Age

From 'Turn 70. Act Your Grandchild's Age' by Kate Zernike in the 9 July 2010 New York Times -

Thomas R. Cole, director of the McGovern Center for Health, Humanities and the Human Spirit at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston and the author of a cultural history of aging, said he hailed anyone who, borrowing a phrase from his mother, age 85, "is playing above the grass".

At the same time, he said, "if we don’t pay attention to the dark side of our 70s and 80s, we're not going to pay enough attention to the people who need help".

"We're going to make it look like if you're sick, it's your own fault; if you're not having orgasms or running marathons, there's something wrong with you. We need to think carefully about how to take care of people who are frail. We need to allow people to not feel like failures when they can't do the things they used to do."

He traces the origins of this "splitting apart" of the reality of old age — good and bad — to the mid-1800s, when people in the United States first experienced what he calls "the legitimization of longevity".

Life expectancy was only 40, but people began to believe that humans could live to be old — which they defined as 80 or more.

"People first began to say, 'I'm here to live a long life, and if I work hard and am a good person and am middle class, I will die a good death ... and if I don't do these things, I deserve a short life and a painful death'."

That split persists, he said, in our obsession with health and longevity, visible to anyone glancing across a magazine stand.

"It assumes you can control these things through willpower", he said.

Gerontologists tend to think of successful aging as taking advantage of what potential there is, staying as socially and intellectually engaged as possible. Our culture tends to measure it more in terms of how active people are.

It's a perspective on notions of virtue, aspiration and self-acceptance in 'Men's Bodies: Listening to the voices of young gay men' by Murray Drummond in 7(3) Men and Masculinities (2005) 270-290.