Keywords

5.1 Sociological Perspectives on Old Age and Ageing

5.1.1 The Sociality of Old Age

Age is a social phenomenon. At first, one might think the opposite: Doesn’t every person lead their own lives and just get older? Is not the life course, as the long path of ageing towards death, the prototypical example of the individuality of human existence? From a sociological perspective, the appropriate answer—formulated as briefly as possible—must be: No. No: What we individually experience as our “own” life is in many ways a product of social conditions and social relations. And no: Even if we tend to reconstruct our biography as an autobiography (and some of us also write it down or even publish it), the course of our life is by no means in our—or even God’s—hands alone, but to a very substantial extent in the hands of partly quite abstract, partly very concrete social powers.

As banal as this statement may seem, it is at the same time fundamental and far-reaching: Ageing takes place in society. Some sociologists would go even further and say that “age” is a social construction. And if one does not go so far as to claim in an obviously contradictory way that age “does not exist,” then there is a lot of arguments for this view. For already the chronological age—a category that seems natural to us—is a social convention: At some point, people agreed to measure the lifespan of a human being in years and to understand and describe the biological continuation of life as a process of “ageing.” The fact that the author of this article was “55” at the time it was written or identifies himself as “born in 1965” must be understood as a thoroughly social fact: As a 55-year-old, he may personally feel “young” (or at least “young at heart”), but socially he will no longer be counted among “the young,” though not yet among “the old” either, because his age will always be evaluated by his social environment in relation to the average life expectancy of German men and this is (as we all know even without knowing the current figures of the Federal Statistical Office) somewhere in the 80s. As the author was born in 1965, he is—as he has experienced himself and as others do know—part of the baby boomer generation, a member of a numerically large virtual group (age cohort) of people born at a certain historical time, who since then, without knowing each other, have in a certain way gone through life together and have shaped and formed the social world of the present in a kind of cooperation that no one really acknowledges.

What may appear to every one of us as highly special and individual—namely, our “own” life course—turns out from a sociological perspective to be an equally highly collective, social event: The life course is “institutionalized” (Kohli, 1985), i.e., set up in such a way that all members of society ultimately follow the same life path, ordered and controlled by social institutions. School, work, and old-age security are the institutions that mark different phases of life and at the same time frame them as differentiated age stages: Childhood or adolescence, adulthood, and retirement. Provided with very different social attributions (e.g., “curiosity,” “routine,” “experience”), only the last phase of such a three-part life course is regarded as “the age” in the generally shared understanding—i.e., shared by “young,” “adults,” and “old” alike. However—another genuinely social phenomenon—this latter attribution has tended to shift in recent times, from the “third age” (Laslett, 1987) of retirement to the “fourth age” (Higgs & Gilleard, 2015) of those in need of care and suffering from age dementia. The fact that “age” is, thus, externalized and attributed as a marker to the ‘very old’ others points to the socially prevailing negative construction of old age—but more on that in a moment.

5.1.2 The Relationality of Old Age

Every age determination is necessarily relational. A personal age statement does not have individual and social significance as an absolute value, but only in relation to other ages. “At 17, one still has dreams” means that these are youth-related and may already have been lost by the members of not too distant age groups (“Don’t trust anyone over 30”); “life begins at 66” is the feel-good motto of all those who are “not among the youngest,” but who, with the beginning of retirement age, enjoy a “late freedom” (Rosenmayr, 1983), which in turn is no longer granted to the “really” old.

Different ages thus “live” in the strong sense of the word from their respective differentiation from others. The practice of social comparison, otherwise known from the field of income distribution and the squinting at higher earners or looking down on those who are worse off, plays no less important role regarding age. Within the generations, as well as between them, people relate to one another in everyday practice: For example, one has “held up quite well” in comparison to other, supposedly less fit older people, and “the young folks” of the following generations are said to be less hardworking, critical, well educated, etc. than one’s own age cohort once was. And, most importantly: “Old” are always only the others - the neighbor who, unlike oneself, hardly ever leaves the apartment anymore, or the friend who “at his age” should rather not drive a car any longer.

Behind the talk of the relationality of age, however, there is more than the practices of demarcation from age peers or (at least perceived) elder people, which have a socializing effect in their own way. More significant for the life situations and life chances of older people are the intergenerational power relations in a society, which are characterized by the hegemony of the “middle” age. The age group of 25- to 55-year-olds, who can claim the status of the working and family-forming “core” of society, has a norm-setting power that should not be underestimated: It is here that decisions are made as to what is economically productive, socially valuable, and culturally legitimate. Older adults must measure themselves against the rules and values of these “middle-aged” groups, and they must answer to “them” (van Dyk & Lessenich, 2009a). Contrary to what striking formulas such as those about “pensioner democracy” suggest, the “society of long life” (Stöckl et al., 2016), in which more people tend to be in the post-employment stage of life, is by no means dominated by the retirees. However, the apparently widespread concern that this is or might be the case says a lot about the prevailing social image of old age.

5.1.3 The Negativity of Old Age

The negativity of the prevailing notions of old age—at least in public discourse—is quite remarkable, especially considering that longevity is becoming more widespread in rich Western societies, and thus the social phenomenon of very old age is also becoming increasingly “normal” (Lessenich, 2014). Perhaps, however, it is precisely here that the key to understanding the social devaluation of old age lies: For somehow everyone wants to grow old—but no one wants to be old. Obviously, contemporary society is dominated by an extremely ambivalent relationship to ageing, that is, to a biological process that is ultimately inevitably associated with losses of physical and mental capacity. It is, however, not only the relative certainty of psychophysical restrictions that must be accepted if one wants to live for a long time. Maybe more importantly, one has to face precisely the devaluation of one’s social position in old age, of which one already knows in advance as a person who has been ageing for decades—and to which we, quite paradoxically, often contribute ourselves in our younger years.

