Getting old

The question is: when do we enter old age? Nowadays the word “old age” is no longer fashionable, since everyone thinks to remain young forever. Besides terminology, it’s difficult to give an answer, it is normally said that the so called “third age” starts at 65, other people will say amenities such as “the years are the ones that you feel” or “the ones you look” and so on.

It’s a fact that our fathers and grandfathers were getting old earlier, it’s enough to look at old family pictures: according to that, I suggest that we could consider the age threshold when the person exceeds the life expectancy he had at the time of birth.

For instance, Italian females born in 1947 had a life expectancy at birth of 64 years, then we could assume that they start to get old at 64 years about, it makes sense; for males born in 1947 the corresponding  figure was 62 years,  however I cannot tell if the previous years of war may have made this figure  less significant.

The thing become more complicated if we refer to earlier time, when life expectancy at birth was maybe 30 years or less: were they really starting to get old at 30? Something to think about it.