INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GERIATRIC PSYCHIATRY, VOL.

8: 685-692 (1993)

COMMENT
‘I DON’T FEEL OLD’: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
THE SEARCH FOR MEANING IN LATER LIFE
PAUL THOMPSON
Research Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex C 0 4 3SQ. UK

SUMMARY
A critique of the study of ageing by social scientists is provided in this article, on the basis of the comparative
neglect of life history studies across the whole lifespan. It points to the skewed nature of studies reported in
the literature. As a corrective, results from a UK life history based study are presented. It focuses on work, leisure,
grandparenting, and intimate relationships between adults, leading to conclusions about the factors determining
later life experiences and self-perceptions of the meaning of old age.

KEY woms-Ageing, meaning of life, life satisfaction.

It is an unfortunate paradox that the energy which
social science researchers have put into the docu-
menting of the social problems and deprivations
of older people in the present has in itself reinforced
conventional misunderstanding and demeaning
attitudes towards the old. The result has been a
neglect of the ordinary experience of ageing in
favour of the pathological. The difficulties of under-
standing ordinary old people have been com-
pounded by the lack of interest of both life story
sociologists (Plummer, 1983) and oral historians
(Thompson, 1988) in tracing their lives as a whole.
The need for such research has certainly been
recognized, for three reasons. The first has been
a growing acceptance in the policy field that ‘older
people are entitled to select their own destiny,
within given limits’. It therefore follows that we
need to know what it means to be old to them,
for even at the most practical, simple level, those
concerns and aspects of their lives ‘which are not
highly valued by external observers may well be
amongst the most significant’ (Johnson, 1976;
Rapoport and Rapoport, 1975, p. 315). This new
willingness to listen to their clients has been very
strongly reinforced in the 1980s by the growing
therapeutic use of reminiscence by health and social
workers (Butler, 1963; Norris, 1986; Coleman,
1986; Oral History, 1989).
Secondly, ageing is now seen-building on much
earlier American work (Cumming and Henry, 1961;
Clark and Anderson, 1967)-not as a once-for-all
event, but as a process. Hence the interests and
wishes of the old are not created from nothing at
the moment of retirement. They are the culmination
of a whole life which has ‘sculpted their present
problems and concerns’, a life itself built around
many different ‘life-threads’-education, work,
marriage, children, hobbies, and so on-so that it
is best understood, both in psychological and social
terms, ‘as a complex of strands running for different
lengths of time throughout a life biography and
moulding its individuality’ (Johnson, 1976; Rosen-
mayer, 1981). Only a life history approach can
unravel these threads.
The third reason follows from the complexity
which this implies in old people’s life patterns. Both
Johnson and the Rapoports have attacked the
assumption of ‘an unrealistic homogeneity’ among
the elderly and emphasized ‘the importance of
viewing people in the later phase of life in a less
stereotyped and more differentiated way’ (Johnson,
1976; Rapoport and Rapoport, 1975, p. 312).
Indeed, in certain respects there is a greater variety
of life patterns among the elderly than among ear-
lier age groups just because their day-to-day lives
are no longer structured by education or work. ‘The
elderly are distinctive not because they can choose,
within broad constraints, but because they must
choose; responsibility for structuring their lives is
uniquely their own.’ In a pilot report which we