Against this backdrop, a countermovement has been underway for some time in the academic field, but also in politics and the media, which is attempting with great institutional and discursive effort to counter the structural dominance of a negative image of old age with its systematic revaluation (Denninger et al., 2014). However, this well-meaning promotion of positive ideas about life in old age has its own problems, as it links the recognition of old age to the image of old people who are healthy and mobile, active, and productive—i.e., with reference to qualities that are commonly associated with younger people or that in public discourse are considered attributes of youthfulness. Such a positive connotation of “young old-age” (van Dyk & Lessenich, 2009b) not only threatens to shift negative images of old age to the higher and highest ages. It rather, if only unwittingly, fuels the “othering” of old age (van Dyk, 2020), by socially constructing the dependent and even more so the demented old age as the other of a desirable life, indeed almost as non-life. However, the “scandal of ageing” (cf. Améry, 2020) cannot be eliminated in this way: Neither the personal humiliation that the ageing process is often experienced as nor the associated resistance and disdain with which old age and older adults tend to be treated.

5.1.4 The Heterogeneity of Old Age

That there is neither “the” old age nor “the” old person as such, i.e., that neither all old people are the same nor their individual experiences of old age are identical, sounds like a scientific truism—which is, however, strangely enough consistently ignored in the public negotiations about this phase of life and this population group. What one would never claim of people in middle adulthood, i.e., of 35- or 45-year-olds, namely, that they exhibit characteristic features shared by all members of their group, is commonplace with reference to old people: From the bent old man with a cane to the “friendly old lady,” or recently alternatively the sporty-young grandma and the grandfather engaged in grandchildren’s care, stereotypical images and associations determine the phase of old age like no other. Although children are also assigned standardizing attributions (eager to learn, ready to discover, carefree), these are still counteracted in social practice by parents’ individualizing exaggeration of the special qualities and qualifications of their offspring.

The homogenization of old age, instead, remains largely socially uncontested, regardless of whether negative or positive stereotypes are mobilized to describe this life stage—think of the “popular disease of dementia” on the one hand, the “potentials of old age” on the other.Footnote 1 During the COVID-19 pandemic, this almost obsessive tendency for collective categorization was confirmed once again, as “the elderly” were immediately and reflexively identified as a particularly vulnerable group (Lessenich, 2020; Graefe et al., 2020, Kim-Knauss et al., 2022). Yet, of course, old and oldest-old age are no less diverse than any other age; on the contrary, they tend to be even more diverse, because the biographical accumulation dynamics of social inequalities (in education and occupation, income and wealth, nutrition and health) lead to very different social situations of older people (Simonson & Vogel, 2019). By no means, then, are all retirees (or even female retirees) “well off,” and by the same token, not all old people are “frail.” What the “Corona crisis” showed once again is the fact that health risks are by no means only a question of age, but at least as much a matter of class.Footnote 2

5.1.5 Old Age and Ageing as Process and Practice

Thus, “old age” is manifold—and it is a process. Even the everyday statement that one is x years old corresponds to a snapshot in the process of ageing, which again is to a certain extent cancelled out in the respective age statement: In one’s 56th year of life, for example, one already has 55 lived years “on the hump,” which becomes visible not only in its potential curvature or in other physical changes but also in the form of the accumulated experience from decades of lifetime—and thus from the passage of the different phases of one’s own biography, as well as from the experienced history of society. Someone who “is” 55 today, like the author was at the time of writing this piece, was only a year younger a short time ago and will soon be a year older again, has passed through various stages of life and repeatedly changed age groups and will continue to do so until his death. “Age” is thus a process category, in terms of individual as well as collective biographies (Crosnoe & Elder Jr, 2002; Moen & Hernandez, 2009). It is multiform in time and across time. Any sociology of old age, therefore, must always be a sociology of ageing.

Moreover, from a sociological perspective, age is—and with this, I would like to conclude the introductory framing of our research findings to be presented in the following —a practice category. Age is lived, not only in the sense of “doing age,” i.e., of a permanent everyday production of “age-typical” ways of acting and “age-appropriate” social behavior. Beyond that, age and ageing are fundamental categories of human existence and coexistence: They have a thoroughly material, biophysical foundation; they are embedded and incorporated into the reproduction of social contexts; and they are lived, practiced and enacted, that is, acted out and performed in the process of social life (cf. e.g., Twigg, 2004). In this respect, a sociology of old age and ageing deals with the social phenomenon of old-age lives or of “living old age.” In order to connote this praxis dimension of old age, we will follow Nina Degele (2008) in using the linguistically more manageable and, for our context of investigation, more suitable term of acting old age.Footnote 3

5.2 The Research Question

The research interest of the qualitative study (or studies) of the Ageing as Future project focused on the time management of older people as a specific dimension of ageing. The starting point of our investigations was the question of the relationship between everyday time wealth and biographical time poverty in old age, or more precisely: Whether older people who are no longer in employment perceive a tension between increasing “free” time in everyday life and decreasing remaining lifetime—and how they deal with this tension. In short, we asked for the time management practices of older and very old adults.

The background to this empirical question was the initially theoretical consideration that people who are no longer employed are confronted with two different time logics that tend to contradict each other. On the one hand, with the onset of the post-employment phase, the available everyday time increases. In a certain sense, people as pensioners are entering the realm of leisure: Not only does the corset of the professional organization of work fall away, but it is not uncommon for the demands of family time organization to decrease, so the days are (or seem) now open to one’s own free disposal. On the other hand, the transition to “retirement” also brings the limitedness of the life span and the unavoidable fact of one’s own death into the experience and expectation horizon of older adults: For them, life’s “last chapter” opens, which could explain why among people who are said to have “all the time in the world” the saying “pensioners never have time” circulates.

In this context, we were not only interested in whether the older people we interviewed state or construct this tension for themselves, but above all in which factors—individual and structural, situation-specific, and socio-historical—are the ones that influence the dealing with the different time logics of old age and thus determine the empirically found constellation of everyday and lifetime agency in old age. Which roles do time and time agency play for the self-description of older people as “old”? Is the relation between already past and still remaining lifetime decisive here—or the feeling of being able to dispose of one’s own everyday time (or the experience that this is no longer possible)? What constitutes the experience of having the power of time disposal in old age, on which factors does it depend? Who has not only a large amount of time at his or her disposal, but can actually (i.e., effectively) dispose of it—and why? In what way and under what conditions do older people develop time management competencies, and how does the resulting feeling of sovereignty over one’s own time contribute to subjectively keeping the fact of old age at a distance and projecting it into a distant future? How do older people’s time management and time interpretation practices change in the transition to old age, e.g., under conditions of their own impending need for care or when they assume responsibility for the care of relatives, maybe for their own partner?

