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6.1 Between Appreciation and Exclusion: The Paradoxical Politics of Age(ing)

Age and ageing in contemporary society are characterized by a fundamental, profound ambivalence. On the one hand, demographic change and the resulting expected increase in the presence of older people in social life are recognized as a social trend for the future. The “long life society,” in which a high life expectancy has become the norm, is seen as an achievement of civilization and a sociopolitical challenge. On the other hand, however, views and semantics of an “ageing society” continue to dominate the public discourse, with even scientifically framed positions sometimes contributing to promote threatening demographic scenarios. Paradoxically, the very political initiatives that aim to enhance the value of old age against this background ultimately undermine their own intentions by contributing to framing old age as a social problem.

In this mixed situation, the project Ageing as Future started with an intention to contribute to informing the “ageing society” about itself. Its findings, which are now available, are suitable for a different way of thinking about the presumed “problem” of age(ing): Specifically, the problem being one that late-modern society has with itself—and which, to put it casually, its older adults must pay for. In the following, we will develop this argument step by step.

The socially prevailing descriptions of old age are characterized by the fact that they are exaggerated in one or the other way and lack balance. Either they tend toward an idealization of old age, which is one-sidedly associated with positive qualities such as serenity, experience, and wisdom. Traditional views of sprightly, dignified old people then appear in idealized images of happy family gatherings, dominated by figures such as the grandmother telling pleasant stories while doing needlework by the fireplace or the grandfather who is buddy-buddy with his grandchildren and always ready to allow exceptions to the educational principles of their parents with a wink. On the other hand, however, and more often than not, a deficient image of this last phase of life, which now often lasts several decades (Lessenich, 2014), is shown. Accordingly, old age is characterized by limitations in physical and mental capacity, social networks seem to be thinning inexorably, so old people tend to be perceived as lonely people. At the same time, the financial burden of pension payments and care services for older people is regularly discussed, sometimes to the point that they live at the expense of younger people and would diminish the prospects of adequate provision in old age for the next generations. The past is then pitted against the future: While older people are denied their own future prospects, the social benefits and support they have acquired over the course of their lives are seen as a mortgage on the life chances of future generations.

As solutions to this supposed problem, two different paths are recommended to older people on which they can move toward the end of life—for their own good and that of the public. As contrasting as these two paths may seem at first, the norms of “a good old age” (de Paula Couto et al., 2022a; Rothermund, 2019) that underlie each of them equally promote the social devaluation and exclusion of old age. Although both age norms, that of disengagement and that of active ageing, contain positive elements, they often become converted into their opposite in social reality. When misused, both norms can nourish the collective wishful thinking that old age and older people should remain hidden from public attention: Be it because they restrict their interactions to their own age group and to their private lives (i.e., by adhering to the disengagement norm), or because they are able to adapt so successfully to their surrounding that they are no longer noticed as older people (i.e., by adhering to the norm of active ageing).

The norm of disengagement unquestionably reflects desirable aspects of old age. It is an expression of the possibility of shaping one’s life in old age free from external obligations and entirely according to one’s own ideas. It guarantees the freedom and the temporal resources to come to terms with the finitude of one’s own existence, to focus on the essential things in life, and to ultimately be able to “let go” and to bring one’s own life story to a good ending. The norm of active ageing, on the other hand, comes with the prospect of being able to participate in society even in old age by maintaining physical fitness and mental sharpness, and by taking an active approach to everyday life. Those who stay fit also remain socially alive and will be able to enjoy retirement as a time when life is anything but tranquilized.

Thus, as much as both age norms have positive implications, or at least could have, they turn into their opposite under the given social conditions. To solve the “problems” of an ageing society, both norms are misused and perverted by the politics of ageing (Denninger et al., 2014). The norm of disengagement then becomes a norm of renunciation: Ideally, the disengaged, self-oriented older adults no longer make any claims, neither on their immediate social environment nor on the social community or on “politics.” The good old age becomes private, it takes place within one’s own four walls or behind the walls of institutionalized older people’s homes, and it is undemanding and self-sufficient. Nevertheless, it is precisely this self-sufficient type of old age which, because of its perceived non-sociality, even a-sociality, is always in danger of being portrayed as a social burden, as a social cost factor whose unproductive lifestyle is at the expense of the rest of society. Under this framing, disengagement implies renunciation, and even with far-reaching renunciation, the remaining demands are seen as critical consumption of scarce societal resources.

