Age Life Cycle

Of all life cycles, age is the most fundamental; we enter into it at birth and exit at death. We start aging from the moment we are born, but our quality of aging varies. Weaving is a useful metaphor for engagements in and disengagements from the life cycles of family, education, work and leisure. The warp as the length of our life span varies by historic time period and social location which limit our life opportunities, further complicated by biological inheritance.

Age, or time, is a talent all of us have. We can squander it, treasure it, or maximize its usefulness and meaning to us and those to whom we are functionally and emotionally linked. The young and healthy often ignore the existence of this factor in life, busy growing up and acquiring an education and fitting into the work cycle.

 We age with cohorts. Earlier societies had maturation rites, but even today’s society prescribes certain rights and obligations based on chronological age. We also limit ourselves by our self-perceptions.

There is even a shift in our evaluation of the concept time. In fact, it is over the past decade, in the fields of aging and health, that researchers have shown a growing interest in a concept called “Future Time Perspective” (FTP), referring to “an individual’s perception of his or her remaining time to live” (Coudin & Lima, 2011:220).

I would like to take it a step further and illustrate by my own life history and personal observations (I am now 78), that the society would benefit from a total life cycle perspective. It involves an interaction effect of age, family, education, work and leisure, the role of life values, health, voluntary and involuntary relocation and self-esteem (Dixon, 2013). Case studies based on these are cross-culturally comparative.