In answering these questions, we expected to find—as sociologists, and the open-qualitative approach to the subject matter notwithstanding—not only identifiable gender differences but also effects of social class (according to income, education, and origin). The intercultural comparative design of the project was also intended to capture “cultural effects” on the practice of “acting old age”—in the sense, for example, of the social significance of experiences of autonomy or of social norms in dealing with death—which would tend to remain hidden in an investigation restricted to only one single cultural context. Finally, we were also interested in specific age and cohort effects, which is why we interviewed both younger (60- to 75-year-old) and older (75- to 85-year-old) adults and, in some cases, repeated interviews with previously interviewed persons. In the second funding phase, we concentrated on recruiting old and very old interviewees to be able to examine in more detail old-age agency with regard to the end of life.

The following presentation of the empirical findings is, of course, not primarily structured in line with our initial questions nor exclusively according to our original epistemological interests, but, following the logic of qualitative social research, sticks to the narratives, relevance orders, and meaning attributions of the older people we interviewed.

5.3 The State of Research

Before coming to this, however, the state of scientific research on questions of time management in old age should be reported in the shortest possible form, with research by members of the Ageing as Future project network itself being particularly relevant in this respect.

The guiding principle for our qualitative research focusing on the time management of older people was the—actually unsurprising—insight gained during previous studies that time and temporality are central dimensions and influencing factors of old-age agency. In practically all social milieus, across different spheres of life, and well into older age (not yet in need of care), empirical evidence initially reveals a relatively ageless self-image among respondents (Graefe et al., 2011): Their self-concept is not dominated by the experience of transitioning into a new stage of life called “old age,” but rather by a perceived continuity of adult life that makes them “older adults” in their self-description (“adults who are older,” Harper, 2004: 3). For this self-concept as “ageless selves” (Kaufman, 1986), in the sense of subjectively not having completed yet the entry into the status of the “old,” the negativity of the socially prevailing views on ageing (see above) plays a crucial role. However, of essential importance for the subjectively perceived and claimed “agelessness,” in a positive respect, is the experience of “time sovereignty” that accompanies the transition to “post-employment life” (Geissler, 2008): The biographically new feeling for many older people of mastering their own time and time management (Münch, 2014). Age-related changes and losses are “offset,” so to speak, against the time autonomy gained in old age; the “late freedom” already cited above, especially in matters of time, proves to be an important pillar of an ageless self-image.

However, the question of everyday time management in old age has not yet been researched thoroughly from a sociological and qualitative perspective; it is quantitative studies on time use that dominate the literature (for Germany, e.g., Tokarski, 1989; Opaschowski, 1998, Engstler et al., 2004; internationally, e.g., Gauthier & Smeeding, 2003; for the following, see also Münch, 2021: 97ff.). These studies provide an insight into the diversity and frequency of activities in everyday retirement, basically revealing little that is spectacular: Media consumption, social (especially family) contacts, hobbies, and physical reproduction are identified as the main activities of older people. The most important qualitative study on the topic in the German context (Burzan, 2002), which distinguishes everyday patterns of time management according to their degree of structuration and relates them to the relative biographical importance of different areas of life, now dates back two decades. A second relevant, hardly more recent study (Köller, 2006) emphasizes the importance of the employment biography for the time structuring of older people as well as, mediated by this, for their subjective perception of the everyday “flow of time.”

Even older, but of direct relevance for our interest in the question of time management in old age, is the research of the working group headed by Martin Kohli (cf. e.g., Kohli et al., 1989), which examined, at the historical high point of the West German early retirement regime , early retirees’ perceptions of time and future. Here, again, the central explanatory dimension is the employment biography of early retirees (Kohli et al., 1983), which in turn is closely related to their socio-structural position as employees and to the dispositions resulting from the respective position (cf. Wolf, 1988; cf. also Graefe & Lessenich, 2012). Thus, status-mobile employees (at that time consistently meaning those with experiences of upward mobility) conceive of time as a resource that enables them to tap into new opportunities for action in their post-employment lives. Early retirees socialized in stable, middle-class positions and oriented toward maintaining their employment status see time as a task of actively shaping a successful old age, whereas for rather low-skilled employees with experiences of occupational precariousness, time in the transition to retirement is seen more as the promise of experiencing a stability that is new to them.

The concomitant dimension of the subjective perception of everyday time, its inertia or speed, deceleration, or acceleration, is the analytical link also to the practical meaning of lifetime (cf. Brose et al., 1993, for a sociological definition of the two concepts). The perspective of a shrinking lifetime budget that emerges with increasing age and the resulting lifeworld distance from the employment system (Thomae, 1989; Weiss & Lang, 2012) is usually not a question of an abrupt, crisis-ridden insight into the finitude of life, but rather a gradual process of the imperceptible restructuring of time perspectives and the emergence of a more present-oriented lifestyle. This increasing “presentism” in the time management of older adults is likely to be a source of the compression of everyday time often perceived in old age. Despite the actual abundancy of time, somehow a feeling of time shortage emerges in everyday life, constituting one of the limits of the “ageless” self-image discussed above.

Another boundary of the perceived non-membership to the group of the “old,” which is at least as important in social practice, lies in one’s own need for care. The anticipated loss of independence and self-determination subjectively associated with the care situation represents for many older people the “actual” transition into old age or into the “fourth,” final stage of ageing. As our own previous research has shown, the negative views on ageing, especially of a demented old age supposedly reduced to mere physicality, are of a remarkably abysmal nature. In the social imaginary of ageing, the onset of the need for care represents the end not only of the ability to shape everyday life, but the end of life itself, and not infrequently even the epitome of a life that is not worth living, an “abjected life” (cf. van Dyk, 2020: 140ff.).

