exercising regularly, maintaining a healthy weight, and not smoking!

Levy’s study also shows that health problems long assumed to be inevitable consequences of aging, memory loss, hearing decline, cardiovascular events, are in fact, influenced by our negative age beliefs. Our internalized ageism, it turns out, is making us sick.

Which brings me back to engagement. So, what if instead of sorting people from young to old, we thought of youngers and elders as psychographic identities? Not ages, but orientations, ways of engaging.

What it means to engage as a “younger” or “elder” mindset

Youngers engage with life from a place of eager curiosity, as if every experience were the first time, free of preconceived expectations. They are forever building, discovering, questioning, reaching. They bring energy to every problem, along with a refusal to accept that things can’t be different. They treat mistakes as the price of wisdom, not as something to be avoided at all costs.

Elders engage from a place of grounded practicality. With years of experience behind them, they look for patterns — with an appreciation that most crises have a precedent, and that with enough knowledge, many can be navigated or avoided altogether.

But here’s the thing: none of this is fixed. None of it is permanent. And most importantly, none of it belongs exclusively to any one age group.

There are 30-year-olds who engage like elders in the truest sense: grounded, reflective, unconcerned with trends. And there are 80-year-olds who engage like youngers to their bones: restless, curious, still scandalously optimistic about what might happen next. I know both kinds. I’ve worked alongside both kinds, sometimes in the same scene.

Ageism in society and its impact on opportunity and value

Ageism, at its core, is the belief that chronological age determines value. That the number of candles on a birthday cake tells you what someone is capable of, what they deserve, and what roles they get to play in the world and on camera. It’s reductive, and it’s costly, both to us as individuals and to the culture at large.

We lose the contributions of elders who get pushed out before their time because someone decided 60 is the new irrelevant. And we underestimate youngers who get dismissed as inexperienced precisely when their fresh perspective is what the moment calls for.

Cross-generational engagement and healthy aging 

If we started seeing the elder in a younger, the hard-won clarity someone in their 30s might already carry, and embraced the younger in an elder, the still-burning passion in someone in their 70s, we’d stop devaluing people based on ageism’s faulty data.

Age is just a descriptor. It shouldn’t be a hierarchy. In my world, a veteran actor isn’t “better” than a newcomer they each bring different things to the table. And the magic can happen in the exchange between them. In the engagement. Two people from different generations, creating something neither could have made alone.

That’s cross-pollination, and I mean that literally. In biology, cross-pollination produces stronger, more resilient organisms. What might it produce in our culture? Mentorship that flows in both directions. Collaboration that doesn’t require anyone to pretend they’re something they’re not. Innovation that borrows from both the archive and the vivid imagination.

Young Youngers and Young Elders. Eldered Elders and Eldered Youngers. We need them all, in the same room, at the same table, in the same conversation. I believe that language shapes thought, and the language we’ve built around age, who’s over the hill, who’s not yet ready, who’s past their prime, has been quietly doing the work of ageism: sorting, dismissing, limiting, before we’ve ever made a conscious choice.

How engagement influences aging more than chronological age

The question shouldn’t be “How old are you?” but “How do you engage?” Although why is there even a need to ask? The behavior — the engagement — is observable, and that’s all the information necessary to judge one’s capabilities.

Imagine what might happen to ageism if we made that psychological shift. Dr. Levy’s research gives us more than permission to ask, it gives us a mandate. Yes, age is in part what happens to your body, but how you engage is a greater determinant of how you’ll experience life, even in an ageist culture.

Choose to engage with curiosity, with generosity across generations, with a willingness to both teach and be taught — and you won’t just age differently. You’ll live differently.

In the ways that some people are introverted extroverts and others are extroverted introverts, I consider myself a young elder or maybe I’m an eldered younger? I’m not entirely sure. But honestly, it shouldn’t matter, because what matters is how I engage. And that, I do. Full out.

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