Читать книгу Aging - Harry R. Moody - Страница 40

We can think of the stages of life as a kind of map of unknown territory through which we must travel. Until recently, some regions of that territory, such as the midlife transition, were completely unmapped and unacknowledged. Other regions, such as adolescence, have been delineated or cultivated only in the past century, although now they seem familiar and predictable. The symbolism of life stages was once easily understood in societies where a map was thought to depict a common geographic or social space that was stable and enduring, the same for each generation. This familiar ideal of life stages reappears in popular forms of lifespan developmental psychology, such as the theories of Erikson and Levinson. The ideal seems to correspond to a fundamental and universal fact about human psychology: the need to define the predictability of life. Now, however, some observers are coming to call into question this whole approach to the life course. Perhaps the metaphor of a map is mistaken.

Today, at the end of the second decade of the 21^st century, we no longer have confidence in a shared timetable for the course of life. The timing of major life events has become less and less predictable at all levels of society. As a result, we may need a new map of life corresponding to the changed conditions of demographic circumstances, economics, and culture in a postindustrial, global society (Laslett, 1991; Phillipson, 2003).

The meaning of aging has changed in contradictory ways. Optimists believe that medicine will soon permit us to displace aging-related disease and decline until later and later in the life course, a pattern known as compression of morbidity. Yet economic forces seem to move in the opposite direction from biology as some individuals accumulate financial assets during a lifetime of working.

To overcome limitations of the previous map of life, we need to develop bolder ideas about the positive social contributions that can be made by older people; we also need to think more deeply about the meaning of life’s final stage. Without such new understanding, there is a risk that older people may be dismissed as “uncreative” or that people will lose any shared sense of the positive meaning from survival into old age. Successful aging in the future will involve new ways of tapping the creative potential of later life in support of a long, bright future in years to come (Carstensen, 2011).

Creativity and wisdom depend on cognitive development over the life course. Whether our society cultivates such qualities among older people will depend, in the end, on creating more imaginative policies and institutions. The challenge of an aging society in the 21^st century is to nurture the special strengths that develop as we age in an environment that prizes change, novelty, and flexibility. That challenge is what is ultimately at stake in debates about the meaning of the last stage of life (Bateson, 2011; Roszak, 1998).