5.4 An Outline of the Findings

5.4.1 Everyday Time Management

One of the many generalizing attributions to “the” old refers to their assumed “time prosperity” (Rinderspacher, 2002). At first glance, things seem to be clear: Those who retire at 65 or even a few years earlier have a phase of life ahead of them in which there is no shortage of time, or more precisely, of a daily available “free time.” Obviously, the fact that there is an objective gain in time that is not consumed otherwise, especially not in the form of gainful employment, cannot be dismissed. However, it has to be taken into account that not everyone was employed in his or her later adulthood and thus not everyone made the classic transition from work to retirement. For women in particular, at least the abrupt change from full-time employment to mandatory retirement was and still is by no means a completely normal experience of old age—either because they were no longer gainfully employed after the birth of their children or because they only worked part-time after raising them. In addition, the gender-specific nature of post-employment life is not only evident in time-use studies but also in our interviews: For many women, the time-consuming family and household obligations continue unabated after their partner’s retirement or even with their own retirement, the everyday division of household labor remaining unequal. The much-used image of “late freedom” is thus first and foremost a profoundly male stereotype or rather a stereotype geared to the life experiences and everyday practices of older men.

Even this finding, however, cannot simply be left as it is, but must in turn be qualified. The fact that the “corset” of time commitments disappears or at least becomes much less tight in the retirement phase of life, which in most of the cases is spent in partnership, is a frequent image used by men and women alike to describe the subjective experience of time in old age. This indicates that the phenomenon of a perceived “time wealth” is not only about the purely quantitative dimension of an absolute expansion of the time budget in old age but at least as much—and even more importantly—about the perception of a decreasing external determination, a reduced access of third parties to one’s own time resources. For most people, the decisive factor for subjective time prosperity in old age is the biographically new experience of being able to literally manage the available time budget, to have it at one’s disposal. The core of the matter is self-determination of “time use”: In this sense, old age is, it seems, the ultimate time of managing time.

As is always the case in the social world, however, the abundance of time understood and qualified in this way is an ambivalent matter, because connected to the possibility there is always the necessity of time agency. No matter whether men or women, whether previously employed, non-employed, or unemployed: Basically, they all face the age-specific or, more precisely, the life phase-specific challenge of restoring or reconstructing “everyday life” after retirement (cf. Wolf, 1988). Be it yourself or your partner who “loses their job” practically overnight, it is important for all older people to actively shape their everyday lives after having left employment. No matter how they do this (and that is what our interviews were about): the restructuring of everyday life and more specifically the temporal reorganization of everyday practice are “the” tasks of life par excellence in old age (cf. Ekerdt & Koss, 2016).

The qualitative research conducted within the framework of the project Ageing as Future confirmed the findings from our own earlier studies insofar as older people themselves almost universally name ‘having time’ as an important and positive characteristic of their life situation. This is summed up in, given the societal conditions, an almost emblematic way by an interviewee who describes time as “my capital” and himself as a “capitalist in time.” Beyond all possible experiences of loss in the process of ageing, our interviewees consistently put the bulging time budget on the credit side of old age. Not every old person, however, claims the role of “capitalist” in the narrower sense, reporting that they use their time as a means of investment with corresponding expectations of return. Rather, the “investing” strategy is only one of the three age-specific everyday time styles that we have identified and that are confirmed in our empirical material.Footnote 4

Investing, enjoying, or filling time: These are three distinct, empirically widespread patterns of everyday time management in old age, each of which has its own connection to the structural patterns of lifetime agency of our respondents. The “investing” mode is characterized by a subjective orientation not only towards a personal advantage, but at least as much towards a social benefit of time use in old age. Everyday time is managed in the sense that it is devoted to meaningful activities—as a voluntary commitment not only to oneself and one’s own well-being but also to that of the social surrounding. The time management mode of “enjoyment,” on the other hand, explicitly does not follow any logic of the meaningfulness or usefulness of one’s own actions: instead, time is considered a consumer good rather than an investment object. The “release” from the constraints of working life is taken at its word, and, in special appreciation of the everyday time gained, “having time” and “taking time” (above all for oneself) are given great importance in practical action. Finally, “filling time” means looking for activities and occupations that make the day go by. The activities documented by our interviewees in this regard tend to have a passive character, because they do not so much reflect one’s own interests, nor do they follow immediate external constraints, but they rather aim to retighten the lost “corset” of everyday life. Each new day appears here as a task to be mastered; each day one has “killed the clock” creates a certain feeling of relief.

Not only for this latter time practice, but for it in particular, the establishment of routines of everyday life in old age is important (cf. Ekerdt & Koss, 2016). For many older people, routines have an important ordering and stabilizing function: being able to practically shimmy from agenda item to agenda item in everyday life gives a sense of being located and secure in time—and thus also in the world. At the same time, the reference to such routines, not only in the interview but also in everyday communication with relatives, friends, and acquaintances, has a significant function of suggesting competence: Here, so the story to be told goes, is an older person who literally “pulls their life off” and about whom one accordingly does not need to worry. This applies not least to the self-assessment of older people: everyday routines that provide support for a way of life no longer held together by gainful employment produce a thoroughly effective fiction of mastery in the sense of having one’s own life “under control.”

It is certainly not only older people who need such a handrail to support them on their way through everyday life—but people with more “free time” need it more than people who are very busy. Nevertheless, the importance of routines is by no means the same for all older people. Rather, their significance, like the three aforementioned everyday time styles themselves, depends strongly on the employment-related biographical experiences of older people and, mediated by this, on their respective socioeconomic status. From a sociological perspective, this is a main finding of our research: the practical everyday management of “abundance of time” in old age—and thus also “time abundance” itself—is socially unequal. It is people’s life histories and life situations that convert ‘time abundance’ in old age into an asset (or not).

