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Age and society's view of it.

  
 
Grey Area
15:08 / 27.07.02
The other day, I was out window shopping, and I noticed an elderly couple looking into the window of a jewelers, holding hands with bright smiles on their faces. Listening in to their conversation, it was like listening to a young, recently engaged couple, full of jokes and laughter. What struck me was my reaction...I was stunned to see old people acting this way. Got me thinking about the way we see the elderly in this modern day and age, and whether these attitudes have changed from the way they were (if they were ever different).

The way I see it, these days old people are only grudingly accepted in society, as long as they stay in the background and we only see them as grey shadows scurrying along the street, not making eye contact, hardly ever smiling. We know them only as that group of society that you never hear about unless they're having trouble paying for heating bills in winter or getting free bus passes. As a whole, we have dismissed the elderly as a part of society whose use has long since past and whom we grudingly support. Think about it: When was the last time you conciously noticed an old person?

Why is this? Is it true? And has this attitude evolved in modern (20th/21st century times or was it always this way? Are the young people of this age too caught up in being young to notice those who came before?

(Note: "Elderly" in this case means 65+ years of age)
 
 
Panda
23:12 / 27.07.02
Old people scare me.

I don't know, I freak myself out when I think about it. There'll come a time when I'll be way past my prime, if I don't get hit by a bus first.

I went to see my grandmother in a nursing home a few weeks ago. She's wheelchair bound after two strokes. She's all frail and bony and shit. But then again she's eighty and another woman in the home who was apparently 95 seemed to still be in posession of a full set of marbles. But she could have been lying about her age. You know what old people are like - thieving chickens by hiding them under their hats and all that.

This hasn't been very helpful has it?

I think old people do get a raw deal. But it's as if they've reached the age where they've realised they can't do much about in anyway, or they've given up trying. Plus, things become a lot more difficult for them to counter, what with the mental and physical duress of getting old.

That's why old people scare me.
 
 
Ganesh
00:07 / 28.07.02
I assume our attitude to old people has arisen because, in western society, we tend to place an implicit value on people according to their physical attractiveness, perceived productivity and, by extension, their income. The majority of elderly don't score massively highly in any of these areas, and tend to slip under the radar.

I tend to get the "stunned" response too, when I meet someone old who confounds these expectations and reminds me that, to paraphrase ol' Jarv, one day they were just like me. That moment of shocked recognition goes double when they talk about feeling sexually driven - still something of a social taboo.

Examples: a sixtysomething patient of mine who was a minor player in literary circles in the 1960s. When I visit her in her West London upper-floor flat (and former studio), she's surrounded by a life's accumulation of artworks, photographs, mementoes... and it's like talking to some faded icon from another era. She's maintained the attitudes of the 'Love Generation' but laments the fact that she can't find a gentleman friend her own age (the younger ones, she tells me, have a certain "chemical" attraction but bore her). She reminds me of Edith from 'The Invisibles'.

I'm also good friends with a seventy-year-old ex-theatre director and designer of the perviest bondage gear you can imagine. His particular fetishes have always veered toward the wilder fringes of sexual desire, and he's a mine of fascinating anecdotes about SM homosexuality pre-decriminalisation. He seems to have met everyone from John Osborne to Salvador Dali, but is frustratingly discreet about their sex lives.

I think we're guilty of forcing the elderly into 'mainstream' categories, assuming their lives have (give or take the odd war or two) followed an average job-marriage-kids-retirement-grandkids course, with sex, drugs and rock & roll falling away after the age of, ooh, forty-odd. We're guilty of stereotyping, forgetting that human nature is weirder, more convoluted than that...
 
 
SMS
02:32 / 28.07.02
UNWRITTEN KNOWLEDGE by JARED DIAMOND, NATURE March 29, 2001
Excerpt:
Jared Diamond is in the Physiology Department, University of California Medical School, Los Angeles, California 90095-1751, USA.
Preliterate societies depend on the wise words of the older generations. Thanks to modern science and public health, most women Nature readers will live to experience menopause. About half the journal's readers of both sexes will experience their eightieth birthday, and many will reach their nineties. But severe social problems await our elderly - and also their middle-aged offspring, who must care for aged parents and young children simultaneously. The root of those problems is that modern society has no productive role for old people: they are considered useless, and both they and their caretakers know it. How did we get into this miserable situation?
It is often claimed that old age and menopause are artefacts of improved modern living conditions: that few women used to reach the age of menopause, and few individuals of either sex survived to 60. I believe instead that menopause and old age have been human hallmarks for a long time. Together with our large brain and upright posture, they played a decisive role in human evolution. > My views are based on my observations of dozens of human societies in New Guinea, many of them only recently contacted, living largely traditional lifestyles, and receiving little or no medical care. In every village, I encounter many people in their fifties (as estimated by their memories of datable events), and some in their seventies and eighties. The condition of these old people differs greatly from that of aged Westerners in three respects.
 