The constellation is exactly the opposite regarding the norm of active ageing, which in turn may represent a threat rather than an opportunity when becoming a productivity constraint. For not every activity in old age is able to satisfy the activation norm; rather, socially beneficial behaviors that serve the common good, from volunteering to caring for grandchildren, are primarily in demand. The activation norm then becomes a norm of what is considered to be age-appropriate behavior, which obliges older people to make their contribution in the service of the community—while at the same time forces them to actively keep themselves healthy, fit, and mobile, so that they can make their contribution for as long as possible. The participation opportunity embedded in the activation norm thus turns into an obligation to participate, the practical fulfillment of which is a prerequisite for the appreciation of old age.

Old age is construed as a problem that old people can only try to deal with by either renunciation of consumption or by active contributions to societal needs, without ever being able to fully meet expectations or to not be seen as a burden. This interpretive context is rooted in a deep-seated conviction, firmly anchored in both individual and collective consciousness, that life in old age is worthless. Here lies the core of the matter: in the generally shared certainty that “real” life takes place before and ends with entering old age—and thus long before death. Anyone who is “really” old has therefore nothing more to gain from life and has also nothing more to give. At most, it can then still be a matter of at least not being a burden to others—younger people. In the end, the only thing that helps is avoiding old age, either by fighting it and adapting to younger people or by disappearing from the scene and not disturbing the lives of others any further.

This societal conviction of the worthlessness of old age acquires an ethical quality in the individual and collective treatment of old age: It justifies the unequal treatment of older people, it makes their neglect and marginalization seem logical, it even asks for these inequalities. Older people have hardly any room left for self-confidence, because as soon as they appear in public at all, they are somehow always a nuisance: Sometimes they delay business, sometimes they give unsolicited good advice; if they do not adapt to social expectations, they are considered stubborn; if, on the other hand, they try to keep up and appear as young as possible, then they run the risk of being perceived as mortifying. Interestingly, the tendency to exclude older people by demanding inconspicuousness and modesty from them is, according to a recent study (Martin & North, 2021), particularly pronounced among people who otherwise express strong egalitarian attitudes. On the one hand, they are massively opposed to sexism and racism; on the other hand, they are convinced that older people should not stand in the way of the younger generation. The age category thus stands, much more than the gender or race categories, for the counter-image of a successful life, for what is socially undesirable and to be split off from one’s own self—which makes unequal treatment appear not only appropriate but even a necessity according to the norm of fairness.

In this respect, it is not surprising that the widespread forms of both everyday and institutionalized discrimination against older people attract little public attention or even criticism. In essence, the numerous discriminatory practices older people face (Ayalon & Tesch-Römer, 2018; Rothermund et al., 2021b; Rothermund & Mayer, 2009) have broad social acceptance, if not explicit approval. This is particularly true of rigid age limits in working life and in the transition to retirement: In many (mostly European) countries, there is a statutory exit from the labor market that is linked to a certain chronological age (e.g., 67 years in Germany). These strict age limits are sometimes abstractly problematized as being too rigid and inflexible and possibly also criticized in concrete terms when people are personally affected by it. In all other respects, however, when it comes to the old “others”, the regulated generational change in the company—despite all the talk of mixed-age teams—is still considered to be functional in economic and organizational terms.

At the same time, the contradiction remains unaddressed, namely, that precisely those people who have just been (dis)qualified as being “too old” for the first labor market are simultaneously targeted by a state engagement policy that never tires of emphasizing the importance, indeed indispensability, of social productivity in post-employment life. Similarly paradoxical are the calls and reminders to take precautions and to prepare for one’s old age that older people are confronted with in an increasingly urgent manner: What initially appears as a societal conviction that preparation for and economic security in old age is important and meaningful suddenly becomes a political expectation directed at the ageing population. It is not public institutions that are held responsible for generally shared needs for provision, instead, the individual subjects—here older people—are required to take care of themselves and their own future.

