Introduction
In official speeches about health, development, and social policies, it’s common to find references to “population aging” as one of the big challenges of the 21st century. Behind this formulation lies a discourse marked by the dominant medical logic.
While science and society celebrate advances that have allowed people to live longer, the word “longevidad” rarely appears in technical documents or government messages. Instead, “aging” is preferred, usually in negative terms such as burden, dependence, and costs. This communicative choice carries a conceptual, political, and cultural position.
The Dominant Discourse on Aging
Aging has been inscribed within a biologicist interpretation, but it wasn’t always conceived as a defined stage of life’s course. The dominant discourse often perceives it as an inevitable functional decline, loss of abilities, and increased exposure to diseases. This view has been further reinforced by the dominance of the biomedical model, which conceives health as the absence of pathology and specializes in diagnosing, classifying, and treating deficits.
From this logic, aging is medicalized: it becomes a disease in itself. Even a healthy older person is considered potentially ill.
Introducing Longevity Changes the Narrative
Introducing longevidad shifts the focus. Instead of concentrating on what has been lost, it invites us to observe what has been preserved, transformed, or even acquired over the years. It introduces concepts like vital variability, biographical trajectory, accumulated experience, and social adaptation capacity.
Most importantly, it forces us to ask difficult questions: what conditions make it possible to live longer and better? And why isn’t this possibility equitably distributed?
Longevity: An Uncomfortable Concept for Technocratic Discourse
Longevidad becomes an uncomfortable concept for technocratic discourse because:
- It reveals structural inequality (who reaches old age, who doesn’t, and under what conditions);
- It challenges the health model centered on curative and specialized care;
- It requires sustained public policies, not ad-hoc interventions.
Aging and Longevity Operate on Two Levels
Both aging and longevity operate on two levels, and distinguishing them can enrich communication and policies. Naming this distinction helps avoid communication errors and proposes different actions.
- For the individual: self-care, support networks, protective environments;
- For society: investment in public health, social justice, and equitable environments.
Implications for Public Policies
Planning for an “aging” population should not be confused with a “longevity” society. This semantic contrast reveals two competing political horizons: one focused on managing the effects of deterioration, and another aimed at realizing dignified and equitable life trajectories.
If aging is still considered detrimental to health, the organized social response will focus on managing more hospitals, medications, and specialists. However, if we talk about longevity as a right, the focus should be different. The interest would shift towards redesigining the health system with a geriatric, inclusive, and community focus; creating environments friendly to older adults and valuing the contributions of older adults to society.
It’s worth noting that the notion of “healthy aging” was adopted by the WHO in 2015 as an evolution from the previous concept of “active aging,” promoted since 2002. At the time, active aging represented a significant advance over assistentialist and passive models of old age by proposing a vision centered on participation, health, and security for older adults.
However, over time, this notion has shown limitations as it tended to idealize autonomous and functional trajectories without sufficiently considering structural inequalities, diversity of capabilities, or environmental conditions.
In response to these limitations, the concept of healthy aging incorporated a more complex perspective by recognizing that an older adult’s functional capacity depends both on their individual conditions and the physical, social, and economic environment in which they live. However, in today’s context marked by deep-seated inequalities accumulated throughout life, this notion again proves limited for guiding transformative policies. It requires complementation—or even substitution—by frameworks that recognize longevity as a right, not an individual responsibility for aging well.
Two Projects of a Contested Society
In the realm of symbolic power, as Pierre Bourdieu would say, language is not just a reflection of reality but also an instrument of domination. Naming classifies, and classifying distributes power.
In this sense, the terms “aging” and “longevity” may be part of a dispute where different actors try to impose their worldview.
Michel Foucault considers that official discourses are not just linguistic expressions but produce effects of truth in collective imagination. In the case of aging, the medical and demographic discourse has succeeded in institutionalizing a vision associating time’s passage with deterioration and deficit. The concept of population aging operates as a scientific but also disciplinary category, allowing the regulation of bodies, allocation of resources, and definition of priorities.
From this perspective, what is observed today is a functional semantic asymmetry to the established order. Aging imposes itself as a legitimate, technical, measurable, institutional term that naturalizes fragility. In contrast, longevity appears as a peripheral word, rarely present in official reports.
Its use forces one to think about rights and quality of life. The dispute over language is not minor, between aging and longevity, there are two society projects in conflict. One based on containing deterioration; the other promoting full and dignified lives until the end of one’s life course.
The way we name social and biological processes conditions how we understand, manage, and value them. Talking about longevity is not just a matter of optimism; it’s an ethical and political stance. It implies recognizing that living longer should not be a threat, but a collective conquest, provided it’s accompanied by rights, care, and justice.
To achieve this, it’s necessary to dismantle the medical discourse’s monopoly on aging, open the debate to other knowledges—like critical gerontology, feminist economics of care, sexuality after 60, senior citizen social movements—and construct a new narrative: one that doesn’t fear old age but embraces it as a full part of life.
Disputing language is not a minor academic exercise. It’s a way to intervene in reality. Naming longevity as a right opens an ethical and political horizon that challenges the structures making not everyone have equal chances of reaching old age or living it with dignity. Ultimately, we’re not just discussing words; we’re choosing the kind of society we want to build.
*The author is a Tenured Professor in the Department of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, UNAM, and an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Health Measurement, University of Washington.
*The opinions expressed in this article do not represent the position of the institutions where the author works.
[email protected]; [email protected]; @DrRafaelLozano
