“At 70 you are still a child, at 80 you are a young man, and if at 90 someone from heaven comes to you with an invitation, say, ‘Wait until I turn 100.'” This saying is extremely popular in Okinawa: for local residents, crossing the hundred–year threshold is a common thing. Attempts by scientists to “shift responsibility” for the long life of the islanders only on their diet failed: Residents of other regions of Japan adhere to a similar diet, but they rarely celebrate their centenary. So, perhaps the point is that living to be a hundred years old is the norm for Okinawans, while most people consider themselves doomed to grow old and die by the age of 70-80? Can attitudes prevalent in a particular society affect health status and life expectancy?

Human behavior is largely determined by the cultural norms of the society in which he lives. Throughout life, it is the laws formed by society that determine what is right and what is wrong. In one culture, cannibalism, polygamy, and the destruction of the weak are considered the norm, while in another, all this is unacceptable. The need for social approval, the desire to be rated “right”, “good”, “successful” have a huge impact on the thoughts and actions of each member. A sense of social success is an important condition for life satisfaction, but a sense of rejection and rejection by society leads to depression and disappointment. However, most of us don’t realize how much our decisions are driven by social influence. Although it is under their influence that we choose what to wear, what to eat for breakfast, where to go on vacation, and even make key decisions such as choosing a profession, friends, and a life partner. Social psychology studies these mechanisms. Its task is to discover the full variety of connections that connect each person with other members of society. Representatives of this discipline analyze both the impact of public opinion on a particular person and the formation of global stereotypes that affect representatives of a particular culture as a whole. Despite the multifaceted influence of society on our thoughts and behavior, there are aspects that are key to our lives. Among them is the impact of society on our ideas about whether old age can be healthy and productive and what is the maximum life expectancy of a person.

The apparent rationality of behavior (we can all explain after the fact why we did this or that act) often hides motives and beliefs that a person does not even realize. Almost half a century ago, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet established that the brain regions responsible for making certain decisions are activated even before a person realizes the fact of making a decision. These experiments, which questioned the very fact that humans have free will, showed that the brain makes many decisions “without consulting” consciousness. But what does our brain rely on when making decisions? Firstly, based on our own previous experience: that is why we often cannot get out of a vicious circle and repeat the same actions over and over again. And secondly, these are beliefs that have come to us from society.: through their prism, we look at both the world around us and ourselves.

When we have a belief (including under the influence of prevailing opinions in society), for example, that old age is always accompanied by illness, we begin to behave in such a way as to confirm this belief. As a result, our ideas are gradually turning into immutable facts. This effect, described by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton, is called a self-fulfilling or self-fulfilling prophecy. The idea of self-fulfilling prophecy was developed by Merton from Thomas’ theorem, which has become a classic in sociology, which states: “If a person defines a situation as real, it is real in its consequences.” According to Merton, at the initial stage we are dealing with a “false definition of the situation”, which provokes certain behavior, as a result of which the initially false idea becomes true. How does this mechanism work when it comes to aging? Scientists from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg observed elderly people (65 years and older) for six months, some of whom perceived aging positively as a new stage of life, and some in a negative way. It turned out that people who are optimistic about aging are less likely to get sick, and if the disease develops, their reserves are quickly “activated”, allowing them to recover faster and return to normal life. Also, the positive participants generally led a healthy lifestyle, as they were confident in its benefits. For those who perceived aging in a negative way, compensatory mechanisms did not “work” well when they encountered the disease, they recovered more slowly. Similar results were obtained in another study: scientists from Yale University observed a group of 600 elderly people (50-87 years old at the start of the study) for 23 years in order to determine how attitudes regarding aging affect the risk of death from respiratory diseases. It turned out that older people who perceived aging positively were much less likely to suffer from respiratory infections and die from them than those with negative attitudes.

Each person has his own image of old age, which he brings to life according to the principle of self-fulfilling prophecy. So why does it depend on whether we perceive aging as a difficult time with inevitable illnesses and a sad ending, or as a new stage of a fulfilling life that opens up new opportunities? The perception of aging is influenced by many factors, such as personal experience. So, if there were centenarians in the family who remained healthy and active until the end of their lives, it is easier to create a positive image of aging than in situations where there is experience in observing elderly people suffering from diseases and passing away early. But besides personal experience, the sociocultural context plays a major role in the perception of aging — the image of aging formed in a particular culture. The attitude towards aging in our society is largely due to the emergence of such a field of medicine as gerontology — it is specifically engaged in studying the causes and finding treatment strategies for diseases that appear with age. However, gerontology has also contributed to the negative aspect of the perception of aging, leading to the “biomedicalization” of this phenomenon. Gerontologists focus on describing disorders and diseases that occur during aging, rather than on the body’s potential to prevent and overcome these problems. As a result, adulthood begins to be interpreted not from the standpoint of opportunities, but through determining the degree of ill health. As a result, an elderly person is perceived at best (by medicine, society, and gradually by his own consciousness) as a “probabilistic patient” — if there are no manifestations of diseases, they will certainly occur. Thus, in modern society, an equal sign is placed between old age (old age) and diseases. This makes people perceive aging as a negative condition that has the most undesirable effect on a person’s quality of life — their physical well-being and social role.

