The assumption goes roughly like this: the people who spend their later years teaching, mentoring, parenting well, and contributing to those who will outlive them are the ones who got there with enough — enough money, enough health, enough emotional equilibrium to turn outward rather than inward.
A study published in December 2024 in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B tested this assumption at scale — and found it largely wrong.
What the model was actually looking at
Researcher Mohsen Joshanloo at Keimyung University applied a random forest machine learning algorithm to data from the third wave of the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) survey, a nationally representative longitudinal dataset. After excluding participants with excessive missing data, the final sample comprised 2,830 adults between the ages of 39 and 93 — people at every stage of the arc from middle age to late old age.
The model tested more than 60 variables spanning personality traits, socioeconomic status, physical health, daily functioning, spirituality, and psychological wellbeing, asking a single question: which of these actually predicts who scores highly on generativity — that is, who actively concerns themselves with contributing to the lives of the generations that follow?
What got eliminated
Income was removed before the final model ran — identified by the feature selection process as adding too little predictive value to retain. So were chronic health conditions, BMI, medications, and — perhaps most counterintuitively — emotional stability. So was life satisfaction. So was depressed affect. The variables most associated in popular imagination with the capacity to give to others turned out to carry very little predictive weight once the full range of factors was accounted for.
This is not a minor footnote. These are the variables that tend to anchor policy discussions about aging, wellbeing interventions, and what we think “successful aging” requires. The model assigned them negligible predictive weight.
What actually predicted generativity
The strongest predictors were: social potency — the desire to influence, lead, and engage with others; openness to experience; social integration; personal growth; and achievement orientation. The top performers in every case were what the researchers classify as eudaimonic and plasticity-related variables: qualities associated with exploration, growth, and outward engagement rather than stability, comfort, or satisfaction with what already exists.
The distinction the researchers draw is between two different orientations to life. One is homeostatic — oriented toward equilibrium, toward maintaining what you have, toward managing rather than reaching. The other is exploratory — oriented toward growth, novelty, and contact with the world beyond the self. The data suggests that generativity belongs firmly in the second category. It is a product of still being in motion, not of having arrived somewhere comfortable.
What this reframes
The finding has an uncomfortable implication for how wellbeing tends to be framed in the context of aging. Much of the discourse around successful later life centres on preservation: maintaining health, maintaining financial security, maintaining emotional calm. But if they are treated as prerequisites for the capacity to give, the model says they are not.
Generativity, it turns out, is less a gift of stability than a disposition — one that looks more like curiosity and social engagement than like contentment. The people most likely to spend old age genuinely contributing to the next generation are not necessarily the most comfortable. They are the most open.
Erikson described generativity as emerging in the tension between the impulse to create and sustain versus stagnation — the contraction into self-absorption that can accompany later life if the outward impulse is lost. What this dataset suggests is that the variables protecting against stagnation are not the obvious ones. They are not the material ones, or even the emotional ones in the conventional sense. They are the ones that keep a person oriented toward growth and toward others — qualities that, notably, do not require any particular level of income or health to exist.
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