What Is Old Age? My Old Age, Yours, and Everyone Else’s
One of the questions I’m most often asked when giving talks to older adults (more so than by my university students, who have a rather vague and overly distant idea of what old age is and what it means) concerns the beginning of old age. What they usually tell me is that 65 no longer marks the threshold of this stage of life, since it’s far removed from the image these people have of themselves. From my perspective, this is just a nuance that really lies in the approach, since we start from the idea of old age as a stage not only of decline, but as a mix of many negative things with which it’s very difficult (extremely, and understandably) to identify.
Therefore, it wouldn’t matter if we pushed the threshold back to 68 years and 6 months, or to 77, because many people (most of them) wouldn’t identify with it as their age approached that number. In fact, based on those premises, self-identifying as old would feel like a defeat. This has a lot to do with how we experience our own old age (other people’s old age is always easier, because having opinions about others is much more comfortable), and it’s as hard to define as our own lives. On that point, a 95-year-old woman I interviewed once told me: “We worked, but nothing else, and here we are.” She summed up an entire life in just a few words.
For this post, I analyzed some of the interviews I conducted with older adults to collect how they saw it. In my research, I considered 65 as the entry into old age, based on the relationship people have with the welfare state in Spain; it’s from age 65 that we can access different services or specific resources. In other words, our age marks our relationship with public policies (or some of their aspects, to be more precise). Even if additional requirements are asked of us, having reached a certain age is the key factor.
For example, pensions: although the regulations have changed — and a certain number of contribution years is now required — 65 is (or was) the age from which one can access this specific protection system. Likewise, 18 marks the threshold of adulthood, the age to vote or to buy alcohol, for example (in Spain, though not in every country).
This is the only factor we share, the one that unites us: the threshold. After that, old age can appear differently for each person, both in the subjective reconsideration of that threshold (at what age did I become old) and in how we live it or define it. Let’s not forget that aging has no single script, though it has many stereotypes. When we listen to those going through this stage, it becomes clear that old age, more than an age or an event, is a subjective, changing, and often resisted experience.
Among its contents (what shapes it, what defines it) is retirement, which sometimes appears as a before and after, although it’s not always experienced as the beginning of old age. Nor does it mean the same for everyone. For some people, it’s a liberation; for others, a total disorientation. “Since I retired, I feel like I’m no good for anything,” Diego’s grandfather, 82, told me.
The truth is that there’s something about retirement that deactivates social recognition: what once gave identity (work, public role) disappears, and there’s not always an alternative narrative to fill that void. In short, we’re left a bit empty of “content,” so to speak. Though there are also those who experience it with relief: “After 46 years of paying in, a person really needs a rest,” another 70-year-old told me.
Another person — whom I mentioned in another of my posts (I was saddened to learn he had passed away, and I wanted to honor him that way) — told me: “I don’t consider myself an ex-anything (…) It’s like when they say ex-bullfighter. A bullfighter remains one until he dies.” The phrase might sound exaggerated, but it holds a simple truth: there are those who don’t accept that age, or ceasing to practice a profession, defines who they are.
And that’s where the crux lies: when does old age begin? When does one stop being an adult and become an “older person”? Is it determined by an ID card, by access to a pension — as I mentioned earlier — by a fall, or by someone else’s gaze? Are we old when we want to be, or when others decide we are? Do we have any say in it?
“I don’t know… it depends on the person, on their mindset,” said one of my interviewees, age 85. “I don’t consider myself old,” said another woman, 67. Some people reject the label “old,” as if saying the word invoked something that still doesn’t belong. “Old are the furniture,” joked a 67-year-old woman — but not everyone felt that way. Not Emilia, of the same age, who told me bluntly: “The word that defines me best is old… ‘older person’ means nothing to me.”
Old age isn’t easily accepted — not so much because of age itself, but because of what it implies in terms of capacity. Of autonomy. Of strength. Of dignity, to be very direct. But I think, above all, because of how it affects one’s self-image. The dividing line, as most seemed to agree, isn’t in the calendar but in the body. “I’m afraid to climb the ladder,” “I can’t carry the bags anymore,” “I can’t tighten a screw.” These were common phrases, far from dramatic, that marked the real thresholds. Old age appears when one depends on others, or when comparison with one’s former self becomes painful.
But I also found discourses of resistance to the idea of old age as a change in oneself or one’s habits, as a loss of ability: “I get up at seven, go walking for an hour, rain or shine,” said a 73-year-old woman. “Yesterday I fixed the faucet myself,” said a man with rheumatism, age 82. And another woman, also 82, explained why she preferred to do the housework instead of outsourcing it: “Because otherwise I’ll end up like my husband (who had dementia at the time). If I start sitting down, I’ll stop moving.” In other words, there are also different forms of resistance to fulfilling all those externally imposed stereotypes.
My interviewees showed me that aging isn’t necessarily, or always, entering new territory, but continuing a way of being in the world — with some adjustments. The key, for me, is whether that world still allows one to have agency, to make decisions, to organize daily life. This is where (I know I’m insistent on this) attachment to one’s home, neighborhood, and familiar spaces comes into play. If we’re allowed to stay and maintain our routines. Remaining in the same environment represents continuity, capacity, control.
Returning to the threshold, many people set a symbolic limit: “Old age, real old age, starts at 85… if we get there.” But my feeling is that this tends to come from people who see that age as far off (this person was 70 at the time). Before that, what exists is “less youth,” but not a clearly recognized identity as an “older person.” Perhaps what’s missing is an intermediate category that doesn’t provoke so much rejection — one that’s neither infantilizing nor terminal. Perhaps because old age, as a deeply subjective and intimate experience, is rarely lived linearly and, without a doubt, is not the same for everyone.