In this sense, our qualitative empirical research shows that the importance of routines for the management of life in old age tends to decrease, or at least to be relativized, with higher occupational and income status. Those who in old age are practically oriented toward filling their time, or even to “kill” it, usually look back on an employment history in which there was little room for maneuver for an independent organization of everyday working life; typically, even the termination of employment in these cases was determined externally and rather involuntary, not least in anticipation of a comparatively low old-age pension. In contrast, the transition to retirement is framed positively by our interviewees belonging to the group of “time afficionados,” not least because it was largely self-determined and connected with the prospect of a good or even very good pension that opens sufficient options for action. Against the backdrop of the time pressure experienced in their employment life, members of this group are almost exuberant about the time gained through retirement and seek to use it to the fullest for themselves and their families. The “investing time” type, in turn, is associated with an early, but nevertheless voluntary, exit from gainful employment—for example, due to a perceived breaking point—which in a sense clears the way for an already existing interest in social engagement. However, the fact that one must be able to afford, also in concrete economic terms, being socially engaged is well-known from research on voluntary work, and the orientation of our respondents toward highly active, socially useful activity in old age was consistently based on a secure household income.

Ultimately, all three patterns of acting old age are characterized by social-structural, occupational biographical effects, starting with the seemingly most trivial aspect of the time of daily getting up: Those who have had to get out of bed very early all their lives are still “attached” to this habit even after the end of compulsory employment—unless they take the small liberty of ignoring the alarm clock and simply turning in bed once again, which is tied to having enjoyed a certain degree of self-determination of working hours throughout the employment biography. Such biographically predetermined autonomy in individual time action tends to continue over the day, week, and year. Depending on whether the transition from work to retirement was perceived more as a gain in freedom or rather as a deprivation of security, the personal way of dealing with the experience of an unusually underdetermined, largely unbound everyday time is more or less “sovereign.” Social inequalities in old age are thus reproduced in two ways: In biographical perspective, high levels of agency are extended from the middle phase of life into old age; in socio-structural terms, gains in autonomy in old age tend to occur in social milieus that are used to enjoy a greater capacity for self-determination.

In addition to the three aforementioned patterns of everyday time management in the narrower sense, we were also able to identify three—actually four—variants of social time orientation among older people in our empirical material. In the background of this partial result was the question with whom older people spend their daily time, i.e., who are the partners of their “free time” organization. Interestingly, this focus of our qualitative research was a result of the intercultural comparative design of the project, because the particularities of social life in old age at the different national locations did not come to the attention of the local researchers in the first place. Rather, it was the colleagues from the other countries, who were not equally familiar with the culturally anchored features of life outside their own home countries, who noticed the unusual (for them) characteristics of the social organization of time in old age that was common and self-evident elsewhere (cf. Lessenich et al., 2018).

Our findings in this regard follow the considerations of Gergen and Gergen (2003), who distinguish three relevant social dimensions of life in old age, namely, the relationship(s) of older people to themselves, to other persons, and to the social community. Accordingly, in our empirical material—and expressed in our terminology—individualistic, interpersonal, and communal social orientations of time management can be found, with the interpersonal orientation being further differentiated into a familialistic and an age group-specific one. As with the previously discussed time styles, the patterns mentioned hardly ever occur in pure form in reality: The concrete practice of social time organization in everyday life is always a specific mixture of different orientations. And yet, beyond the individual cases and their particularities, certain widespread prioritizations can be identified. Thus, in addition to strongly individualistic, ego-centered ways of using time, which are subjectively often justified by the desire to be able to “finally do something for oneself” after the end of the working and/or family phase of life, there are also systematically strongly communal, community-oriented time practices, in which the most diverse forms of social engagement for more or less distant others form the essential content of everyday life.

A third type of social time orientation in old age is of an interpersonal nature, which in turn takes two forms. Either everyday life is shared primarily with one’s partner or with members of one’s own family (classically, the grandchildren) and/or relatives. This familialistic orientation is to be distinguished from the one in which time is spent mainly with people from one’s own age group or peer group, i.e., with one’s closest circle of friends, an age-homogeneous group of leisure partners, or in institutional contexts, e.g., senior education. The intercultural comparison of social time orientations revealed interesting differences in the subjective attribution of meaning to one and the same time use practice. For example, while communal time orientation seemed completely self-evident and downright “not worth mentioning” in the North American context, corresponding orientations tended to be emphasized and normatively highlighted by German respondents—in line with the offensive political promotion of volunteer work in this country, especially in old age (cf. Neumann, 2016). In Hong Kong, on the other hand, a practice of actively socializing mainly with other older people seemed to be “normal” and not in need of further explanation, while this very practice was not infrequently accompanied by expressions of regret by German respondents that they could not (any longer) find access to younger leisure partners.

Underlying all this diversity of individual everyday life experiences, be it in social or organizational terms, there is a social requirement that is ultimately common to all older people: the subjectively perceived need to justify one’s own mode of everyday time practices. To a certain extent, such a need for legitimation exists—after early childhood—in every phase of life and for every age group. In older age, however, this is to a greater extent the case, precisely because of the “abundance of time” given in the self-perception as well as in the perception by others. For many older people, in part even for those who are confessedly in “enjoyment” mode, this subjectively perceived compulsion to justify themselves takes the form of a disposition that is imbued with the “ethos of being busy” (cf. Ekerdt, 1986). This “busy ethic” represents, functionally, a solution to a problem that is significant both individually and socially, the problem of establishing continuity between employment and retirement life, a continuity at least in the sense of the symbolic continuation of the normative references for one’s agency. Although retirees as such are freed from the demands and constraints of gainful employment, they still orient their lifestyles on the norms and values of working life (cf. Ekerdt & Koss, 2016). In this sense, activity (“busyness”) is good, passivity (‘laziness’) is bad, and a regular daily routine is highly appreciated even in old age, while letting oneself go is subjectively strictly forbidden. The retirement life of many older people is thus characterized by a logic of “as if”—as if they were still gainfully employed. Accordingly, in retirement the day must be “filled” in some other way than by way of employment, and “investment” activities, especially so-called hetero-productive activities (i.e., activities that benefit other people), sometimes take on a quasi-full time job character in terms of their scope. And even the “enjoyment” of time is not only measured against earlier, work-related deprivations, but also derives its value—in the sense of the interpretation as an extended, even endless “vacation”—from conformity with the norms and normalcies of working life.

