one - Lifecourses, insight and meaning

Summary

This book explores an approach to ageing in terms of a central concern to human beings as they live through their lifetimes: how they create meaning and insight in their lives, and what meaning both they, and ageing itself, have to others. The importance of meaning in ageing has long been a concern in the study of older people and intergenerational relations. Even if this concern is often expressed obliquely, it is stressed explicitly in such works as I Don’t Feel Old, by Thompson et al (1990); Chris Phillipson (1998) terms it central to critical gerontology; the idea of meaning is central to the work of gerontologists including Dannefer (with Kelly-Moore, 2009: 405), Cole, Ray and Kastenbaum (2010) or Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs (2013). Pat Thane’s work on ageing (2005) highlights the various meanings ascribed to later life for those who experience it, as well as for people who do not yet see themselves as old; psychologists such as Peter Coleman (2011) regard the transmission of meaning and value as central both to older people themselves and to what others expect from older age. This book explores this debate, trying to become clearer about what creating and perceiving ‘meaning’ in later life really imply. It interrogates the ways in which issues surrounding meaning impact not only on how we look at ageing and conceptualise older people, but also on intergenerational relations.

The study of ageing by gerontologists, people concentrating specifically on that topic, is, Andrew Achenbaum reminds us (1995), relatively new: it has developed since the end of the Second World War. This timing has not been without its consequences for the study of meaning. As Achenbaum also points out, the early days of gerontology occurred at a time of disillusionment with political debate and political idealism; science, in comparison, seemed to offer a more reliable path to progress in tackling major problems faced by humanity. But ‘science’ is always envisaged in terms of the culture of the time, its application envisaged within a social and political context that affects how it is understood. The right-wing movements of the 1930s had imagined science to reveal laws of genetics that could transform the health and purity of the human race; in the post-war period, new views of science were constructed, with their own effects on how older people were seen.