five - Conclusion: ethics, insight and wisdom in intergenerational life-course construction

Summary

Developing meaning in life, carried out in styles of everyday activity as often as in conscious deliberation, is part and parcel of operating within social institutions, groups and practices; but it is core to the human condition. Major contemporary gerontologists, from Cole and Moody to Phillipson, point, like Frankl, Erikson and Elder before them, to a crisis in meaning, one that affects the way in which lifecourses in general can be understood. The fact that people’s understandings of themselves and their lives are intertwined with their social contexts does not make them determined by those contexts, but it does make them vulnerable to them. Not least, for writers like Cole and Moody, economistic understandings of the human lifetime have drained the profundity from ageing. The excessive individualism these positions and policies entail is a symptom of a ‘war on old age’; without a fundamental reorientation of attitudes to what it is to age, efforts to defend older people or make their life-courses intelligible cannot succeed (Cole, 1992: 181). Thus Moulaert and Biggs (2013) raise the alarm when they note that even in official documents of world organisations supporting older people, references to wisdom and experience are giving way to the assumption that self-sufficiency and independence – not least, financial independence – should be core to defining life-course aims.

Accentuating what gerontological work counterposes to these developments, this book began to explore different aspects of meaning attributed to the world by older people in its texts. Michele Dillon offers evidence of various types of purposefulness with which older people struggle, with absorption and often with pleasure, to determine what is important in their lives. This follows on from work like that of the Eriksons, who see all stages of individuals’ lives as marked by the ways they cope with moral and personal challenges, and who show a lively appreciation of the vivacity with which older people embark on their activities; or from Frankl’s, whose experiences of life in a concentration camp taught him that retaining hold of meaning can be literally a matter of life or death. For Glen Elder, individuals’ development as people, the way they respond to challenges and crises, is key to his work.