All these findings ultimately point to the difficulty, or even inadmissibility, of speaking of “time sovereignty” in old age. If at all, the possibility of a truly sovereign, i.e., unrestricted, everyday time activity that is neither impaired by material or social nor by institutional or normative factors is reserved only for very specific, quite singular social situations. In the true sense of the word, hardly anyone in this society is sovereign over his or her time, in old age as well as in other phases of life; the “mastery” of one’s own time, the individual establishment and maintenance of an autonomous time regime, requires extremely extensive time resources coupled with exceptionally well-developed time competencies. The generally false suggestion associated with the talk of “time sovereignty,” but just as well of “time prosperity,” that older people are masters in the house of their own everyday life, should definitely be avoided in the light of our research. The existence of “free time” must be legitimized even in old age, notwithstanding the public discourse formula of “deserved retirement”; subjectively, there is no feeling of de-responsibilization in old age, at least not in the sense of a moral relief from justification constraints. Against this background, it seems equally inappropriate to describe the practical ways in which older people deal with the “problem” of free time as individual “strategies.” The notion of planned, goal-oriented, calculative action suggested by this term does not do justice to the real existing practices of everyday time activities of older people and their subjective interpretations. For freedom in old age is, according to our qualitative interviews, only in a socially limited way the individual freedom to act differently: “one is free but not free to do nothing” (Ekerdt & Koss, 2016: 1297).

5.4.2 Lifetime Management

As seen, the everyday time management in old age is, on the one hand, in a way nothing special, but a reflection of conditions that basically affect all socialized individuals: Like everyone else, older people must organize their lives and structure their everyday time. Just as anybody else, they must justify the existence of “free time” to themselves and, above all, to others in a society permeated by the logic and ethics of work; for them, too, the possibilities of truly “free” disposal of their own time are limited, and among them, too, the scope for everyday action is unequally distributed, depending on the resources available.

And yet, on the other hand, it is true that the everyday time activities of older people certainly have their special moments and motives, which are due to the specific location of higher, “advanced” age in older people’s individual life courses. In contrast to younger people, older people have a comparatively long stretch of things that happened “before”: a past life that, although it may have taken place in very different ways, is in any case eventful and saturated with experiences, the imprints of which inevitably shape the old age life of 60-, 70- or 80-year-olds. Everyday time management in old age can thus, basically, only be understood as a practice influenced by the life already lived. And as such, according to the findings of our qualitative research, it is not uninfluenced by the concrete, life-time-related perceptions and orientations of the old. How everyday time is shaped in old age thus depends not least on how older people conceive of their own lifetime, both in retrospect of their life history and in outlook on the future, i.e., on what they still expect in and from their lives.

In this sense, we were able to empirically identify two clearly distinct, and in some ways contrasting, life-time styles in old age. These two ways in which older adults use to deal with their subjectively remaining life time are to be understood as typical or typifiable combinations of biographical retrospection and prospection, both of which are of immediate importance for the organization of everyday life time. We have characterized them as the “logic of catching up” on the one hand and a “life in limbo” on the other (Münch, 2016)—two modes which, however, certainly do not exhaustively describe the spectrum of possibilities of individual life-time management.

The logic of catching up is found among older people who look back biographically on a structural lack of time and on years, often decades, of putting aside their own interests. In our interviews, it is especially women or mothers who express the life experience of never having had time for themselves between the multiple demands of raising children, household chores, and their own gainful employment (Beck-Gernsheim, 1983). The time of old age then appears to these respondents as an opportunity to finally be able to do all the things they always wanted to do but never got around to before—or at least to tackle some of the unfinished business. “So, then I just felt I had a whole lot of catching up to do”: this is the typical paraphrase of this life-time style, which translates in everyday terms into a multitude (sometimes a subjectively perceived excess) of activities, from fulfilling long-held desires such as learning languages or a musical instrument to traveling on one’s own and cultivating old, neglected friendships. As a rule, this self-chosen (hyper)activity, in the light of which not young and middle adulthood (Panova et al., 2017) but paradoxically the so-called retirement phase turns out to be the “rush hour of life,” is related to a perceived biographical scarcity of time: “It’s now or never” is the watchword—because who knows how long one has still to live. Or even more, the urgency to catch up sometimes seems imperative, because, for example, the early death of a parent or the statistical life expectancy are perceived as quasi-objective limits of one’s own biographical time budget. The latent time pressure associated with the life-time logic of catching up is summarized by one of our interviewees who, reflecting everyday communication with his acquaintances of the same age, expresses the following appeal: “Remember, you probably still have about 7,000 days to live.”

The life-time style that tends to oppose this activist concept of old age, and which we conceive of as a biographical limbo between life and death, is characterized by the fact that older people permanently pause in anticipation of their demise and begin to withdraw from social relationships, thus entering, as it were, a passive state of waiting. Regarding the perception of time and everyday activities, this disposition leads to a pronounced presentism: nothing major is tackled, nothing new is started, and longer-term planning is ruled out. Life is spent in the here and now. In this sense, our project partners in Hong Kong and the USA speak of “time freeze” (Ho et al., 2019), i.e., a downright halting of time, in which the future is subjectively not so much shortened but conceptualized as a mere extension of the present. The old-age agency of respondents who can be assigned to this life-time style takes place in the mode of suspension: the rhythm of life is scaled back, and everyday life is reduced to a minimum. The background of such an orientation toward inaction is often formed by critical life events: a survived heart attack, the death of close people, especially of the life partner. In all these cases, the end of one’s own life comes closer; potentially imminent death comes into view: “I could drop dead at any moment.” From this perspective, restraint in all situations and concerns of life then appears as a form of precaution, because in the event of death, one is neither torn out of something important oneself nor does one cause others to experience loss if one has already said goodbye to everything and everyone beforehand. The subjective entanglement of lifetime orientation and everyday practice is also evident in this case: Expecting death at any time, life becomes a waiting room in which time passes but is effectively halted. And in which inconspicuousness is the first civic duty: the feeling of one of our interviewees of being “only temporarily present” led him to simulate his absence, to make himself downright invisible. In this sense, he began to practice activities that were once taken for granted and highly valued, namely, driving, less frequently, more carefully, and almost secretly—in other words, in such a way that no one would notice him. The fact that the value idea of “autonomy in old age” is taken literally—as “auto-nomy”—in Germany, especially by men, and is thus associated with the continued use of one’s own car, is an interesting finding of our qualitative studies, especially in an international comparison, which cannot be further elaborated here.

