The older man's mirror

We're all aging and it's one of life's greatest privileges, but how do we turn the table on aging so it's not something to fear, but it's actually an opportunity to embrace. What if aging meant extending the quality of our life and learning to sit comfortably in our older selves as naturally as we once did in our youth? I'm Jacinda Parsons and brought to you by Uniting Aetral, this is the aging ideal. Through honest and inspiring conversations, we'll cut through the noise to find out what it really means to grow older well. How would you describe being a man in 2026? I love being a man in this era of life, it's fantastic and just love time to do other things. Rolls to become more complex today, you become aware life begins to pass you by in many respects, there's something that I need to deal with. No one's responsible to me, it's a bit disenfranchising, I just do other activities like play golf and go to choir practice and things like that. What do you think of when you think of a man? Whether it's right or wrong from boyhood, the message is clear, your value is what you do, what you earn, what you build, how unshakable you appear. You might be expected to be the provider, the protector and the problem solver, and here's another P word, pressure, that's a lot of it. So when retirement comes, the family leaves the nest when the body slows or the mirror reflects someone unfamiliar, it can feel like more than just the expected change that aging brings. In this episode, we're exploring what happens when work, status or physical strength no longer define you. We'll have honest conversations about aging and masculinity, so what is a man's place in the world in his later years? These answers aren't mine to give, but they're questions we need to ask, because identity and later life isn't about what's lost, it's about what's left and what's waiting to be discovered. Professor Leon Flickr spent 25 years conducting the largest study of aging men in the Southern Hemisphere. When he said out on his quest, he had hoped his study would help develop a positive aging strategy for future generations. Professor Leon Flickr is the professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Western Australia and the executive director of the Western Australian Center for Health and Aging. Any joints, it's now welcome. Well, thank you, Jacinta. 25 years are you tired? It's been quite exciting along the way. What surprised you the most over that 25-year study of men? Not so surprising, but I've been thrilled to see so many older men doing very well. Obviously, there's been a lot of men who have passed, so these men started between the ages of 65 to 80 years, 25 years ago, nearly 30 years ago now. And so a lot of the men have passed away, but there's still quite a lot of men doing very well and very active. So when you say very well, I guess that's what we have to understand. What is it to be doing well as we age? We all want to live independent lives. We want to be mobile. We want our thinking to be good and not to be too disabled by any health issues. And the other thing that has become apparent for the older men is that they have something to get out of bed for in the morning. So they want to have meaning in their lives that continues. For a lot of men, it's volunteer work looking after their families, providing help to grandchildren to other members of their communities. And they find that being productive members of their community is something that they all aspire to. Do you think though that health challenges such as frailty and depression and cognitive decline affect the experience of what you describe as a good life? Men generally as they age stay much the same as they have previously in many ways. They still have often the same worldviews about most things. But the difference being in that as they age, they do have health problems to overcome. And these problems do impede their life, frailty, cognitive decline. And these things are things that are older men and older people generally know a lot about because they see it happen to friends and relatives as they age. Was there a particular age that you saw the biggest change happen with the men that you studied? I think that by the time you get past your 80s and 90s, I think you really have to accept that your things have changed in your life and that you have health issues which you have to deal with. And often men have come to terms with that. For a man to age well, what advice would you give them? Physical activity is very important and the most important thing is not to be sedentary. So it's the beginning bits of physical activity that are the most important. Turning yourself from sedentary to doing a bit every day. And then if you do a bit more, you get more benefits, but it's very important not to be sedentary. I think that the smoking rates have really decreased over the years, which is fantastic. The other thing that people do is having good nutrition. Protein intake is probably important as you grow older, so you should have more protein. The other thing that we found quite some time ago was that being underweight is a problem as you age and that being overweight is actually ideal. So not a decent, but to have a BMI of 26 which is slightly overweight is the best for surviving to older age. Wow, that's a bit of a surprise as me. This was, we found this in both men and women. We had a collaboration with the Australian longitudinal study of women's health. And we looked at men and women over the age of 70. And we found that both groups, the best body mass index was 26, a little bit between 26 and 26.5, which puts you slightly overweight. It puts you a bit overweight, but not certainly not in the obese category. People who have lower body weights, who's BMI, 22 and below, they're the ones who are at an increased risk of mortality. For older people, eating