What If the Way You Expect to Age Changes How You Age?

What if the picture you have in your head of growing older helps shape the life you actually end up living?

Researchers at the University of Vienna and collaborating institutions followed 459 adults between ages 30 and 80 for 10 years.

They weren’t simply asking whether people were optimistic or pessimistic.

They looked specifically at how people imagined their future social lives—whether they expected to remain connected to family and friends and socially active—and then compared those expectations with what happened over time.

The researchers found that more positive expectations about future social relationships were associated with greater social activity later on.

Interestingly, their analysis suggested that the direction wasn’t simply:

People have active social lives → therefore they expect to age well.

The researchers found evidence that expectations preceded later social behavior.

That’s consistent with what’s sometimes called a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But let’s be careful with that phrase.

The study doesn’t prove that simply thinking positively will create a wonderful old age. Social circumstances, health, income, relationships and countless other factors matter.

And the participants were German adults, so we shouldn’t assume the findings apply identically to everyone.

Still, there’s an interesting possibility here.

If you quietly assume that getting older means becoming less social, less curious and less adventurous, you might gradually organize your life around that expectation.

And if you expect that your later years can still contain friendship, learning, activity and discovery, you may be more inclined to seek those things out.

Maybe aging isn’t just something that happens to us.

Maybe some of it is also something we practice imagining.

That’s worth thinking about.