In one case as in the other, in the active catching up with what has been missed as well as in the passive pausing before death, it should have become clear that “individual life-time styles” are never only individual and never only related to lifetime. Life-time styles always have recognizable effects on the organization of everyday life or on corresponding patterns of everyday time management (see above). And they can never be understood without taking into account the concrete life management patterns of significant others: older women in the mode of catching up, for example, act against the experiential background of a family life in which they have systematically put aside their own desires in favor of their husbands and children; older men in a self-chosen state of limbo, on the other hand, seek to take into account the supposed or actual life plans of their children or younger partners. Thus, one of our very old interviewees, upon reaching his 90th birthday, decides to literally suspend his social life, because his own life expectancy and the time horizons of his preferred interaction partners increasingly diverge in his perception: “They cannot just take care of me. I’m only available for a short time, and the younger ones will live longer, so they must live on with the others.”

“I am only available for a short time”: This age-related attitude to life, which becomes more and more prevalent with increasing age, can obviously function as a motive for very different ways of organizing everyday life, i.e., more active, or more passive ways. Similar subjective perceptions of time can thus, in other words, result in a very different sense of well-being in terms of time. Based on our empirical research, we prefer the category of time well-being to the established sociological talk of “time wealth” and “time prosperity” on the one hand, and “time autonomy” and “time sovereignty” on the other. We prefer this category to “time sovereignty” (see above) because, according to our findings, it is not the perceived quantity of available time that is decisive for the subjective quality of life in old age—and because real autonomy in the disposal of time turns out to be a strongly milieu-bound attitude toward life that tends to be reserved for older people who are better off in terms of resources. In contrast, time well-being—as the individual well-being in and with time—is a complex constellation of perceptions, which is fed by a multitude of sources and is neither equivalent to objective time wealth nor to individualistically conceived control practices. Well-being in time in old age is both a subjective and a social category in which factors such as personal resource endowment, health status, spatial mobility, involvement in social relationships and responsibilities, critical life events, chronological age, and the prevailing social time regime intersect and intertwine. In all its complexity and inner contradictions, it cannot be reduced to a single denominator and ultimately can only be explored in intensive qualitative interviews with older people—as socialized individuals—themselves.

In this context, and against this background, an important problematization of the concept of “retirement,” which we believe is overdue, must be undertaken—as well as a second order problematization, in the sense of a problematization of the common forms of its problematization. Originating as a political category, rooted in the National Socialist semantics of the “quitting time of life,” and becoming a socio-politically institutionalized figure with the Federal German pension reform of 1957, the concept of retirement (“Ruhestand”) has since become firmly established in German everyday language. In the world of social discourse, it has in fact become synonymous with the post-employment phase, indeed with the life phase of old age per se (Denninger et al., 2014; Göckenjan, 2000). The double problem of the conceptual politics revolving around this term lies in the fact that, on the one hand, the social conceptions of old age as a specific phase of life are shaped in a pejorative and exclusionary sense. Old age understood as retirement signals that people, once they have become “old,” move into a state of rest: Into a status position in which they have their peace and, consequently, are let alone—but in which they also are in rest, in which they are supposed to just let the others, not or not yet old, be as far as possible. Old age as retirement describes a social siding established by the welfare state, on which the material appreciation of the life old people lived goes hand in hand with the symbolic devaluation of their life still to be lived: Here, rest in this world has already been provided for, in the expectation of the old eventually finding “eternal rest” in the hereafter. Mind you, and as already indicated: this retreat of those who have been deprived of their duties in the working world to their now socially guaranteed old age was for a long time, and in part still is today, a real option at best for the elder males. For many women, especially for those who have been working only temporarily, intermittently, or marginally, the idea of retirement was and is nothing more than this: an idea, an institutional fiction, and more so in view of the gender-specific division of labor that is perpetuated even among older couples.

No less problematic than the symbolic (and in part also material) devaluation of the “evening of life” as a time of retirement, however, is the countervailing tendency to problematize a “retiree lifestyle” that has become prominent in recent times (van Dyk et al., 2013; Hasmanová Marhánkova, 2011). Under the discursive umbrella of an “activation” of old age, the image of retirement has come to serve as the epitome of a historically outdated mode of existence to be socially overcome. To the extent that, in the face of demographic change, the idea of a public collective provision for old age is discussed as a financial hangover, older adults themselves become a social burden that society can no longer afford (or may no longer want to afford). To solve the problem thus constructed, the delegitimization of retirement as a lifestyle is being resorted to more and more frequently—whereby the question as to what extent the social situations incriminated are existent at all or not rather fictitious is hardly ever raised in the public debate. Either way, older people are called upon not to lean back, but to keep the ball rolling. The “potentials of old age” is being discovered at every turn (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2008) and political efforts are being made to mobilize the resources of older people. A socially (if not economically) productive way of life, for instance, through practices of civic engagement, is becoming synonymous with “successful” ageing, not only in the political discourse on ageing but also—and even earlier—in gerontological discourse (Baltes & Baltes, 1990; Schroeter, 2004). Those who rest in old age, on the other hand, not only rust slowly, according to the new scientific-political image of old age, but also, intentionally or unintentionally, throw sand into the gears of economic and social dynamics—in a certain sense, this could be seen as an old-age activity, albeit one that is obviously unwelcome in the “ageing society.”

