Читать книгу Aging - Harry R. Moody - Страница 44

How do patterns of leisure activity change over the life course? Broadly speaking, people ages 65 and older continue to engage in the same activities with the same people as they did in middle age. Although there is some selective age-related withdrawal, active engagement remains a key to life satisfaction and positive meaning in later life. In addition, participation in intellectual and political leisure activities may have protective benefits for cognition during later life (Kareholt et al., 2010).

Leisure is not simply what we do with “leftover” time, but a multidimensional quality of life.

istockphoto.com/Saturated

Social structures, not age itself, determine the uses of time in later life. According to surveys of time use, as people age, they spend varying proportions of time in paid work, family care, personal care, and free time. Most of the variation comes from a decrease in time spent working, not from any demonstrable effects of aging. People who are still in the labor force after age 65 have time use patterns similar to those of younger people. Retirement frees up time—findings from the 2018 American Time Use Survey indicate that people 75 years of age and older engage on average in 7.8 hours of leisure time daily, more than any other age group (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019a). After taking into account household labor, most of this gain in time is taken up by watching TV, reading, relaxing and thinking, and socializing. Some leisure activities decline with age, but others remain the same. A study of leisure found that the number of people starting new activities does diminish as we get older (Iso, Jackson, & Dunn, 1994). In addition, certain activities show a marked decline in participation rates: For example, moviegoing drops from 38% in midlife to 17% after age 65. Involvement in indoor fitness shows a decline, and travel diminishes significantly among people over age 75. Other activities, such as outdoor gardening, show only modest declines, and still others, such as TV viewing, watching sports, and engaging in informal discussion, show no age-related decline at all. Church participation and community activities tend to be maintained. Age-related declines appear to come partly from barriers to physical exertion or access. Activities based in the home, such as reading or socializing with familiar people, remain strong until well into advanced old age. However, we must keep in mind that subgroups among older adults display markedly different patterns. For instance, the young-old can generally be categorized as the active-old, a group of increasing interest to advertisers and marketers (Furlong, 2007). Also, there may be variations in the leisure time pursuits of older adults in different minority groups (for example, the rate of church participation).

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.