with somebody else is often quite important because people who lose weight generally eat alone and people who eat with others tend to eat a bit more. So all the simple things that we do in our lives can lead to a healthy, old age. At 71 years of age, Alex spends his time working with wood and maintaining his garden with his loyal pooch lolla by his side. During his working life, Alex was a motorbike riding police officer. While personally, he raised twins as a single dad. Hello, Alex. Good age, you think? When you look back at the man that you were in your 30s and 40s, are you very different to the man that you are now? In some ways similar, in other ways, chalk and cheese. I think when you go through various life experiences, they can't help change your worldview and will change in many ways. So after becoming a single parent, I remarried and my next wife died of cancer. And that was, well, anyone in that situation has some sense of the complexity and richness of that journey. Did it impact the way you saw the world as a man? The shift at that stage was becoming more of a metacognitive person. So understanding my own thoughts and feelings and reflecting on them and observing them. And that can't help but change your behaviour. You become a different person over time. And it's never ending. I mean, to this day, I still reflect in that way. I think what we were to hear was that men potentially have not been encouraged or taught to be self-reflective in the way that you describe. Would you agree with that? Was that your experience? Most definitely. I don't know if it just extends to men. I think people generally are poor reflecting on their behaviour and their actions. I hate to generalise, but I think men are probably a little less reflective and less conscious of how their emotions are guiding and influencing their behaviour. I'm interested in what you feel the perspective is from the outside of you as an older man now compared to how you were treated when you were younger. As much changed, we do hear that men find it really hard with identity, living work and those sorts of things and how they've regarded. How I perceived on change has changed significantly in my career, the academic field that I worked in. I had respect and it's fascinating because if someone says to me, "What do you do now?" And I said, "I'm retired." And I leave it at that. And normally, when you say that people leave, they're fall asleep or turn and their eyes close over. And I find that very useful. It qualifies people as if you can be bothered having an conversation. Wow, that's your. Isn't that funny? That's a little twist that's happening in that storyline there where it's actually. You're not interesting potentially for me to engage with because you don't understand the capacity of me beyond work. Yeah, yeah, and I can't. What have you got to give me? Yeah, I love it. That's really good. I'm interested too in the world and how you're perceived. Do you feel more invisible than perhaps you did when you were a younger man? I would say most definitely whether it's in a shop and someone serves you and they look away as they endure a receipt or whatever. There's this sort of distance or shield that comes up. I just find it interesting and boring when I'm using it too much. I want to hang out with you at a party and we can make some assessments. - Yes, sir. - We'll share our cheese ball. with. There are the men we all recognise, the disengaged grandfather, the angry letter writer, the one muttering about how things were better back in the day. And I'm talking about the so-called "grumpy old buggers". When journalist Jeff Hutchison retired, he was determined not to become one of them. And instead, he set up to explore why some Australian men seemed to harden with age. Moving on expert insight and his own lived experience, he's uncovered what aging men can do to stay engaged, connected and perhaps most importantly, less grumpy. You have to sort of realise one day, don't you? Like, am I going to go down the grumpy path, or am I going to resist it with all my might? Some men find it irresistible, which is dangerous. Some men just think that it's just going to happen. They've said it happened to Frank down the road, he left work, he's not as important as he once was, he's got all this time in his hands, he's out the front of 10 past seven in the morning, raking up seven leaves that fell overnight. And then at quarter past seven he's thinking, "What am I going to do today?" And then he goes and stands by the window, and waits for the council to come and fill the pot hole out the front of his house. And he stands there all day, and by the end of the day, his sister's wife, I still haven't bloody done it. She's heard this for the last five years, thinking, "My God, is this the man I married? And do I have to have another 10 or 15 years of it?" That's it, in a nutshell. When did you realize, though, that you thought, "Look, it's time to figure out why some men become grumpy as they age?" When I was a 12 year old boy, I was chopping wood, or our wood heater, and my dad came down the driveway in his PMG overalls, and I said to him, "I propose nothing. How are you, dad?" And he didn't answer. Because I was a kind of curious goofy kid who would later become a curious, goofy man, I said, "Are you happy, dad?" And he looked away for a moment, and then looked back at me and said, "No, not really." And then he walked off toward us tomatoes. I didn't think a lot about it at the time. Here's a great bloke, my dad, but he didn't have a very happy life, as I could see it. And I was getting to the age he was, and I was thinking, "This is interesting to me." So if you imagine, you leave work, you might have been defined by a work. It was the big thing in the expectation of your life, because that was how you were brought up. And then you get to the end of it, and no one is