Resilient or stubborn? Pre-boomers coping better in time of pandemic

Studies show the older a person is, the less impact the pandemic is having on them. Why?

Judi Lipp, 71, at her home at a retirement village at Windsor Hills in Sydney. Picture: John Feder

Seventy-one year old librarian and archivist Judi Lipp could be speaking for her generation when she sums up how she is managing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Yes, I miss having the freedom to do whatever I want, whenever I want, but I’ve surprised myself with how well I’ve adapted to all this,” she says.

A widow of 14 years, Lipp falls just inside the baby boomer cohort, much closer to the 75-plus pre-boomers than the oldest of the Gen-Xers, who are 55. She says she feels “pretty much the same now physically and mentally as before” the pandemic despite dealing with some chronic health challenges including diabetes.

She continues to work four days a week for a disability service provider, as she has for the past 25 years, and now that her Sydney retirement community’s pool is back up and running after a COVID closure, she can again find her “place of meditation”.

“I’m privileged to be drawing an income in work that I love and that has continued during the pandemic, so I have no angst financially,” she tells Inquirer.

Lipp’s “just get on with it” approach is being replicated across Australia, with new research revealing that it is the nation’s oldest who are least fazed about our increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

Oldest are least fazed

Overall the survey of more than 5000 people aged 50 and older finds 90 per cent feel they have adapted well to the COVID crisis. But a deeper dive finds that pre-boomers are more likely than baby boomers or Generation X to be chugging along feeling pretty much the same emotionally and physically as before COVID-19.

While Lipp has curtailed most outside activity and contact with friends and family to protect her health, she has taken to theatre and virtual music concerts on streaming services, and has joined online cooking and book clubs. She regularly tunes into Jimmy Barnes’s Facebook page for his isolation sets.

“I have practised aloneness for quite a long time due to my personal situation and I’m quite practised at it and quite used to it. But if this pandemic drags on and I sense I’m tipping into loneliness then I’ll develop strategies to deal with that,” she says.

Commissioned by the Australian Seniors insurance company, the survey finds three in every four people aged 75 and older say the isolation and social distancing during the crisis has had no impact on their mental health.

But for the 50 to 54-year-old Gen Xers captured by the survey the results are more disparate, with just under half feeling unchanged mentally, 37 per cent rating their mental health worse and 13 per cent saying it is better than pre-COVID.

Nearly 30 per cent of these Gen Xers also rate their physical health worse now than before COVID-19, with just under 20 per cent saying it is better and around half saying it hasn’t changed. Compare that with the over-75s, where 70 per cent consider themselves unchanged.

And on a range of other questions about their levels of activity during the COVID crisis, such as time spent exercising or amount of food being consumed, a significantly higher proportion of pre-boomers than the younger cohort of Gen X Australians say they simply haven’t changed.

It was the same when the issue of loneliness was raised. Boomers sit in the middle across all these questions, clearly indicating that the older a person is, the less impact the pandemic is having.

Resilient or stubborn?

Why? Is it simply because people are more set in their ways as they get older? Or is it more nuanced, and attention should be focused less on how well those in their 70s and older are doing and more on what’s behind the volatility among those in their 50s and 60s?

As Australia hits midwinter, four months since the borders were closed, whole industries were shut off and working from home became the norm, it is beyond trite to say there are twin impacts of the COVID pandemic, health and economic. Those in their 70s and older are at greater physical risk if they catch the disease. But it is a concern that can be controlled to a large degree by their social behaviour, including how rigorously they undertake social distancing and isolation.

While they will understandably have financial concerns about the impact of the crisis, they are more likely to be managing their money at this stage of their lives rather than earning it through work. More than 94 per cent of the 75 and older cohort in the survey said they weren’t working. And they are unlikely to have dependants still living with them. For Australians in their 70s this is a health crisis first and foremost.

The scales are tipped more the other way for those in their 50s and early 60s. They will be looking at the daily coronavirus case count with an eye to their own health and susceptibility to catching the disease, but they will be counting the cost to the economy even more carefully. Many will have lost their jobs as a result of COVID (16.9 per cent of the 50 to 54-year-olds in the survey), or lost hours of work, or feel precarious in their position, with sometimes more than a decade of working life still to run.

Even if their job is safe, planning for retirement is compromised by the falls in property values and super balances. Some will be making up the spare room to host adult children forced to move home after losing jobs in the hospitality or tourism industry.

Yvonne Wells, professor of aged care research and policy development at La Trobe University, says the report makes it clear that coronavirus is making life more turbulent for people in their 50s than it is for those in their 70s and older.

“The impacts on Generation X are clearly more diverse than the impacts on the older generation,” Wells says. “What we know from other research is that life events in general have less impact on older generations. As we become more mature we develop coping strategies and we tend to be less unsettled when things change.”

Council on the Ageing chief executive Ian Yates agrees. “This accords with the evidence we have gathered through the council that a significant proportion of older people seem to be coping with the lockdown better than younger cohorts. They are often more experienced at living alone, and they simply know themselves better.

“And putting it simply, they’ve been through more. It’s not uncommon for us to hear people say: ‘I’ve been through a few crises in my time and this is just another one.’ 

“What they tend to worry about more is not themselves but how their children and grandchildren will manage through the pandemic, both from a health and a financial perspective.”

John Allan, president of the Royal Australia and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, says the difference between the generations is the difference between reflection and aspiration.

“By your mid-70s you are in a reflective stage. You know you’ve been through a lot and you just want to enjoy the balance of your life, to make the most of it no matter the circumstances,” Allan says.

“But if you are in your 50s and reviewing your life you realise your window to pursue your dreams of success is closing, and you have to act. Then this comes along, out of nowhere, and that chance may be gone.

“At that time of our life we are expecting life to move through phases, and this changes those expectations, which leads to much more anxiety.

“For older Australians, they have already passed through those phases and their aspirations are simpler, time with friends or the grandkids and so on.”

Able to adapt

Overall there is no doubt that older Australians are travelling pretty well, COVID crisis or no COVID crisis.

Another survey published earlier this month of more than 10,000 Australians, taken for the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety but conducted pre-COVID, found more than 90 per cent of over-70s consider themselves healthy and 85 per cent believe they are capable of doing anything they want to do. Again younger people are the party-poopers, with fewer than 70 per cent expecting to be healthy and able to look after themselves in retirement.

Together the two pieces of research paint a picture not of intransigence but of in-built resilience amid a turbulent time.

“What strikes me is the great adaptability seniors have shown in the face of the coronavirus restrictions,” Wells says. “Many have developed new hobbies and most have made efforts to stay connected with family and friends. This is convincing evidence to counter ageist stereotypes of older people as unable to change.”

Lipp is unstintingly positive but she doesn’t pretend COVID is all beer and skittles. “I have a very close friend and we’d normally do about 50 things a year together — theatre, concerts, lunches — and none of that is happening at the moment, so I really miss that.”

She perks up quickly as she rattles through her COVID era online discoveries — including The Reservoir Room at the Paddington Town Hall (Rodger Corser is a favourite). She’s looking forward to tuning in to Todd McKenney at the Riverside Theatre Parramatta on Sunday.

But it’s her online book club, The Secret Life of Authors, that intrigues. “We recently read The Secret Life of Shirley Sullivan, about an older lady who kidnaps her 83-year-old husband from his nursing home and whisks him off for a last adventure. I enjoyed it immensely.”