Interestingly, the social idea of the worthlessness of life in old age, which is the major source of the diverse mechanisms of age discrimination, is also internalized by older people themselves, thus contributing to the reproduction of practices that devalue and exclude old age, or subjectively prolong and thereby cement such practices. The fact that the unequal treatment experienced socially by older people is duplicated in the form of self-discrimination (Rothermund, 2018; Rothermund et al., 2021a, b; Voss et al., 2018a) does not, of course, mean that they are “themselves to blame” for their social exclusion. Rather, it points to the complexity of the foundations and to the widespread appeal of the “social imaginary” of life being worthless in old age (Higgs & Gilleard, 2021) that underlies the social phenomenon that is referred to in international scientific as well as political debates as “ageism” and for which, quite significantly, there does not even exist a distinct word in some languages (e.g., in German). We will return to this point later.

6.2 Of Variability and Vulnerability: There Is Nothing Like Age(ing) per se

The manifold forms of factual devaluation of old age and everyday practical exclusion of older people culminate in recurring debates about a possible “abolition of old age”: What if the biological ageing process could be slowed down, stopped, postponed? What if it were possible to “defeat” ageing by means of medical technology? What at first seems to be a somewhat whimsical, playful continuation of classical ideas of the fountain of youth and timeless utopias of eternal life, nevertheless provides deeper insights into the tendency to not take the reality of old age and ageing seriously in our time. The imagination of a life without old age and a society without the old is ultimately only the radicalization of prevailing practices of reinterpreting old age on the one hand (e.g., in the idiom of the “young old”; van Dyk & Lessenich, 2009b), and on the other hand of its individual denial and collective repression: “Old” is then basically a designation of something that is different from regular life, and the “really” old only get to see relatives and the nursing staff. In the depth of psychosocial dealings with the unavoidable fact of ageing, we see a fatal escape from the reality principle: The old are punished for embodying the social fact of old age(ing), for holding up to us the mirror of our personal future—presented as a story of decay (Martens et al., 2005).

Yet old age and ageing are actually quite different from what is painted in the negative views that feed the bad utopia of society as an age-free zone. This is probably the most important empirical finding of the project Ageing as Future: Old age is not a uniform phenomenon; it is as diverse as life itself. There is also nothing like old age “as such,” because growing older is a process, a constant ageing that knows no clear boundaries and thresholds. In fact, ageing is a long quiet river that does not flow into the sea of old age at a fixed date—be it the departure of the youngest child or the death of the partner, the day of retirement, or the 80th birthday. The paths to old age, the individual courses of the rivers of ageing, so to speak, are extremely diverse; none is truly identical to the other. Even after critical life events such as a stroke or the diagnosis of a fatal illness, not all biographies are gray; even then, a wide variety of ways of dealing with the perhaps elementary experience of ageing can be observed: That things in life are suddenly no longer as they were before.

Our quantitative and qualitative findings show a remarkable variability of age(ing) in two respects: between individuals and within individuals. The variability of age(ing) between individuals refers to its social-structural dimension. There is no less diversity of life situations, life courses, and lifestyles among older people than among younger people, that is, people in adolescence or adulthood. How and why should it be any different? Why should millions of people who grew up in very different parental homes in their younger years come from very different social milieus, have gone through very different educational paths, can look back on very different employment biographies, are integrated into very different family constellations and social networks, have very unequal financial opportunities, and so on: why should this diverse assortment of people, as they transition into retirement or reach a certain chronological age—whether 70, 80, 90, or 100—all of a sudden converge, merging all at once into an amorphous mass of “old people” who exhibit uniform social characteristics and psychological dispositions? To pose the question in this way is to declare absurd the background assumption of a uniform, homogeneous phase of life called “old age.” And yet, the homogenization of “old age” is common social practice: Depending on one’s point of view, all older people are considered to either enjoy being home or enjoy traveling, to either be spry or decrepit, well off or threatened by poverty, stubborn or wise. Whether they are to be envied or pitied, a burden, or an opportunity, the most common thing is to make the simplest possible collective judgment about old age and the old.