08854230/93/080685-08$09.00
0 1993 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
686 P. THOMPSON
found particularly helpful, Taylor and Ford (198 1)
remarked on the ‘seemingly endless’ diversity of
life patterns they found through interviewing old
people in Aberdeen. They might focus on their
wider family, or their spouse, or a continuing job,
or a social cause or a hobby, or their own (ill-)
health; and ‘some lead such active lives that we
found it difficult to arrange a time for interview,
while others are so isolated and lonely that our
interviewers felt guilty about terminating the inter-
view and leaving them to themselves’. Taylor and
Ford argued for an approach which sees later life
as a continuing process: ‘a constant struggle to
maintain cherished life-styles against the threaten-
ing impact of both external events and internal
changes’, in which different styles of life will prove
to have different kinds of resilience.
Despite such calls, there has been an inadequate
response from social science researchers in Britain.
In contrast to the United States, we have neither
longitudinal studies with cross-sections of ordinary
older people using in-depth interviewing nor even
a disconnected series of major works like the earlier
Williams and Wirths (1965) and Clark and Ander-
son (1967) (both of which partially foreshadow
Taylor and Ford’s position) or, more recently,
Myerhoff s classically sympathetic life story study
(1979) and Kaufman (1986). There has also been
more popular feminist life story work (Ford and
Sinclair, 1987). British feminist contributions have
been much more focused on the burden of caring
for the old which is imposed on younger women.
Otherwise, the liveliest work is dominated by a
class-based policy sociology (Phillipson, 1978,
1982).
Our own research study, now published as Z
Don’t Feel Old: The Experience of Later Life
(Thompson et al., 1990), therefore stands strangely
alone. It is based on 55 life story interviews with
informants born between 1899 and 1928 (then aged
60-87) who were the grandparents in a randomly
selected national sample of families in Britain. We
do not wish in any way to suggest that problems
of poverty and ill-health are not crucial in shaping
the experience of later life. Class differences show
up immediately in terms of resources for transport
or telephoning or holidays. We find that a retired
middle-class man lives in a manor house furnished
with antiques, while an ex-collier sleeps on a camp
bed in his bedsitter. Nevertheless, fear of absolute
destitution has certainly gone, while in health
terms, a mere one in 20 of those over 65 lives in
hospital or an institution, and even among those
over 75, two-thirds have no physical difficulties
with ordinary daily activities. For the great major-
ity of the old in Britain, the immediate problem
is quite different. Not only socially but probably
physically too, the most damaging threat to them
is loss of life purpose and boredom.
The fundamental message which we have learnt
from our informants is in our title. Unless they
are physically ill or depressed, they do not feel,
in their real selves, that they are old. And given
the common stereotypes of old age, they are absolu-
tely right. Because later life normally brings losses
of unprecedented seriousness-retirement from
paid work, and the death of lovers, friends and
kin-it is a time of active challenge. So far from
implying passivity, it demands an exceptional abi-
lity to respond imaginatively to change. To succeed,
older men and women have to be able to draw
on their full resources, built up over a lifetime. They
have to fight against the stereotypes of dependence
to maintain their own sense of independent purpose
and meaning in life.
Denial of old age is defiance of a spoiled identity.
They all fear going into an old people’s home, and
only a tiny majority can even think of joining an
old people’s club. The old to them-as to so many
social scientists-are typified by the dependent
inmates or members of such institutions; they will
call them ‘old’ even when chronologically younger
than themselves, especially when working for them
as volunteer social assistants, to emphasize their
distance from such a condition. Their own need,
rather than feeling their age, is to feel themselves,
grown from the past and growing into the future.
As a 74-year-old farmer put it to me at the end
of an interview, returning to the land after giving
it up six times, ‘You see, my life’s just beginning’.
Z Don ’t Feel Old explores the varying strategies
which underlie such resilience in the search for
meaning and fulfilment in later life.
WORK
There are four basic spheres in which meaning is
sought: some new, some old. but each needing to
be actively sought.
The first is work. The rise of obligatory retire-
ment has created quite new problems for older peo-
ple, and above all for men. They solve this in a
variety of ways. Some insist on retaining work
habits. The ex-India policeman still rises at dawn;
the former country-house butler changes his shirt
 ‘I DON’T FEEL OLD’
three times a day. Others devise work-like activities
at home, constructing house extensions, or repair-
ing clocks for a whole neighbourhood. Yet others
continue zealously to seek work, finding it above
all in poorly regulated and underpaid sectors: men
in road transport and women in domestic service,
shop work or private nursing.
A classic case is Bill Duncan (b.1912), son and
grandson of Scots miners and a miner himself until
an accident in his forties, when he became a hospital
nurse and clerical worker. His model of later life
goes back to his childhood. His father died relati-
vely young, but he was strongly influenced by his
uncle, who continued as a working miner into his
mid-seventies, and by his grandfather, who turned
professional gardener and remained ‘always an
active man, right t’more or less aboot the last year
that he died. He was always active, yes; oh aye,
he had a marvellous garden, he had more or less
green fingers my grandfather. He could grow any-
thing’. Although he comes from a large family, Bill
rarely sees them, and he has few leisure interests.
Socially, he always depended on work. ‘I’ll say this
aboot the pits. As far as comradeship was con-
cerned, the pits was the best thing I was ever in.
