Mary Dejevsky: An ageing society isn't all bad news

In the space of a week, the writer and long-time editor, Diana Athill, has notched up a brace of distinctions. She received an OBE in the New Year Honours List for services to literature, and last night she won the Biography category of the Costa Book Awards with her memoir, Somewhere Near the End, which makes her a contender for the Book of the Year prize when the results are announced later this month.

Still more remarkable is that Ms Athill recently turned 91. Energetic, appreciative, and – it goes without saying – in possession of all her faculties, she is a one-woman advertisement for Britain's ageing society. A brave and highly regarded editor, she started late as a writer, publishing her first book at the age of 43. She has used her long life to maximum, and enviable, advantage.

Related articles

• Unflinching Athill lands Costa book award at 91
• Search the news archive for more stories

In so doing, Ms Athill offers a timely antidote to the doom-mongering consensus that regards an ageing society only as a problem, and an expensive one at that. In the UK, there are now more over-60s in the population than there are under-18s. But I have never quite bought into the idea that longer life-expectancy need be the burden that will bankrupt the state. (You could even argue the opposite, given the mayhem created by a younger generation of risk-taking bankers left to its own devices.)

To be sure, developments in medicine have enabled people to live longer, and the technology and drugs cost money. The incidence of dementia, we are told, is set to increase; already far from adequate social services will be shamefully ill-equipped to cope. But it also remains true that most people cost the Health Service most in the very last year of their life – at whatever age that last year happens to be.

And the reasons why people live longer – including improved nutrition, better sanitation and the decline of heavy manual work – are invariably positive. To be 60 or 70 today is tantamount to being 50 or 60 a generation ago, in terms of health, capability and attitude. There is surely no reason – except atrophied social thinking – why those now too often dismissed as "elderly" should not contribute far more to society than they do. Many would be only too delighted not to be excluded, as they see it, from the mainstream.

If raising the pensionable age again is too sensitive a nettle for any government to grasp at a time when joblessness is rising, why are there no more imaginative options for the "young" old to supplement their travel – and hobby – time with temporary or short-term work? At the least imaginative end of the spectrum, why is there no encouragement for willing individuals to organise and staff civilised accommodation and care for the new generation of super-old? Care assistants, so called, are currently at the very bottom of the salary pile; young, temporary and often from abroad. Anyone familiar with the world of old-age homes – which are closing by the week – knows that nothing short of a revolution is needed in this benighted sector.

Britain's changing age structure should bring positive change, if not an actual revolution, within the bounds of possibility. Technology helps. Internet shopping, home deliveries, electric trikes and subsidised taxi arrangements have already made life easier for those who find it difficult to get out. Some construction companies are building in aids to mobility and use that benefit people of all ages.

Experiments in France and elsewhere team care homes with schools and nurseries on the same site; work, services and facilities can be pooled. In countries such as Japan, where the ageing society is more acute and further down the line than in Britain, scientific researchers, designers and advertisers are applying vast amounts of ingenuity to chasing the "grey" yen . I see no reason to despair quite yet.

But there is another, quite different, reason, why the ageing society may not prove to be the "ticking social time bomb" that pessimists fear. Even 60 years ago, the very idea that women would ever have routine control of their fertility would have been dismissed as impossible outside the world of medical researchers. It is something that is now taken for granted in most countries of the developed world.

In large part, the pill – and to a lesser extent legalised abortion – may be responsible for the changed demographics of Europe today. Quite simply, many children were not born who might have been. But the social effects of the pill – a cheap, easy and reliable form of contraception – have reached far beyond the prevention of pregnancy. It is widely assumed that pregnancy is a matter of choice – the woman's choice. Hence the additional opprobrium attached to "feckless" mothers.

Bearing a child is now seen less as something that just happens – a byproduct, welcome or not, of a relationship – but as a deliberate choice. A decision not to have children can still carry a social stigma of sorts: you are deemed to be selfish, for instance, by not doing your bit for the pensioners of the future. But the choice exists, where once it did not, and it has become the social norm within half a century.

Which is why I cannot help wondering whether my contemporaries and I – the second pill generation – might be the last generation unable to control how and when we end our lives. The demand for such power is growing. More people are writing "living wills" – to decline aggressive treatment – and more would surely seek assisted suicide if it did not entail a trip to Switzerland. Baroness Warnock has mooted euthanasia for dementia-sufferers.

The instinct to survive remains strong. But for some – not only those who have seen in close relatives what it means to be old and incapacitated, or who know of some adverse genetic predisposition – the choice could prove attractive. What if you could live your life to its physical and financial full, and then simply switch yourself off?

The social consequences of being able to choose when to die – legally and reliably – could be far greater than those associated with choosing whether to beget another life. And the very idea would be fought by the same churches that denounce abortion. But in a mostly secular society, where – even as life expectancy rises – not all can live lives as long or as full as Diana Athill's, the choice of when to call it a day must be the next medical and demographic frontier.

m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk

More from Mary Dejevsky