An aunt of mine came to stay with me in Bangkok a few years ago. She was seventy-six, sharp as a tack, and I had the visit planned like a small military operation. Driver on call. Good restaurants. A massage every afternoon. Nothing for her to do but sit in the breeze and be looked after.
By day three she was quietly miserable and I could not work out why.
On day four I came home to find her on the kitchen floor with a screwdriver, tightening the legs of a dining chair that had wobbled for about a year. She was delighted. Genuinely lit up, in a way the massages never managed. Same woman, same holiday, one difference: somebody in that flat finally needed something from her.
I filed it away as a quirk. Then I started reading the research on wellbeing in old age, and it turns out she was not a quirk. She was the finding.
The question that predicted who was still alive
In the MacArthur Study of Successful Aging, researchers asked adults aged seventy to seventy-nine a deceptively boring question: how useful do you feel to your friends and family? Then they followed them for seven years.
People who said they rarely or never felt useful were more likely to become disabled or to die than those who often felt useful, and that held after the researchers accounted for age, income, physical health, health behaviour and a stack of psychological factors. A later analysis of the same group found that those whose sense of usefulness stayed low, or slid down to low, carried a substantially higher risk of dying over the following nine years.
Read that again. Not “reported lower life satisfaction.” Died sooner.
Worth being honest about the limits. This is correlational. Feeling useless might be a symptom of decline as much as a cause of it. But the pattern keeps turning up, and it points somewhere uncomfortable.
Psychologists call it mattering
The idea goes back to 1981, when Morris Rosenberg and B.C. McCullough described mattering as the sense of being significant to other people. They broke it into parts. People notice you. People think you are important. And people rely on you, meaning they actually need you for something.
Isaac Prilleltensky, who has probably done more than anyone to map the concept, splits it into two halves: feeling valued and adding value. Being cared for, and being of use. Both are required. They sound like the same thing and they behave completely differently.
Here is the part that stopped me. Love, attention and money handle the first half beautifully. A well-run family can flood an older person with being valued. Adding value is the half nobody can gift you. Somebody has to hand you the screwdriver.
Reviews of mattering in later life keep landing on the same worry: as people age, the machinery that used to generate their significance gets dismantled, and low mattering tracks closely with depression and loneliness.
We take it away out of kindness
Nobody strips a person of their usefulness on purpose. We do it one thoughtful decision at a time.
She shouldn’t be carrying that. Let me handle the money, you’ve earned a rest. Don’t cook, we’ll order in. Maybe give the driving a miss, the roads are terrible.
Every one of those is reasonable. Some are necessary. Stack them up over eight years and you have built a person who is adored and consulted about nothing.
I did a version of this in my own business, back when I still had restaurants to run. A prep cook in his sixties, years with me, and I quietly moved him off the brutal weekend shifts because I thought I was being decent. He came to see me a fortnight later and asked to be put back on. I heard it as pride. It wasn’t. I had retired him without asking, and he could feel exactly what was happening.
Giving does more for you than getting
One study has lived in my head since I read it. Researchers tracked older married adults for five years, comparing the effects of giving support against receiving it. Giving practical help to friends, relatives and neighbours predicted lower mortality, as did giving emotional support to a spouse. Receiving support showed no such benefit once giving was taken into account.
Which is awkward, because in most families with an older parent, support flows almost entirely one direction. We optimise hard for the half that does less.
Ask for something you actually need
The practical fix is smaller than you would think. Ask for real help. Not a job invented to keep someone busy, because people can smell a made-up task from across a room and it insults them twice over. Real help. The recipe you cannot get right. The letter you need translated. The decision you are stuck on, where their forty years beats your Google search.
Then report back. “That thing you told me worked” is a full sentence, and it does more than an afternoon of compliments.
My family gets this wrong constantly and so do I. It is much easier to send money than to admit you need advice.
Build yours before you need it
I am nowhere near seventy, so file the rest under early warning.
When I sold my restaurants during the pandemic, the phone went quiet inside a fortnight. No supplier chasing an order. Nobody needing a decision by four o’clock. I had time, a bit of money and a beautiful view, and I felt like furniture. It took me an embarrassingly long time to name the feeling, and it was not grief for the business. Nothing depended on me any more.
That was a preview, and I took the hint. Now I keep a handful of relationships where I am load-bearing. Things that wobble if I stop showing up. Not because I am indispensable, but because being relied upon appears to be doing something quiet and important to a person’s health.
The chair is still in my flat, by the way. Still steady. She asks about it on nearly every call, always with the same faint note of ownership, and I suspect it did more for her than the rest of that holiday combined.