 
SMS
02:45 / 28.07.02
How would people here feel about a sexual relationship between two mature adults with considerable difference in age.

Is
"old enough to be her father,"
or "old enough to be his mother,"
or "old enough to be hir parent"
a bad thing?
 
 
Ganesh
03:04 / 28.07.02
Technically speaking, ZoCher's just about old enough to be my father, and we have no problems with it. It's a Good Thing.
 
 
Shortfatdyke
07:44 / 28.07.02
should i start by saying that i've had involvements with two women who were considerably younger than me - 12 years and 13 years my junior. one i used to wait outside school for (she was a sixth former - over the age of consent), which got me sniggers and derogatory remarks from people and suspicious looks from the teachers, but both women remain important parts of my life.

i work with older people a lot: activists working to improve pensions. some of them are real old style unionists with decades of experience and wisdom and some of them are more radical than an awful lot of younger people. there are also increasing numbers of older people who are doing amazing things with their retirement, travelling the world. i've learnt a lot and i respect older age - this is perhaps why i have no problem with getting older myself. i've mentioned a woman called rowena cade on other parts of the board - she was still working to complete the wonderful minack theatre in cornwall in her eighties, i believe, and was being taken around the site in a wheelbarrow.

i don't fear old age. i am constantly working on myself to improve the incurable health problems i have already, so i am very conscious of my own frailty. and, perhaps more importantly, i am doing as many of the things i really want to do, right now. when i get older, i don't intend to have any regrets.

but i think there is little respect for older people, in this country certainly, which needs to change from the top down - the government needs to start paying decent pensions. while the tories were responsible for breaking the link between pension increases and the better of the RPI (prices) and the IAE (earnings), to link increases only with prices - which has been the lowest of the two for a long time, therefore cheating pensioners out of a decent pension - the labour party haven't restored it.
 
 
alas
06:25 / 30.07.02
I was struck by the phrase:
Preliterate societies depend on the wise words of the older generations.

Rather than focusing on the government, I'm interested in thinking about the cultural function older people served and how the notion of wisdom has been replaced by "knowledge" pretty much and that we don't get from "elders" but from, well, the journal NATURE, university, Microsoft training, the internet etc.

Are we a society without a need for "wisdom"? Is wisdom just a nostalgic word for "old wives' tales" (yipes! gender police!) or "the crap your parents believe but thank god you grew out of it"?

I read in NO LOGO that the "age of aspiration" targeted by advertisers and popular culture is 17. No wonder I feel alienated; couldn't pay me to be 17.

(Truth in advertising: I have a silver hair fetish--I think people whose hair turns silver grey, especially if it's a little premature, are just gorgeous. . . )
 
 
Fist of Fun
07:13 / 30.07.02
How would people here feel about a sexual relationship between two mature adults with considerable difference in age.

Is "old enough to be her father," or "old enough to be his mother,"
or "old enough to be hir parent" a bad thing?

Right - My father was 69 when he had me, and when he died at 94 I was 25. My mother was something like 30 when she had me. They had a loving, caring relationship and, having met her friends from the old days, I can see 100% why she chose him over any of them.

My father was a solicitor, specialising in real property (i.e. land law - not exactly non-brainy work). He retired at 70, got bored within a week and went back to work. He proceeded to repeat this action at 75 and 80 (albeit slowing down as he went on), finally retiring fully at 85 and even then it was only because the insurance policies had got too expensive to justify with his gradually diminishing work load.

He wasn't perfect by any means, but he was a superb father and a good man, more liberal than most of my peers and more concerned about the future of the human race and the planet than most people today even when it was clear he had no personal interest in it. When he and my mother had their first child (my sister) in 1969 and she started getting spooked by the nucleur arms race, worrying about what sort of world she'd brought a child into (not mentioning my father's role, I had to notice) he started Lawyers Against the Bomb. I mean, the man was 66 at the time - when most people have retired!

So with this background I have one reaction when I see old people:
Big furry deal.
Sure, they get frailer and can do less physically, but so what? A lot of them can still do more than most couch potatoes today, and have a lot more to offer than most teenagers today (myself included when I was that age). And sure, mental facilities do diminish in many cases - but given how stupid many young people are without any impact on their lives, so what?

