Age and Agony
I have seen the agony of ageing first hand, but I have never experienced it myself. I recall a time where I held someone’s hand as they cried about coming to terms with the fact that they will die soon, or the first time I saw a dead patient lying behind the curtains on a ward. Dying due to old age appears to invoke a type of existential dread in the elderly that is not replicated in the young. It is a slow burn, a yearning for yesteryear.
Ageing is a tough thing to understand not only for the elderly, but also for those interested in what it means to ‘age’. As an observer I am ignorant to the lived experiences of the observed. The acknowledgement of this ignorance is important when discussing ageing as a phenomenological experience, or in other words the ways in which ‘elderly people’ perceive and understand ageing from a subjective first person perspective.
“It’s all life, until death”
— Grace Paley
Ageing, Science and the Use for Phenomenology
The word ‘geri-’ comes from the Greek word gēras, which means old age. Evidently the fields of geriatrics and gerontology are concerned with the elderly, but there are key differences.
Gerontology is the scientific study of ageing. This is broadly categorised into three main areas of research: the physiology of ageing (what is happening to the body), the psychology of ageing, and the social/economic effects of an increasing elderly population. Geriatrics on the other hand is the group of medical doctors concerned with diagnosing, treating and preventing ailments that affect older adults. So, where does phenomenology fit in?
Michael Bavidge says that “philosophy takes its stand at the point where our experience meets the world. It does not concentrate just on giving expression to experience, nor does it focus exclusively on explanation of events. It finds its problems at the intersection of those concerns”. Simply put, phenomenology can help describe how people experience ageing.
Ageing and Living
The people I love will age and die, and the same will happen to me. This is a cruel fact of life. Modern ideas around death and ageing are quite bleak. Old age is something that is imposed upon us, and we are then condemned to a life of reduced function and enjoyment. Counter to this Bavidge argues that viewing old age through the lens of ‘inevitability’ is an unnecessarily negative view. He says that a more positive way to look at living in old age is to recognise the different ways one can engage in life that don’t require ‘youth’. Whether it is listening to music, interacting with animals or engaging with community there are many things that can bring meaning for older adults.
“Growing, ripening, ageing, dying — the passing of time is predestined, inevitable”
— Simone de Beauvoir
The Language of Ageing
In medicine someone who is 60 years old is not considered “old”. Rather sweetly, doctors may call an these patients “young lady” or “young man”; contrary to wider society where they would in fact be considered “old”. The language we use to describe ageing and our experiences of ageing is key to understanding some of the negative perceptions of old age.
One of the benefits of the English language is that one word can have multiple meanings. The word “old” can be used to describe a pair of jeans, a toothbrush and even people. While this makes English quite a simple language to learn, describing people in a way that is analogous to non-living objects can lead to less than kind words being used to describe older adults. I used ‘older adults’ as opposed to the phrase “old people”. The former acknowledges the temporality of life, and the latter denotes a sub-optimal state. Age is relative, and we all age. As you are reading this right now your cells are senescing, and you are closer to death than you were three seconds ago. “Old people” are just people who are older than you.
Similar problems arise when we colloquially correlate age with loss of function or beauty. I am not alone in thinking “you look good for your age” when someone’s physical state does not match the one I attached to the age in their notes. I acknowledge the double-effect of this phrase and others like it. You are complimenting someone, but simultaneously letting them know of their aged state; used and beyond their peak.
Age and Time
I often look at pictures of my youth and ponder about how time has flown by and how different I am to this remnant of my past. I can cast my mind back to the time the photo was taken, and that will bring up with it a set of memories. Memories operate in a grey area between fact and subjectivity. I have the lived experience of these events, but I cannot guarantee that my memory of them is completely accurate. This touches on the philosophical difference between imagination and memory. A memory is something that we modify and construct passively, whereas a figment of our imagination is something that we actively modify and construct, the difference being awareness of what is happening.
(For anyone interested here is a paper on Sartre’s The Imaginary)
The temporality of life is important when discussing the phenomenology of ageing, as ageing leads to neurodegeneration — reduced brain function. How an elderly person looks at their past will be drastically different from how I look at mine. I do not suffer from the memory loss that can afflict someone with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s Disease. So, are my accounts of memories more reliable than theirs?
Another key difference is that my ‘past’ is currently being created, whereas elderly people are cognisant of the fact that ‘time is running out’ and there is not much past left. Carpe Diem.
Age and Dependency
Apart from a lucky few old age almost always leads to a loss of mobility, and an increasing dependence on others. Our grandparents depend upon their children, their environment and the healthcare system in a way that they did not 30 years ago. We like to think of ourselves as agents, people who take an active role in making decisions for themselves. The ideas of autonomy, popularised by Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, have played a central role in western liberal philosophy. A belief in self-governance and moral agency is key to understanding the individualist society that we live in. The individual is independent, and self-reliant. So, it is easy to see how anxiety can creep into an elderly person as they become more dependent, and no longer self-reliant.
The modern world has made ageing a lonely affair, family structures and social bonds that once helped people are largely gone. Perhaps I view community through rose tinted glasses, but there’s a coldness about the individualism that is propagated in our society today. The “each to their own” mentality leads to people at the margins being left behind and forgotten. Unfortunately, elderly people often fall within these groups, economically inactive and increasingly expensive to deal with. I have witnessed first hand the social isolation experienced by the elderly in this country, a concept alien to my own experience of old age. My grandmother lives next to my uncle, all of my cousins live in the same town and there is always someone to help out with the activities of daily living. In contrast, many patients I have seen on the elderly care ward are alone, socially estranged and in my eyes abandoned by their families.
There is no easy answer here, but I do echo the call made by social neuroscientist Susan Pinker to move towards a more community focussed life, the benefits of which she extensively discusses in her book “The Village Effect: Why Face To Face Contact Matters”.
“The very old needed interpreters just as the young did. When the old lost their companions, their friends, they also lost their interpreters; they lost love, but they also lost the full powers of speech”
— Julian Barnes, Staring at the Sun
Ageing is a complicated matter, and I reiterate the fact that I do not know what it is like nor do I profess to be a philosopher. I have presented a somewhat grim view of what it means to age, but I am not suggesting that that is the way it is perceived by the elderly. I have attempted to uncover four areas related to ageing that I feel need more reflection at a societal level: (1) living in old age, (2) the language of ageing, (3) time, and (4) dependency.
From my point of view as a medical student I decided to learn about ageing from a phenomenological perspective to better understand what patients are experiencing outside of their diseased state. Elderly patients experience disease, but they are also going through a natural process that is rocking their world. As a doctor you are trained to extract information relevant to managing someone’s care, their own experiences of old age are often a footnote. I hope the last five minutes brought it to the fore.
***Recommended Reading:
- Stanford Encyclopaedia Article on Phenomenology → good introduction for people like myself who don’t study philosophy
- Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Aging → great book for anyone interested in medicine/philosophy
- Feeling One’s Age: A Phenomenology of Aging by Michael Bavidge (pg 207–224 of the handbook) → the inspiration for this article, I reccomend you read this as it helped structure my thoughts for this piece.
- Rethinking the Relationship Between Memory and Imagination in Sartre’s the Imaginary → the paper on Sartre if anyone is interested
- The Village Effect, by Susan Pinker → click here for a guardian article summary
