Читать книгу Aging - Harry R. Moody - Страница 39

As long as there have been old people, there has been ambivalence about old age. The psychological basis for ambivalence is understandable. Why shouldn’t people feel uncertain dread at the prospect of vulnerable old age stretching before them? In contrast, why shouldn’t they look forward to a time when it seems possible to finally drop the burdens of coping with the complications of life? We see the same ambivalence today, but the truth is different from what popular images often convey. Old age in our day cannot easily be characterized. Especially in early old age, just past retirement, most people remain active and capable despite their removal from economically productive roles. Inevitably, the human body declines and dies, but normally, even in middle and late old age, humans retain more capabilities than they are often given credit for.

Industrialization brought growing rationalization and bureaucratization of the life course, a greater rigidity that took the shape of stronger demarcations between youth and adulthood and between adulthood and old age. At the same time, rapid developments in medical science and cultural values have begun to erode the concept of distinctive life stages. With rising longevity, more people are living to old age, and older adults as a group are becoming a larger, more influential proportion of the total population. Today, because the entire life course is changing, the meaning of old age is ambiguous.

The problem of understanding what it means to be old in postindustrial society can be compared with a parallel problem in the biology of aging: Why does physical aging occur? There seems to be no reason for organisms to live much past the age of reproduction. Old age, in short, should not exist. Yet human beings do live long past the period of fertility; indeed, human beings are among the longest-living mammals on earth. But the challenge is not just to discover why we live so long—or even how to allow people to live longer. It is to understand how we can make the final phase of the life course more meaningful—for our elders and, eventually, for our future older selves.