Patterns of late-life leisure have important implications for the economy in an aging society. Americans over the age of 50 offer a huge and growing market for business. They command more than half of all discretionary income and account for 40% of consumer demand. Older consumers are quite heterogeneous, varying by family status, ethnicity, education, geography, and social class. As we will discuss in Controversy 12 on the new aging marketplace, the “gray market” is stratified by age. The young-old are much more likely to be interested in travel than the old-old. Old-age leisure is often advertised as a consumption good or a status symbol, but leisure is also a means of affirming one’s identity, a vital dimension of our phenomenological life world at a time when other roles may be lost. Leisure time activities, then, are an important part of our personal world of meaning and also part of a shared horizon of socioeconomic transactions that shape the meaning of leisure over the entire life course.
Explaining Patterns of Leisure
A study of activity patterns in old age sheds interesting light on different theories of aging, such as activity theory, disengagement theory, and continuity theory (Toepoel, 2013). The Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging found that most Ontario residents ages 45 to 85 engage in familiar activities and maintain stable activity patterns, as continuity theory would predict (Singleton, Forbes, & Agwani, 1993). However, the Canadian study also found that education and income are big factors. Retired people who have more choices because they have more resources are also likely to change their patterns of activity more often.
We also find some support for the idea of disengagement as people age, but not as a global generalization or stereotype. Disengagement, in other words, is not a universal pattern, but is highly selective, an example of selective optimization with compensation (Baltes & Baltes, 1990). As long as leisure activities remain accessible, people will go on doing what they find worthwhile and meaningful as long as they can. When physical impairments impose obstacles, most people adapt to optimize whatever resources they still have. Most people do not simply disengage altogether from meaningful activities.
Other explanations for the decline in leisure participation can also be found. For a segment of the older population with limited income, travel or cultural activities may be economically out of reach, perhaps an example of how social inequality accumulates over the life course and affects outcomes in later life (Ferraro & Shippee, 2009). But those with limited income may pursue activities outside the marketplace, for example, informal socializing with others. Another cause for constricted activity is declining health or age-related decline in vision, which might limit participation in fitness or sporting activities as well as driving. Even among those who remain healthy, loss of companions for leisure activities can be a limiting factor. As a result, decline in leisure, as we might expect, is most severe among the oldest-old.
In conclusion, it is important to note here that recent Pew Research Center data suggest that older adults spend, on average, half of their waking hours alone, not including time spent on personal care (Livingston, 2019). As such, participation in leisure activities may be an important buffer between older adults and loneliness and isolation.
Religion and Spirituality
According to recently published Gallup data, 72% of U.S. adults consider religion to be important in their lives; 50% are affiliated with a church, mosque, or synagogue; and 38% attend services weekly (Brenan, 2018b; Jones, 2019). It is worth noting that each of these figures has shown a declining trend over the past two decades, consistent with findings from the Pew Research Center that Americans are becoming less religious. Interestingly, 90% of older adults surveyed for the 2012 Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project indicated that they are “religiously affiliated.” For comparison, 67% of adults ages 18 to 29 report being “religiously affiliated,” perhaps an example of a cohort difference. On the one hand, it seems natural to expect that interest in religion might increase with advancing age given the association of old age with increased mortality. On the other hand, the continuity theory of aging reminds us that, as people age, they tend to maintain earlier patterns of practice and belief.
But religion is more complicated than responses to a poll or attending a worship service might indicate. To understand the role of religion, we need to distinguish formal religious behavior from subjective attitudes toward religion, what we might call an inner attitude of spirituality. Across many different dimensions, religion and spirituality continue to play vital roles in the lives of older adults and help them find meaning in later life (Atchley, 2009).
Religious Involvement Over the Life Course
Religious involvement in old age displays a pattern that some investigators have called multidimensional disengagement. What this means is that as people grow older, they may withdraw from some activities, such as attending church, but at the same time show an increase in personal religious practice, such as Bible study or listening to religious TV and radio. The number of people who report praying “once a day” or “several times a day” increases steadily from age 55 to the highest levels among those over 75. By contrast, other empirical studies show declining frequency of church attendance after age 75, perhaps reflecting frailty and physical limitations among the old-old. Older people seem to disengage from some organized religious roles, but make up for this loss by intensifying their nonorganizational religious involvement—for example, personal prayer, meditation, and other forms of spiritual practice.
Self-reported data from Gallup (2015) about religious affiliation of adults of all ages reveal the following: 38% identify as Protestant, 23% as Catholic, 9% as “unaffiliated” Christian, and 2% as Jewish. A smaller but increasing number of people living in the United States identify as Muslim. In 2017, Muslims of all ages made up 1.1% of the U.S. population. This represents 3.4 million people, 2.15 million of whom were adults (Mohamed, 2018). Interestingly, the same survey shows that the percentage of religiously “unaffiliated” persons is increasing. This compares to long-standing data suggesting that as they grow older, Americans continue to display patterns of religious identification similar to those among younger age groups: 65% identify as Protestant, 25% as Catholic, and 3% as Jewish (Pew Research Center, 2012a). In terms of the percentage of adults in the United States identifying as Muslim, 4% are age 65 or older (Cox & Jones, 2017). According to ongoing Gallup surveys, older women tend to have higher levels of religious participation and belief than do older men. Although survey data vary, it seems that, overall, anywhere from 30% to 60% of all older adults attend religious services at least once a week, and attendance tends to be positively related to measures of personal adjustment. When we look at church attendance from a life course perspective, we see the influence of family structure. Parents with young children often get involved in church activities, but after middle age, attendance falls off.
Despite these variations, older people are still more likely to be involved with their church, synagogue, or mosque than with other kinds of community organizations. Among mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches, as well as Jewish synagogues, a large proportion of the congregation is over age 50. Adults ages 65 and older are twice as likely to attend religious services regularly as those under 30. But it