Contrary to that idea, the social reality of old age in the early twenty-first century, as it emerges in the findings of the project Ageing as Future, stands in sharp contrast to such undifferentiated and one-dimensional views on ageing. Both individual and institutional, material, and cultural factors contribute to the inherently multidimensional heterogeneity of old age. Different personality traits and formative life experiences influence the different ways in which people deal with issues such as preparing for old age or structuring their daily lives in old age. Equally, factors such as their own family circumstances, their (objective and subjective) state of health, or their endowment with financial resources and educational capital can be important. The rather low normative and institutional imprint of older age compared to other phases of life is also responsible for its many faces (Riley et al., 1994): After leaving the labor force, there are no longer any chronologically fixed events or tasks (such as compulsory schooling) or social transitional norms (such as moving out of the parental household at the latest when starting one’s own family). Instead, older people are free to decide whether they remain as long as possible in their current living environment or, on the contrary, whether they make an early effort to switch to forms of assisted living; they may choose to live alone for decades, or they may remarry even at the highest age, possibly also with persons of their own sex.

To avoid any misconceptions: It is not the case that in old age “everything is possible,” both individually and structurally (which, of course, is by no means the case even in younger years). But empirically, there is a wide variety of life design patterns and realized life plans also among older people. In turn, cultural factors are important for their range and specific design, which could be shown in the context of our project, especially through the international comparative perspective: From the question of when a person is considered “old” to that of what meaning is ascribed to the end of life or the finitude of life and what practical consequences this attribution of meaning has, striking differences are found not only between older people within a country but also between older people of different age cultures. These differences obtained not only between Western and East Asian societies (represented in our project by Hong Kong and Taiwan), but also between the European and the North American cultural contexts (e.g., the US-American practice of old-age employment, i.e., the absence of a mandatory retirement age policy, which seems extremely “foreign” in a German background of experience, has already been mentioned here).

Perhaps even more surprising and in contrast to the common understanding of old age as a homogeneous phenomenon is the fact that there is a high degree of variability in age-related beliefs and experiences not only between individuals but also within individuals, that is, within a single person. A central research interest of our project was related to exactly this intraindividual diversity of age(ing), more precisely to its context-dependence and domain-specificity. Our findings impressively show exactly this: Different life domains each have their own criteria and rules of being old. In addition, each older person has different abilities and resources, options for social connections and relations in different life domains, leading to different self-evaluations in these contexts. One and the same person can, for example, experience themselves as “old” in the domain of work and occupation because they feel set back within the company or not valued in terms of their competencies and qualifications. Simultaneously the same person may still perceive themselves as clearly “younger” in the domain of partnership and family, whether because they have entered into a new love relationship or because they are developing new life relationships as a result of the birth of grandchildren.

It is not only the subjective perception of age and ageing that varies depending on the life domain. Personal evaluations of old age and older people are also strongly dependent on which life domain the people we surveyed had in mind: If, for example, older people are seen as being in their element with regard to religious life, they are more likely to be seen as being in a deficient position with regard to their social life. These perceptions about older adults’ lives or about life in old age, in turn, change across the lifetime: Younger people tend to have more negative views of old age(ing) than those for whom old age and the experience of old age are already a personal reality. In this regard different life domains are also important: In the domains of work and health, for example, with approaching old age people become more inclined to credit old age—and their own ageing—with positive attributes and to picture it in a less gloomy light. On the other hand, when it comes to family, friends, and leisure time, 50- to 60-year-olds, i.e., those who are about to but have not yet transitioned to old age, have the most negative views of old age—a seemingly paradoxical distancing from the age group to which they themselves will soon belong. Just like positive ageing experiences in a life domain that is of high personal importance can brighten the overall picture of old age or transfer to the assessment of other life domains, similar generalization effects can also occur with negative views of ageing that taint the outlook on ageing in other domains or in general. In this respect, both positive and negative spirals in the individual handling of ageing experiences are conceivable, including such dynamics during which older people “adjust” themselves in a world of objectively limited possibilities and perhaps even feel comfortable in it (Ong et al., 2009; Rothermund & Brandtstädter, 2003b; Ryff et al., 1998).