My only problem is I do tend to be a bit fascistic when I see old people moaning about lack of respect / activities / things to do. The difficulty is - I keep comparing them to my father and I know that not everybody can do that. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't try and it sure as hell doesn't mean we shouldn't give them the chance.
 
 
Fist of Fun
07:21 / 30.07.02
but i think there is little respect for older people, in this country certainly, which needs to change from the top down - the government needs to start paying decent pensions. while the tories were responsible for breaking the link between pension increases and the better of the RPI (prices) and the IAE (earnings), to link increases only with prices - which has been the lowest of the two for a long time, therefore cheating pensioners out of a decent pension - the labour party haven't restored it. sfd

Alright, I'm a lawyer specialising in (amongst a couple of other things) pensions. Here's the problem:
(i) Yes, pensions should be linked to earnings, rather than the RPI - otherwise there is a relative decrease in the purchase power. There are also difficulties with the RPI staying low due to the decrease in price of luxuries or new technology, whilst the price of basics (which is what most pensions will be spent on) increase at a higher rate.
(ii) However, there is a real problem with pensions generally. They were set up when the average life expectancy was in the 60's, so anybody who lived into their 70's was an exception and society could afford to pay them a good pension. This simply is not the case anymore. The population is increasing in age, with a reducing birthrate - the result is a demographic timebomb, where a reducing working population is being forced to pay for the retirement of the generation above it whilst the capital is increasingly retained by that very generation. Not only is this inequitable, it's impossible to maintain.

The only answers are:
(i) reduce the pension
(ii) increase the age of retirement.
Given that (i) has been taken about as far as possible without the pensioners starving, (ii) is going to have to be exercised. The unions are spitting blood about it at the moment and usually I side with them on pension matters, but I simply cannot see any alternative to this course.

The answer, I suspect, may be the kick that results in a change in attitude to the "old". If you regularly see people working aged 70 (and, hey, judges do, so why not everybody else?) then it's a bit more likely that you will see something in common between them and you, and assume that they have value to society and you.
 
 
alas
21:37 / 01.08.02
The only answers are:
(i) reduce the pension
(ii) increase the age of retirement.

What about option
iii) Tax the FUCK out of the wealthiest 2% of the population, especially multinational corporations and their CEOs, on a world-wide, global basis, ideally. Oh, and make inheritance illegal.

Heh, heh.
 
 
Gibreel
04:02 / 02.08.02
Wisdom vs. Knowledge...

Isn't this partly a function of the switch from an agarian to an industrialised society?

In a relatively static agricultural society what matters is local knowledge about plants, animals, soil, climate, etc. This takes years to build up and thus those that are old are considered wise because they have the years of experience necessary to successfully grow crops.

In an industrialised society, what counts is the ability to develop and deploy new skills centred around technological developments. Hence flexibility is highlighted and "old" knowledge is viewed as outdated.

This is obviously a massive simplification. As Fists of Fun's post indicates, people over 40 can still be dynamic and flexible in their learning.

I agree with FoF about contact with the elderly in working environments being important. And how about contacts between the elderly and school children. Should/would retired people like to have some role in schools?
 
 
ShadowRain
05:20 / 02.08.02
What defines getting old or being aged? Society and societal perceptions. Why is it strange to see someone above 'retirement' age working? As FoF mentioned, if it would become a common occurance then it wouldn't be such an issue.

My father (himself rapidly heading for 'retirement') has an interesting theory regarding age and getting old. In a nutshell, it boils down to the fact that people get old, because society expects them to, 'programmes' them to get old. We are bombarded with images of elderly people being frail and sickly. On a subconscious level, doesn't this programme us (as a younger generation) to expect to be frail and sickly when we get older and reach retirement age? The mind is a funny thing ... if I were to believe that retirement spells the end of a productive life, I will unconsciously live that way when I retire. If society didn't insist on an official retirement age, how many older people would still be having productive, rich lives? It's a vicious circle: people are forced to retire at a specific age, they feel useless to society as a whole, they become demotivated, which means that they do less and have less to offer to society, which reinforces the feelings of being useless.

I'm generalising, there are exceptions to this. But as a whole it is something that I've seen first hand.

Society tends to see older people as a burden; they end up being neglected or marginalised. So do we as society respect them ... no. Do we as society see them as viable contributors ... no. Is this necessarily true ... no.

A tale of a 'young' person - I used to rent a parking space from an elderly lady (about 85 years old). She was bubbly, outgoing and an absolute joy to be around. She had a zest for life that many younger people never had. Her secret? She decided that she would do everything in her 'retirement' that she never got around to doing while she was younger. She travels the world on her own, flirts with the young men and in general, has one hell of a time. She decided that she would not sit in her little flat and get old.

