by Dorothy Hoffman

Created on: September 30, 2009

Whatever you feel about growing old - the advantages and disadvantages - I think you'd have to say the very best thing about it is simply being alive to grow old. But aside from mere survival, reaching our golden years has a number of benefits.

In his famous "all the world's a stage" soliloquy in As You Like It, William Shakespeare described the seven stages of man, which begin and end in the same depressing way - "San teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." This gloomy vision of the aging process doesn't give us much to hope for. But, fortunately, others paint a more optimistic picture. Psychologist Erik Erikson, for example, breaks human development down into eight life stages, from infancy to old age; in each stage we must achieve a different virtue by resolving a tension between conflicting extremes: trust versus mistrust, autonomy versus shame, initiative versus guilt, industry versus inferiority, identity versus role confusion, intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus stagnation, and finally integrity versus despair.

We continue to evolve and develop as human beings through every stage of life, of course. But only in these final two stages (late middle life and old age), according to Erikson, do we achieve the virtues of caring and wisdom. It is at this time in our lives that we begin to focus less on "getting ahead" and more on giving back to society and finding a more profound sense of purpose and meaning in our lives.

In a fascinating interview on Bill Moyers' Journal this past spring (see the transcript at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05082009/transcrip t2.html), author and educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot really brought this theory to life. She was discussing her book on what she calls the third chapter of life - the 25 years after 50 - for which she interviewed a number of people who found themselves developing new passions in their lives at this stage. To some degree, she said, we are all "on a search for meaningfulness, for purposefulness. . . . And we're ready for something new, for a new experience, for a new adventure. And I think all of us, to some degree, experience some burnout. Burnout is not about- is not about working too hard. Or working too diligently or being overcommitted. Burnout is about boredom. And so, I think in some ways this is about sort of moving beyond the boredom to compose, to invent and reinvent the path that we're on."

Based on the experiences of those she interviewed for her book, Lawrence-Lightfoot

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>