In addition to variability, however, a second meta-finding of our empirical study needs to be reported at this point, namely, the vulnerability of old age. This result of the Ageing as Future project again has two dimensions, because the vulnerability of old age can be understood in such a way that on the one hand vulnerability restricts the variability just described and on the other hand—in an opposite way—strengthens it at the same time. This complex connection, which may seem confusing at first, will be briefly explained in the following.

On the one hand, old age can be described as a particularly vulnerable phase of life (Kruse, 2017). Vulnerability is a defining characteristic of human life, at basically any age: As social beings, we are existentially dependent on others, on their care and concern, from the first to the last day of our lives. No human being is truly autonomous—independent—in the conduct of their life; everyone, even the supposedly strongest, is in need of support from others, and vulnerable in that very neediness. Going beyond this fundamental vulnerability, which is constitutive of being human, however, there is indeed a specific vulnerability at the end of life—and the commonsense concept of old age is ultimately only a cipher, technically speaking a proxy variable, for precisely this form of social dependence that is specific for old age. To the extent that, with advancing age, experiences of illness and the need for care simply become statistically more probable, to the extent that the decrepitude of life announces itself on the horizon and life becomes recognizable as a long path “towards death,” the vulnerability of their existence becomes a shared body of knowledge of older—“very old” —people. In this respect, and only in this sense, one can speak of a standardization of living conditions and a de-differentiation of within-person capacities and resources in old age (e.g., La Fleur et al., 2018): What older people objectively share with each other is their increasingly scarce remaining lifetime, their relative proximity to death.

On the other hand, however, there are also variable states of vulnerability among older people, even among the oldest of the old. Apart from the general truth that is valid for people of all ages that every day lived brings us one step closer to death (which, although general, leads to social exclusion tendencies only with regard to the “really” old), it must be noted that by no means every older person is vulnerable to the same degree. This holds already for fundamental facts as their subjective remaining life expectancy, on which older people of the same age differ massively, and even more so regarding their desired longevity (de Paula Couto et al., 2023; Lang & Rupprecht, 2019a; Rupprecht & Lang, 2020). Not all older people want to maximize their lifespan, and by no means all of them think they will reach a certain age, such as living to see their 80th birthday. Statistically, too, not every very old person is subject to the same objective risk of having to face fundamental limitations to their quality of life, with different lived biographies being associated with massively different prospects. Even more importantly, the possibilities and abilities to deal with such limitations—should they actually occur—in a satisfactory way, are certainly not equally distributed. Thus, although it is true that all people are vulnerable in old age, their vulnerabilities are not the same. Instead, age-related vulnerability and coping with vulnerability depend on material resources and social networks, on biographical experiences and on personal ego strength.

The future actions of older and ageing people are shaped by this constellation of ultimately differentiated vulnerability: With the increasingly concrete life experience of vulnerability, the subjective urgency to make provisions for the contingencies of old age in the form of insurance and living wills also increases. However, the age at which this sense of urgency sets in, whether at 70 or already at 40, and how it then translates into practical action, depends on the circumstances of each individual case (Lang & Rupprecht, 2021). The vulnerability of old age is thus not the destroyer of all inequalities; on the contrary, it only sets the shared framework within which the social diversity of ageing emerges.

6.3 Appreciating Age(ing): But How?

Old age and ageing, as it should have become clear by now, is an ambivalent experience—for the ageing people themselves as well as for a society that is confronted with the collective reality of a long and constantly lengthening life but does not quite know how to deal with it. The world of ageing is no less ambiguous for ageing research, that is, for those who observe the individual as well as the societal ageing process from a scientific perspective, which itself is never completely free of normative judgments. As such a “biased” science committed to its research object, gerontology, and ageing research face a dilemma that is hardly manageable: In principle, these sciences would like to avoid the age category and its often negative social connotations, without, however, preaching the abovementioned doctrine that “age can be abolished”.

