On Being (Not) Old: Agency, Self‐care, and Life‐course Aspirations in the United States

Abstract

This article examines U.S. endeavors to eradicate old age. Drawing on research with older, mostly white, Americans across social classes, I probe how older people engage in “healthy,” “successful” aging as a moral project, health identity, and way of approaching the life course. Moving beyond influential literature on biopolitics and biomedicine that tends to treat medicine, science, and biopolitical governance as overdetermined causal forces, I explore instead how a confluence of factors—including cultural ideologies of personhood and independence, medical interventions, social hierarchies, and individual experiences—together lead to the stigmatization of oldness. Social inequalities also matter, as an ethos of self‐care and individual agency to ward off oldness is most pronounced among the able‐bodied and socioeconomic elite. The aim is to illuminate the convergence of factors that stigmatize oldness in contemporary North America, while highlighting the ways that class profoundly figures in people's varied attempts to not be old.

On Vulnerability, Resilience, and Age: Older Americans Reflect on the Pandemic

“…1 So, I quickly transitioned to online and phone research, turning my attention to older interlocutors' experiences of the pandemic. As I had been conducting ethnographic fieldwork already with older Americans, focusing on their engagement with healthysuccessful-aging discourse (Lamb 2014(Lamb , 2018, it made the most sense for me to draw mainly from the same group of participants for the new pandemic-focused project. In the virtual interview conversations, I was sometimes accompanied by undergraduate student research assistants, and many older interlocutors expressed their pleasure in engaging with the students, especially as other crossgenerational interactions were curtailed.…”

“…Finally, I have been struck by new ways my interlocutors are claiming the identity of being 'old,' as an unexpectedly motivating identity. Anyone familiar with US cultures of aging will know that Americans have long eschewed identifying as old, an identity widely perceived as negative, pejorative, ageist, and something "other" than one's "ageless" self (Gillick 2006;Kaufman 1985;Lamb 2018). This is a phenomenon I had been critically scrutinizing in my US research for some years (Lamb 2014(Lamb , 2018.…”

“…Anyone familiar with US cultures of aging will know that Americans have long eschewed identifying as old, an identity widely perceived as negative, pejorative, ageist, and something "other" than one's "ageless" self (Gillick 2006;Kaufman 1985;Lamb 2018). This is a phenomenon I had been critically scrutinizing in my US research for some years (Lamb 2014(Lamb , 2018. Suddenly, when the pandemic struck, I began noticing the very same interlocutors who had resisted calling themselves old, now claiming the identity:…”

Energy, Aging, and Neurasthenia: A Historical Perspective

“…Popular slogans such as "healthy aging" (Fries 1980), "successful aging" (Kahn & Fries 1987) and "productive aging" (Butler and Gleason 1985) all express the concern with old age as an unproductive burden on society (Lamb 2018). Consequently, they promote a compression of morbidity, effectively arguing that morbidity in old age should be as limited as possible (Moody 1995).…”

Promoting older women’s mental health: Insights from Baby Boomers

“…The constructs and concomitants of ageing are complex. For example, recent anthropological work in the US explored the ways in which older people are expected to take steps to resist ageing [6]. Medical practice contributes to this endeavour, but "anti-old" attitudes and behaviour are class-related (people higher on the socioeconomic scale appear more committed to the moral imperative of youthfulness) and confined to the able-bodied [6].…”