We septuagenarians are the happiest and freest generation

How do you stay connected? In your seventies, you don’t have to do something if you don’t want to. You don’t have to try to impress people, writes Hamish McRae

There are many afflictions of age but for most of us, there are also huge freedoms (Getty/The Independent)

How do septuagenarians communicate? No jokes please. We are a diverse bunch, maybe more diverse than any other age group, in that we vary enormously in our health, whether we are still working or not, and – though this is harder to demonstrate – our attitudes to technology.

So it is an instance of the quip attributed to Mark Twain that “all generalisations are false, including this one”.

One generalisation is that modern communications have not only been a huge blessing to us during the pandemic, but things that we were forced to learn have now stuck. As a result, the seventies age group has become much better at using FaceTime, WhatsApp or whatever, than we were three years ago. In turn, this means, whether it be for work or our private lives, we are a much better-connected group than we were – even if we have to find a teenager to set the stuff up for us.

A second generalisation is that the technologies are even more useful to people with mobility issues than those without. If you can’t get out of the flat because the lift is broken, at least you can talk to your family and friends – and in one case I know about, see your grandchildren. And you can do it for free.

That leads to the third generalisation: cost. Many 70-somethings are on incomes that have failed to keep pace with inflation, and have little or no prospect of earning anything additional. So they worry about money. The fact that there is no marginal cost of making a WhatsApp call means that this is one area of their life where they don’t have to count the pennies, unlike phone calls that can eat into even decent incomes. If family and friends are abroad, the benefit is all the greater.

If there are three common features, there are also three very different ones. First, a huge amount depends on whether people are still working. I am still writing aged 79, and that is unusual. But if you look at over-65s, there has been a surge in employment happening right now. The Office for National Statistics keeps track of this and the most recent numbers show that in the April to June quarter, the number of people in work aged 65 or over rose by a record 173,000 to 1,468,000 on the previous quarter.

I can’t find a breakdown of how many of these over-65s are also over 70, but there must be a fair number. I suspect that the fact that people can work from home now has been one driver of the growth, as well as the need to top up a pension, but this would not explain that one of the fastest-growing sectors for the over-65s has been the hospitality industry. You can’t do that from a laptop or a home office.

For myself, working mostly from home, everything is very straightforward. It is email and Google, just as it would be in the office. But we vary. Most of my younger colleagues have very active social media set-ups. John Rentoul, our chief political commentator, has a brilliant Twitter feed – he wrote about it yesterday in this series – but I don’t have much activity in this area, though my articles go out on Twitter and other platforms.

Instead, I go to people whose judgement I trust and who express those judgements clearly. This probably is an age thing. I was already well into my 60s when Facebook was open to general users, and was in my middle-70s when TikTok took off.

True, many people in their 70s use Facebook, but not many use TikTok. I suspect my attitude is typical of my age group who are still at work. We only use the technologies that help us directly to get things done.

What about communications and leisure or social life? That is the second area where we are, as an age group, all very different. Some of us love using the various platforms, with my own preference being WhatsApp, because it’s so flexible. We have lots of WhatsApp groups, from family ones, which are great, through to ones for friends that we are on a skiing holiday with to coordinate our plans, including vital issues such as where we are meeting for lunch.

But other friends simply use WhatsApp as a free and superior phone service, particularly for international calls. They won’t switch on the video because they don’t want people to see how they look – something that lots of us can relate to. There are hardly any nuisance calls, the bane of many older people’s lives, and you can usually see a picture of who is calling and decide whether you want to answer or not.

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That leads to a further affliction for the elderly. For many of us, the level of nuisance calls on the landline has gotten to such a stage that at home they go directly to voicemail. Alas, many older people get conned into giving away personal information, with the dreadful consequences we all read about.

The third area where we are all different is that some of us want to keep up to date with everything – the news, the markets, social trends, views of the young and so on – while others really couldn’t care less. There are many afflictions of age but for most of us, there are also huge freedoms. You don’t have to do something if you don’t want to. You don’t have to try to impress people – and probably couldn’t anyway. You are what you are. So if you don’t want to communicate with other people, you don’t have to. If you do, there are all the brilliant new technologies available to let you do so.

That leads to a final point. Happiness is U-shaped. There has been a massive amount of work on how happy people are over the life cycle – there is a good summary here – and they all seem to agree that young children are usually happy, but that declines through to the mid-thirties and forties before climbing as people move to their sixties and seventies.

Actually, it seems the happiest decade is the seventies, before health and mobility problems intrude. A cheering thought in these glum times.

Our series – Generation Gap – explores how different generations stay connected. See the rest of the series here