Myabe it's a question of attitude. She decided not to let retirement change anything. Maybe society as a whole needs to learn that 'retirement' does not necessarily mean the end of a productive, full life.

In the end, we need to start reprogramming our perceptions with regards to elderly people. If we don't, we'll just perpetuate the lie and become trapped as well.
 
 
Cherry Bomb
08:58 / 02.08.02
Interesting, interesting topic... will have to ruminate on to answer fully...

But this has me thinking about my great-aunt, who, at 90, is sharp as a tack and very humorous and fun to be around. She once said to me that one of things she has notices about being old is that she can say anything she wants, because people are afraid to contradict her or just think, "silly old bat" because she is so old.

More (with relevancy I promise!) later.
 
 
Grey Area
09:44 / 02.08.02
I find myself agreeing with ShadowRain's idea that we're programmed with images of being old and then subconciously drift into emulating these ideals when we reach that age. I'd say this programming also affects the way we view the elderly.

So where did this ideal come from? My theory would be that it stems from the establishment of the concept of retirement at a set age, rather than at a point decided upon by the person themselves. In modern society, when you hit the big 65 you're labelled as "retired" and drop from the subset of useful people into that faceless mass of old people. As examples posted here prove, this loss of ability to contribute to society isn't at all the case for a number of individuals, but I would say that they have a great deal of trouble getting society as a whole to accept the fact that they don't want to stop.

So what is to be done? Someone here suggested bringing elderly people into schools...in itself not a bad idea. I think a fair number of us have had contact with vivacious elderly people in our lives, and have come away with a different idea of age and growing old.

I also think that the commonly accepted connotations held by society with regard to retirement need to be re-evaluated. And not in a corny, "oldest-swinger-in-town"-type way. In the long run, that type of approach does the image more harm than good (imho).
 
 
ShadowRain
06:06 / 05.08.02
A quick note on retirement age : In South Africa, the mandatory retirement age is 55, not 65. Which means that a larger percentage of the population are forced into 'retirement'.

My father is a Rotarian and his club has a project going, to help retired people get back into the swing of things, by offering them guidance and the opportunity to start as small business from home, selling their stuff at flea markets and such.

Although this is a good cause, I still feel that this isn't enough, as most people don't have the energy to start something from scratch at such a time in their lives.

This is a difficult one ... society needs to change, but such changes always take years before a tangible benefit is felt. What about the problem at this moment?
 
 
some guy
16:16 / 05.08.02
What's the likelihood of a shift in thinking about the elderly in the near future when the baby boomers start to realize, "Hey, that's us you're trying to push aside?"

Could Ruth Fischer be the first effort in a potential new wave of "mature actives" introduced into the culture?
 
 
Turk
04:01 / 06.08.02
Bah. As with all 'minorities', when it comes to the elderly, those of us who are in our prime and not particularly in any 'special group' honestly don't care so long as they're not being murdered or raped or whatever, and don't impede on our glorious path to something frivilous and tacky.
Attitudes might have changed, but nowadays you could probably pick any social group that faces problems, the old, Asians, teenagers, gays, Welsh people, and we'll rather have indepth discussions about David Beckham instead. It's because generally we aren't them.
 
 
Shortfatdyke
08:36 / 06.08.02
d - yes, but we will all become them, i.e. older. you would think self-interest would play more of a part here!

an immediate change in attitude could be made, i think, if pensions were higher, if older people were seen to have a decent standard of living in general. successive governments in britain have treated pensioners as basically a thorn in their side and a waste of resources, so why should anyone else care about them? my happiest memory from my early school years was after we had a harvest festival one year, boxed up the stuff we'd collected, and took it around to the local older people. it made a big impression on me and i really wish we'd had older people come into our school - infant and secondary - to talk about their lives. i think that kind of thing can benefit us all - young kids will learn some fascinating personal histories and the older people will see that kids are nothing to be afraid of.

who was it said that a civilised society can be measured in the way it treats its older people? older age is perceived to be something to fear - not surprising, given the level of pensioner poverty. or ridicule, instead of having the respect that their experience should earn.
 
 
Turk
18:17 / 06.08.02
"d - yes, but we will all become them, i.e. older. you would think self-interest would play more of a part here!"

True, but in assuming people have the foresight to consider that fact I think we're probably trusting a little too much in the intelligence of the dopey general public. Old people just aren't us.
 
  
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