There is a problem that the human mind refuses to work with and which, in fact, the scientific world ignores. It’s about the inevitability of death. Each of us knows that we are mortal, but only theoretically, without real awareness. Most people try so hard to avoid thoughts of death that in the end it becomes the main driving force of life. The anthropologist Ernest Becker, in his book Denial of Death (Pulitzer Prize in Journalism in 1974), puts forward the theory that denial of death is the basic mechanism of functioning of both an individual and social institutions, and underlies the creation of both personal and public “projects of immortality.” The American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton in his book “The Broken Bond: on Death and the Continuity of life” described five ways in which a person tries to achieve symbolic immortality:

• Biological — the creation of an endless chain of biological connection through the birth of children;
• Theological — belief in life after death, the continuation of life on another plane of existence;
• Creative — a person continues to live in his creations, preserving the opportunity to influence the personalities of other people even after death.;
• Participating in the energy cycle in nature — we don’t go anywhere, because our bodies serve as a source of energy for other living beings.;
• The path of “losing oneself” is an intense experience of the current moment, accompanied by the loss of a sense of time, a feeling of “eternal being in the here and now.”

The collapse of the “immortality projects” in personal terms leads to depression, crises, and a sense of loss of the meaning of life. Thus, although avoiding thoughts of death and creating psychological protection in the form of one or another illusion of immortality help to avoid depression and maintain mental health, this does not contribute to a real solution to the problem. Because thanks to these illusions, a person refuses responsibility for his life on the physical plane, not paying due attention to lifestyle correction and abandoning habits that lead to its shortening.

Today, scientists are focusing on finding remedies for diseases, and to an immeasurably lesser extent on working on ways to actually increase life expectancy and slow down the pace of aging. Neither global public organizations, including the WHO (World Health Organization) and the United Nations, nor pharmaceutical magnates who sponsor research, set themselves the task of combating aging. And even more so, they are not looking for ways to radically prolong life while maintaining maximum productivity. One of the most important reasons is the exploitation of the fear of death to create social “projects of immortality” specific to each culture, such as religions and the concept of heroism, which helps a person feel part of a sacred process, an “eternal movement” in which the death of the body does not play a significant role. For example, in Soviet times, people felt like they were part of a great movement, and their lives were a contribution to the happiness of future generations. Such phenomena as wars, genocide, and nationalism are caused by conflicts between various “projects of immortality”: the very existence of a foreign system (religion, ideology, etc.) declaring its “conditions of eternal life” calls into question “our immortality”, destroys the “heroic picture of the world”, and therefore must be destroyed. Thus, cultural and religious “projects of immortality” are a kind of “social glue” that holds various public institutions together. It is not surprising that the latter are not interested in debunking illusions and turning the fear of death into a driving force of science and medicine.

Our vision of our own old age and our attitude towards death is the sum of personal experience and a multitude of social attitudes, most of which are not even realized. All of them are “taken into account” by the brain when constructing a personal picture of the world, when forming attitudes that often turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. That is why it is so important to “monitor” these attitudes and the patterns underlying their formation, both personal and social. Only a conscious attitude will allow us not to be led by society, which suggests that aging is inevitably accompanied by diseases, and a significant prolongation of life and, moreover, physical immortality is impossible. On the contrary, it is worthwhile to work purposefully on your beliefs, be inspired by the examples of centenarians (for example, residents of Okinawa), and study information that allows you to understand how powerful nature has provided our body with resources. So, it is proved that our heart is designed for 150 years of life. There have also been recent studies confirming the importance of epigenetic (“supra-genetic”) mechanisms such as nutrition, sports, and mindset in the realization of information encoded in DNA at the physical level. As a person “downloads” such information into his consciousness, the brain takes it into service and creates a new “scenario” of self-fulfilling prophecy, including a long life and a healthy, productive maturity. It is very important to get rid of the scenarios of “immortality” — personal and socially conditioned. By fueling illusions, we give up a powerful motivation, which can be awareness of our mortality. As the American psychotherapist Irwin Yalom writes in the book “Existential Psychotherapy”: “… Life and death are interdependent: physically death destroys us, but the idea of death saves us. The consciousness of death sharpens the sense of life and radically changes the way we look at it; it gives us an impetus to move from a mode of existence based on distractions, reassurances and minor worries to a more authentic one.”