In the light of the unavoidable fact that the demarcation of a certain phase of life—the phase of “old age”—from other phases of life also leads to an exclusion, at least categorically, and thus possibly unintentionally paves the way for processes of social exclusion, ageing researchers age might be inclined to dispense with the category of age altogether. However, as much as this is a contradiction in terms and would not be an appropriate scientific or socio-political solution to the aforementioned problem, ageing research will continue to be in danger of contributing to the “segregation” of age.

However, it is precisely the societally special status of old age that should be avoided in the future, according to the common conclusion drawn from our interdisciplinary research on Ageing as Future, which has been conducted for more than a decade. For every social assignment of a special status, no matter how well-meaning the intention, tends to backfire like a boomerang on the group that is provided with this demarcation feature: The most recent experiences with the construction of older people as a “risk group,” whose increased vulnerability to the coronavirus has been used to justify their isolation in nursing homes and thus their social exclusion, can be taken as evidence of this connection (Ayalon et al., 2021). However, instead of standardizing “the older people” in large groups and characterizing them as “special”—whether in need of protection, in want of productivity, or worthy of worship—it would be time to understand and negotiate “old age” simply as what it basically is: just another phase of life. Nothing else (and “different”), as self-evident as the previous stages of life, and as the possibly still following ones.

Collectively and matter-of-factly accepting the social reality of a long life, and thus of an individually prolonged old-age life, would be the key to the personal recognition of old age as an independent phase of life, as a period of life of its own right and quality. Both sides of the experience of old age, the individual and the collective, the personal as well as the social, are closely intertwined: The actors and institutions of old-age policy are called upon to take into account the variability and vulnerability of old age outlined here, so that not only a few privileged older people, and also not only a majority of older people, but actually all older people are empowered to recognize and realize old age as a period of life that promises a meaningful present and future, and is experienced as a source of personal life satisfaction.

Only if older people have the chance to participate in and thus become part of societal reality and only if they can choose from a set of different possibilities and opportunities will it be possible to structurally improve the quality of life of older people. These outcomes are commonly understood as resulting from purely individual competencies and qualities but should instead consistently be framed as social and societal problems. This requires a radical shift in perspective: The willingness and ability to accept the reality of ageing and to recognize old age as opening unique possibilities for new experiences would finally no longer be solely considered as challenges for ageing individuals, but would be discussed as what they are, namely, as public issues (Mills, 2016).

The “society of long lives” will only do justice to this designation if it is understood by all as a new social constellation in which it is not only statistically “normal” to enjoy a longer life, but in which there is, as a matter of course, a “right to be old”—or, formulated more generally, the equal right in any phase of life to be allowed to be as one is, including “being old,” in case of doubt.

This, in turn, would mean breaking the reproduction cycle of extremely negative views of old age (mostly projected onto the highest, “fourth” age, Higgs & Gilleard, 2015, 2021) and countering the extreme biologism of the debate on old age, which is expressed in mottoes like “health is the most important thing” or even “without health everything is nothing.” In this sense, gerontology and ageing research should also critically examine its own implicit normative assumptions and should break away from its widespread orientation towards questions of health promotion, medicalization, and activation—in particular its fixation on the functionality of age and the instrumentality of the old (Kocks & Unkhoff, 2021). Much would be gained in terms of age-related policy if at least scientific interest were directed primarily toward those topics that are of real importance for older people and their life satisfaction in old age: That is, on questions of material resources and social integration, social participation, and recognition.Footnote 1

Regarding the social categories of gender and race, the political-social struggle over such issues of recognition is commonplace today. Sexism and racism, #metoo and #blacklivesmatter are now—and rightly so—receiving a great deal of public attention. For the time being, however, this does not apply to age and its recognition deficits: #themtoo or #oldlivesmatter are unknown as hashtags. Ageism is not only generally uncommon as a political concept designating a relevant societal problem; in German-speaking countries, there is not even a word for this phenomenon. Introducing the topic of ageism into the social debate would be an invaluable advance for age(ing) policy, but also in the longer term for improving the living conditions of older people. Should the present book be able to contribute, even modestly, to this progress, it would have served its purpose.