quite as interested in you as they used to be. The kids are moved out. And if you continue to do this, I think this or I think that, you might just start noticing. You might find that the grandkids don't come over for a sleepover anymore, and your wife doesn't tell you why. But it's because they might be scared of you, or because you don't engage with them. Or you seem angry all the time. Or your son doesn't come over for Friday night, for buddy and pizza, like you did for years. Because he's actually got a bit tired of you going on about the player's haircuts. The jokes you've been making for 10 years, they just get a little bit tedious, a bit long in the tooth. And sometimes I think blokes recognize this themselves. So they do go down the path that gets narrower and narrower, and a little bit sadder and a bit sadder. And I think that was my dad, and I'm now spending more and more time wanting to write even to a younger cohort to say it's okay for blokes to be vulnerable, and keeping secret sorrows and terrible experiences bottled up in our heads does not service well at all. I really love that you recognise that vulnerability in the older man potentially, and we don't frame it that way nearly enough, do we? Because even when we say the grumpy old man, we're sort of diminishing the real depth of complexity that this might be. And when we use that language, it's productive for everyone, including those going through it. I agree. And much as my publisher did a magnificent job with the book, I would have asked them to even take the word old out of the title because it plays into a stereotype. I got them to add a line that said, a bloke's guide to living a better life, just so it didn't look like some sort of comic attempt at teasing. We don't need to tease blokes anymore as they get older, but blokes also do have to understand the nature of change, and this idea of blokes will complain to us, you can't say anything anymore these days. Well, it's really an invitation to not be a dickhead and always has been an invitation to not be a dickhead towards other people. Was there anything that surprised you in your research that even in the positive way I suppose about how men are tackling aging and change? So I got this great feedback from people saying, I didn't know you were living inside my head. So that's a good bit because that tells me that I was reasonably in tune with how people think. Every time I got tanked a manious and I try not to, but I have a tendency to, I realize that I can't tell these blokes what to do. So all I said was I'll offer up a scenario. I would say things like, do you carry with you something in your head that you won't tell anyone about? That might have been something that happened to you as a kid 50 years ago or being uncomfortable about your sexuality, but you were a kid a long time ago and there was no opportunity for you to even consider what that might represent. And then I write things like, I'll leave it there for a moment, have a think. So I'm not intimidating blokes. And that thing is, as I say, you know, I do despair how defensive we get. And when I talk about that defensiveness to an audience, it is true just about every woman in that audience is just nodding their head furiously. That thing that my mum walked round on eggshells to ensure my dad was okay. That's not how it's meant to be. Let's say we've created this image of who this grumpy person is because we all know them. What if I was able to say to him, have you thought for a moment what it would be like to not have to be so strong all the time, not have to offer an opinion all the time, not have to be right all the time, not have to fit things all the time? Now I actually think blokes can't do many of those things, but we all brought up to believe that there's an expectation that you lift the bonnet of a car, new stand around with your hands on the hips and you've got some idea why it's not running smoothly. How would it feel to just be an observer and to not have the loudest voice in the room? Don't feel the need to comment endlessly about everything and about things that may not be that pertinent. All music today is rubbish. Don't listen to the music of today. But also don't get so sucked down this idea of nostalgia. This thing as you get older that all you might share is this nostalgic yearning for a time that didn't really exist the way you're remembering it, doesn't give you any opportunity to enjoy what might be happening now. We actually want all of us want to have a real understanding about the vulnerability that exists and that's why it's there, but also be part of the shift for men to feel much more as they should as they age. Yeah, I think we will get a bit of that. I mean, I'm not like my dad's generation, but I've also had a much easier life than my dad had. I think if we invite men to lean in and continue to think that their lives can be really interesting. You know, this is not to be defined by youth, work, retirement, misery, death. We're here for however long we're here for and as I am now at the age of 62, you know, I don't know how long I've got. I hope it's a long time, but what if it's not? What if it's two years or five years, or I choke on my crunch, you know, I call flakes tomorrow morning? Why wouldn't I want to have as good an experience as I can and as positive an experiences I can? So I think we need to help blocs think that when they get to 55 or whatever, that it's not over. Now I know ageism exists profoundly and it affects women profoundly too, but we need to encourage blokes to think that there are lots of happy times ahead and there are lots of things that men can still do to have very productive happy lives. There's lots you can do to be positive. You can have big role to play in the lives of your family members and your community. You don't have to be central to all of it. Wouldn't that be a relief? The