While retirement as a social construction of the last phase of life is increasingly being discredited in public discourses about ageing, the idea of just taking it easy in old age is still firmly anchored in the life plans of older people themselves, as earlier findings from our qualitative research indicate (Denninger et al., 2014; cf. also the concept of the “tranquil life” of our Taiwanese colleagues, Liou, 2016). However, this image of successful ageing, like the subjective future images of quality of life in old age in general, is subject to a major caveat shared by virtually all the individuals interviewed in our subproject: you must be or stay healthy. “As long as I am healthy and can do everything myself, that’s okay”: This statement by a 90+ years old pensioner could have been made in this or a similar way by almost all our interviewees. According to our findings, older people rarely have an absolute, unrestricted desire to live as long as possible. The ideal of longevity is rather often a qualified one, which as such is mostly closely tied to health criteria by the interviewees—and indeed in all countries included in the study (Ekerdt et al., 2017; Lang & Rupprecht, 2019a). In principle, people want to become “ancient,” maybe even join the illustrious circle of centenarians—but not unconditionally, only if and as long as body and mind cooperate. This “health fixation” of ageing ideals is complemented in the Western ageing cultures we have studied by an analogous autonomy focus of life plans: According to this, good old age (and ageing) takes place in autonomy. Dependence on third parties, although an unavoidable social normality for every person and at every age, is a horrifying image for many people in the final phase of life and one that consistently provokes strong defensive reactions (Ekerdt et al., 2023). The dependent old age—optionally translated as sick, bedridden, in need of support or care, and increasingly also demented—is to be avoided at all costs; it is the unwanted, rejected other of a successful life towards the end. “Better dead than seemingly dead”: This basic attitude devaluing the “fourth age” (Higgs & Gilleard, 2015) has been encountered again and again in the European-North American research context, moderated at best by religiously based motives of uncomplaining indulgence or explicit acceptance of an uninfluenceable fate of life.

The widespread fear of loss of control, in the sense of an ultimately externally determined way of life in old or very old age, represents the background for a last finding of our qualitative research to be documented here. This refers to the—as is the case with so many things in old age—very individual way in which ageing people deal with the knowledge of the finitude of their existence in everyday life . Under the formula of doing finitude, which tries to capture linguistically that finitude does not remain an abstract body of knowledge in the process of ageing, but rather becomes a “practical idea” that is actively processed as such, we have specifically investigated older people’s acting of finitude. In doing so, we have unearthed two central insights. First, we can identify a continuum of agency that runs between the poles of openness and control: While some older adults take the end of life and its concrete form as it comes (“Because it’s guaranteed to turn out differently than I imagine. So I don’t have to worry about it at all.”), others, conversely, devote a lot of energy to shaping it themselves. A cornerstone case in this latter sense in the German sample was a 79-year-old man (at the time of the interview) who, as a precaution, tried to take the circumstances of his death into his own hands as far as possible: He drew up a living will, became a member of an association for self-determined dying, dealt with the possibilities of old-age suicide that came into question for him personally, and rounded off his plans for Day X by purchasing an emergency cell phone that he programmed to send a call in the event of his suicide, thus ruling out the possibility of an undiscovered death. This interviewee finds inner peace, and with it the willingness to go on living, only in his intensive preparations for the end of life—in the feeling of having done “everything that one thinks one can do at all.”

Of course, there are also less strictly finality-related practices that nevertheless address the fact of the finitude of life—the life-time style of catching up on what was missed in the “previous life” described above could be mentioned in this sense, but also, for example, the early “down-sizing” of living space and material possessions (Ekerdt, 2020). The latter form of ageing is particularly interesting insofar as it forms a bridge between practices of finitude that operate more in self-reference and those that take place more having others in mind. For example, moving out of a house that has become too big and into a smaller apartment or into an assisted living facility on one’s own decision, and in the process necessarily getting rid of a good part of the household goods that have sometimes accumulated over decades, can be understood as a form of self-determined preparation for old age, which at the same time also aims at relieving other people, typically one’s own children, from the obligation of a later household liquidation. Such forms of future-oriented action, which focus not only on one’s own life but also—and perhaps significantly—on the lives of (significant) others, were encountered repeatedly in our interviews. In their most pronounced variant, they are completely absorbed in the reference to others, and one’s own life takes a back seat, whereas the life of the following generation(s) becomes the epitome of ageing as future. Generativity as a process of giving meaning to one’s life that points to the future (Erikson, 1959) becomes, as it were, a solution to the problem of finitude: “Children and grandchildren, that is the future. That’s the idea, that goes on, even if it doesn’t go on for me, but there is something going on. Basically, a part of me goes on, too”.

5.5 Conclusion: The Ambivalences of Old Age and Ageing

One thing above all needs to be noted as a result of our research-based observations: the process of ageing or, if you will, the process state of old age is, from the perspective and in the experience of older—and further ageing—people themselves, a thoroughly ambiguous, indeed ambivalent phenomenon. “Old age” is a constellation of life that is lived—and must be lived—individually, but that at the same time is always socially structured. As we hope to have made clear, everyday time and lifetime are deeply socially shaped in their complex interplay, so that even though no one can be relieved of living his or her own life, it can undoubtedly be said that there are no “individual” everyday and life-time styles in old age in a strict sense. It is true that single, partner and family households, and especially households with and without care obligations, differ strongly regarding the forms of indirect and direct social dependence that exist for the respective household members. But ultimately, they all —we all—lead “linked lives” in a variety of ways and at every stage of life (Moen & Hernandez, 2009).

The specific feature of old age in the sense of post-employment life is that it is a comparatively undetermined or at least underdetermined phase of life in institutional terms. Against this background, a good part of the life practice of older people refers to the existential concern to make the unavailability of lifetime available via everyday time practices. The knowledge about life’s finitude is of major social relevance for the individual shaping of life, irrespectively of the more or less successful practices of repressing death itself. But not only the management of the finitude of life is given to all ageing people as a task of old age. The double coding of old age in the sense of its relief and its devaluation is also, in one way or another, part of older people’s experience. “[A]ll retirees face the same two challenges of retirement: to manage its threat of marginality and to utilize its promise of freedom” (Weiss, 2005: 14)—but it is by no means the case that all older people would or even could make the same out of it. It would therefore be necessary to really take seriously the invocation of the “diversity of old age,” a notion which all too often degenerates into a mere scientific-political phrase.

In conclusion, however, we must be self-critical in stating that our own qualitative research was ultimately unable to meet this goal of accounting for diversity. At all research locations, our sample shows a socio-structural imbalance in favor of (upper) middle-class households—an overrepresentation that inevitably also determines the research results presented here and that to a certain extent distorts them. Future research on old age and ageing is urgently asked to avoid the practical reproduction of social inequalities that this bias implies.