Introduction: the roles of meaning in (later) life

Summary

It might seem difficult to deny that meaning in life is important, in later life not least – and perhaps most. But it is surprisingly seldom discussed directly. While meaning does feature in important ways in work on ageing and older people, in everyday life it is more often implicitly than explicitly treated as significant. Much of what older people have to offer is tacitly suppressed by exclusionary practices that frame meaning for older people, and the meaning of older people to their societies, as trivial. This book begins, first by exploring positive approaches that gerontologists take in relation to older people and meaning, particularly in cultural and humanistic fields, then by dealing with some of the ways in which attention to meaning is made difficult in everyday life. Ignoring the importance of meaning in relation to ageing is in many ways the most exclusionary habit of all; if the ways that older people see things and what they have to say do not matter, then little else in connection with them does either and they, with all that later life has to offer, cannot effectively be defended. In effect this is a practice with substantial political implications; implying that the world of work is all that should matter in human lives, it devalues the lifecourse for everyone.

This book therefore analyses in detail some of the key ways in which meaning is treated in gerontology, tracing a range of approaches to talking about meaning that highlight its significance and that of older people’s insights and behaviour. This underscores varieties of meaning from commitments to connectedness of different kinds, through meaning related specifically to time and generational meaning, to ethical meaning and grappling with the human condition. Characteristically, these are partly implicit, but not the less key to their holders’ lives for that, an importance too often played down or ignored. Most of these are more difficult to perceive if the field confines itself to individualscale data, so we examine methodological approaches to meaning that aim to respond to the partly social nature of its production and practice. Searching for further discursive resources for resisting the denigration of older age, we recall that older people in the past might be thought of in terms of their potential for wisdom.