I thought about starting this post in a provocative way, saying that old age does not exist, but that seemed very misleading to me. What does not exist is the idea of old age that seems to be offered from certain conceptual frameworks, but old age, as a life stage, and ageing, as a process we live every day, do exist.
There is something deeply curious in how we socially approach and think about age. No one thinks that childhood or youth are experienced by everyone in the same way. We accept that experiences are different because they are shaped by social class, gender, territory (is the experience of youth the same in rural and urban settings?), health (and that’s without even mentioning disability), life experiences or educational trajectories. However, when we talk about old age, it seems that all of that suddenly disappears and that previous differences hover over older people, yes, but without landing. As if Amancio Ortega’s old age were the same as that of your neighbour on the fifth floor.
Based on this “forgetting” of different life experiences and the conditions that accompany them, millions of people (very different from one another) become part of a single category: “older people”. As if reaching a certain age erased previous differences. As if from the age of 65 onwards all people shared the same problems, the same needs, the same desires and the same ways of living.
But what do a 66‑year‑old person and a 102‑year‑old person really have in common?
The question seems absurd when formulated like this, because the differences may seem obvious, although in reality our thinking would automatically go to issues such as frailty, dependency, sight, hearing, overlooking deeper matters. These two people have lived radically different historical contexts and may (not necessarily derived from the above) have opposite economic situations, incompatible life trajectories and even very different ways of understanding the world. They belong to different generations (their relationship would also be “intergenerational”, that word that is sometimes deprived of real content, reduced to a matter of opposition). And yet, we talk about both as if they were part of the same homogeneous social group.
We are not only facing a difference in age. It is a difference in historical experience. In lives. A person born a century ago has lived through a war, a dictatorship, radical changes in the role of women, technological transformations and completely different forms of social interaction. Even the experience of seemingly universal matters — widowhood, work, retirement, motherhood or caregiving — changes enormously depending on the specific generation to which you belong. I dare say that even grief is experienced differently, and not because it hurts less — I would never think that — but because socially the way we understand it is different. This is something I have thought about since interviewing very old women who were still grieving the loss of a sibling in childhood, but who spoke about it with a certain normality, because losing a sibling was not unusual. Again: these were 90‑year‑old women who still missed their brother who died at age 8.
Returning to our topic: despite these differences, we continue to think of a single old age, from a reductionist approach that (it cannot be otherwise) has consequences for the effectiveness of public and social approaches to it. When we reduce old age to a uniform category, we end up building single (canned, I would say) solutions for very diverse problems, aimed at people with major differences between them, without paying any attention to their specificities. We talk about “older people” as if they shared identical technological needs (if they had any), the same problems of loneliness or the same relationship with autonomy and dependency. As if they even shared identity.
However, neither loneliness, nor vulnerability, nor even the physical experience of ageing is the same for everyone. It is not at any moment of life, and it is not when ageing either.
Some people over 80 have an extremely intense social life, and much younger people are profoundly isolated. There are older people who experience their old age marked by precariousness and others who have enormous economic resources. There are those who live retirement as liberation (or as a recovery of themselves, of their time) and those who experience it as a loss of identity. There are older women sustaining the care of children, grandchildren or dependent husbands while we continue to represent old age exclusively through fragility and passivity, as receivers and never as emitters. We insist on imagining “old age” as a kind of uniform territory.
I do not think there is malice in the ageism described above; I think it is simply ignorance. Perhaps the category of old age, when understood as homogeneous, works as a comfortable simplification. And in such an overwhelmingly complex world, it is understandable that some people advocate conceptual simplification. Careful: it is understandable, but not defensible, nor inevitable. It is still not right, however comfortable it may be for brains exhausted from receiving infinite information.
The previous reasoning would assume that, from a certain moment onwards, life trajectory and experience would cease to matter. As if, upon ageing, people stopped being concrete and became abstract, becoming simply “an older person”. Old age understood as a stage that dilutes differences of class, gender, territory or biography under an apparently homogeneous collective identity.
And of course. Everything designed with that all‑covering homogeneity in mind (and covering everyone) will inevitably be wrong, limited.
This becomes especially visible (bringing back here the ideas that have been hovering over me in my recent posts) when we observe how many technologies aimed at older people are designed. It feels as if many of them start from an idea of old age that no longer exists. An old age built from passivity, isolation, technological incapacity and absolute dependency. As if all older people had exactly the same relationship with their bodies, with technology or with the world.
But the problem is not only technological, of course. It also happens in public discourse. The automatic association between old age and loneliness is a good example. We have repeated so many times that older people are alone that we have almost turned loneliness into a natural characteristic of ageing. As if growing older necessarily implied isolation, sadness or social disconnection.
Perhaps one of the most perverse consequences of this assimilation of imposed homogeneity is precisely that: stopping asking what lies behind each concrete life. Inevitably, when we turn millions of people into an abstract category, we stop looking at the material conditions, previous trajectories and accumulated inequalities that shape ageing.
People with a non‑contributory pension do not age in the same way as those who have assets, but we forget this. Perhaps this forgetting is what leads some to defend pension reforms that would worsen the lives of so many people. Perhaps this is what makes some forget that people who have worked all their lives in physically demanding jobs do not age in the same way as those who have had resources and time, that a woman who has sustained decades of invisible care does not age in the same way as someone who never had to care for others. And that the old ages of some and others are, inevitably, very different.
On the contrary, recognising the heterogeneity of old age forces us to recognise that social inequalities do not disappear with age and that old age does not serve as a shield against life’s hardships. Recognising the intragroup heterogeneity of old age would allow us to design approaches to the issues that cross it in a more effective, more inclusive, more just way.
We need to stop thinking of old age as a closed category and start thinking of it as what it really is: a profoundly diverse experience, shaped by inequalities, trajectories and different ways of inhabiting the world.