last thing I'll say, because I still want people to read the book, but if you were to distill 280 something pages, it is go easy on yourself and go easy on the people around you. I think it's as simple as that. Stuart is someone who has worked to beat the grumpy label we just explored. At 78 years of age, Stuart is confident, curious and full of stories from a life well spent. What was the first moment you realised you were aging? I wouldn't say I realised I was aging, but I did realise life was still going on. I went to a Roger Woodward concert in Darwin. The music was pretty ordinary and every, he would play a piece, not a terribly long piece, maybe 15 minutes at the most. Then he would have to go off stage and ring his hands and you could sort of see him doing his finger exercises. And I said, yeah, I can understand that. I can understand what you're doing. I'm 72 and still working too. You keep going, I guess, if you have to. The body, there's markers that we hit though as we age that really can drastically transform the way we live our life. You actually worked until you were 72 and then retired. How was that transition going from someone who had done incredible work around the world as an academic working as an educator in graphic design to then the next day not being that anymore? One of the things that people me included say to people who are retiring and is you've got to have something to do and I never stopped being a designer either personally making wacko Christmas cards. or having exhibitions and I'm trying to get myself in retirement to be creative. What do you reckon have you discovered later in life that is that surprised you? Your sexuality changes. That seems to be a huge thing. Do you think that is a common experience? As people age. Yeah. Yeah, I do think that's like, yeah. In what way? I'd love to hear more about that. You get less proficient at it, let's say. But still, there are all sorts of things that you can do to be together and create each other and behave sexually that are going beyond the obvious form of sex interaction. Do you talk about that much with other men in your life? Not really, I don't think. I can't think of anybody that I would actually have talked about too. It's a common big experience. It's confronting, I imagine. Very, miss it. It's a thing we should be talking about far more. I would think because that transition as a sexual human is fundamentally. Yeah, but it's kind of inevitable. Matt Zernig is the co-founder of Spoke to a Block. It's a movement built on a simple idea that one honest conversation can clear ahead, change a path or even save a life. Matt joins us to explain why getting men talking has never been more important, hello, Matt. Hi. So good to have you join us. What made you realise just how important it is for men to open up and to talk to each other? Look, it all started back in 2021 when I just started a new job and my brother-in-law called me up and he was crying and he ran me up and said that one of our, his brother and one of my best mates who I've known since 13 had actually died by suicide. It was at that point that once we also sort of gathered ourselves and realised that we had no idea this was happening. You know, we're pretty tight bunch of guys and we had no idea that he was going through struggles. We had no idea how to communicate with him, how to ask him, he never approached us. So it was at that moment that we just went, well, guys are not real good at this. So many men seem to struggle with having that honest conversation about how they're really feeling. Look, I think it's back to the age old thing of just being embarrassed. They don't want to look weak in front of their friends, like if they've got a marital problem or if it's a financial problem, you know, they're not going to feel that they're being the man or looking after themselves properly. So I think it's more embarrassment, weakness and feel like a failure, really. I wonder, Matt, have you got any advice for anyone who's listening in right now and they've never opened up, but they know they need to? What's a good first small step to take? Yeah, we do get asked this a lot, like what to do. For guys, it's more not the how, it's more the where and the when, because guys like to do it, they like to talk side by side doing an activity. So your best thing is to get a mate or get a friend and just organise an activity, whether it's just going for a walk, whether it's going tennis, whatever it is, find yourself an activity and then just start and just start with something small and then that something small will grow into something bigger and you'll feel more comfortable and then you'll have the opportunity to actually talk to someone and to a friend and open up and you'll feel more comfortable. The side by side doing an activity, the side by side gives you an opportunity where it's non-confintational. It's good advice and it's a good way just to kick off, you know. It doesn't have to be enormous declarations of inside life, but just even small things can make a huge difference. If people want to know more information about the events that you run, where do they go? You can just get away with it, so I'll just type in "Spo Talk Live". From speaking with all our incredible guests in this episode, I really have learnt that being a man in later life is best approach through adaptation, reinvention and the pursuit of new sources of meaning. Being a man in your later years isn't about holding on to old roles or outdated ideals. It's actually about embracing who you are today and who you still have the opportunity to become. You've been listening to the Aging Ideal, a podcast brought to you by Uniting Agewell. We hope that you've really enjoyed the stories, the perspective and expert advice on the experience of aging. I'm looking forward to continuing this important conversation next episode.