For comradeship oh aye.’ But he continued to make
good friendships later, often with younger work-
mates. Working for a health authority, he had no
choice but to retire at 65. It came as a shock: ‘We’d
never made any plans, no . . . No, I didna expect
it to be as bad as it was. I just felt that I wouldna
be that bored’. To make matters worse, in the
second week his wife died. Utterly shaken, Bill
tolerated only a fortnight’s retirement. Taking a
walk up the street, he noticed the unemployed men
outside the pub at the corner, and resolved, ‘There’s
no way this is gonna happen to me’, so he bought
an evening paper, found an advertisement, and got
work as a van driver. This job lasted 5 years; and
then he succeeded in finding another similar job
for two more years; and finally a brief job as a
milk driver, until forced out by the refusal of insur-
ance cover because of his age. ‘I’ve no had another
job since-I would take one tomorrow if I could
get it. Ye’ve got to have something you know. I
mean this just sitting around . . . I would like t’have
a job. To me it is important.’ And when asked later
what was the best thing about his whole life, Bill
had no doubt that it was to have been able to work
when others could not: ‘to think that the people
that I was serving had no more time for me, and
I could get another job in another station and be
accepted and carry on’.
687
Women, with the exception of those who were
professional nurses, seemed much less identified
with their work. Their ‘retirement’ crises are more
often related to their unpaid role as carers, They
face crucial needs to change, first when their chil-
dren leave home; then when their husband retires,
often becoming a more active presence in the house;
and again, on widowhood. Each time it proves
much easier for those who have already developed
alternative life roles.
LEISURE
The second sphere is that of leisure: an opportunity
whose growth mirrors the decline of paid work.
We found a remarkable diversity in the extent of
such activities. At one extreme, a quarter of those
who described their lives to us had very few leisure
pursuits. None of them were very happy, and they
included some of the most discontented in our sam-
ple. At the other extreme, a smaller group had deve-
loped special new leisure skills in later life, such
as toymaking and wine-making, flower arranging
or sequence dancing, activities which brought
intense pleasure and meaning into their lives. It
is particularly striking how leisure activities can
remain fulfilling for those whose physical health
would make paid work impossible. Thus Annie
Mimms (b. 1908), happily married to a retired elec-
trical worker turned gardener, is deaf and diabetic
and dare not walk out on her own, but she puts
all her energies into sewing curtain and chair covers
and clothes for her family and friends. ‘I don’t feel
old, no, I do all me knitting and loads of sewing
. . . You’re as old as you feel, are’nt you? . . . I feel
quite jovial and jolly . . . I want to live till I’m 100
you know . . . I’ve got lots of things I want to do
. . . - making things.’ Similarly, Sadie King
(b. 1906), widow of a furrier with whom she worked
herself, is so crippled by arthritis that she is house-
bound, takes 20 minutes to get her clothes on, and
has to climb down her stairs backwards, yet with
her constant knitting of creative toys and patterns
for charity, she characterizes old age as a time of
‘contentment ’.
A striking instance is Sarah Smith (b.1912). Her
father, a Lancashire signwriter, died when she was
in her twenties, and to her great anger her mother
remarried a much younger lorry driver. Sarah’s
own marriage to a workaholic tailor was turbulent
and conflictual. She is a very heavy smoker who
has severe breathing problems and has had two
688 P. THOMPSON
major operations for cancer, the first 25 years ago.
Yet despite this catalogue of longstanding damag-
ing experiences, Sarah is a woman of energy and
enthusiasm, a compulsive talker, to whom ‘life’s
very sweet’ and ‘I feel too young to go yet’. The
turning point in her life was when she retired from
her job as a laundry milliner at the age of 60 and
threw herself into the world of flower arranging.
She attended regular classes for 4 years, joined a
flower club, entered competitions, helped at volun-
teer flower stalls and joined in excursions to
country gardens, both making new friends and win-
ning approval for her successes. She transformed
her garden into a systematic source for suitably
coloured leaves at all seasons. In the interview she
talked lyrically about her plants and her compe-
tition entries. ‘It’s very satisfying, you know; it’s
a lovely hobby . . . I’ve got to win a First before
I die.’
GRANDPARENTING
The third sphere is grandparenting. Here we found,
in contrast to recent American research (Cherkin
and Furstenberg, 1986), strong continuities with
past patterns: the almost universal pleasure, and
often intense joy, felt in becoming a grandparent;
the mutuality of support between the generations;
and also the continuing salience of grandmothers.
The degree of intimacy between grandparents and
grandchildren differed principally between families
with continuing patterns of their own, and also by
gender. There was no sign yet of a trend among
grandfathers towards active involvement in child-
care.
For both men and women, however, grandpar-
enting is essentially a mutually optional relation-
ship. Grandparents cannot count on natural
loyalty. Again, like so much else in later life, it
builds on the choices of earlier years: those who
give more of themselves to their children when
younger are more likely to stay closer to them and
to be given the chance to become active grandpar-
ents-just as they are likely to be especially well
cared for if they find themselves in need later in
their lives. Whatever their views on family obli-
gations, people make individual distinctions among
their own kin. Meaningful grandparenthood is not
automatic, but has to be achieved. Even this most
biological aspect of ageing cannot be realized in
social terms without sensitivity, imagination and
commitment.
INTIMATE ADULT RELATIONSHIPS
The last sphere is intimate relationships between
adults. Later life is a time when these relationships
need to be continually rebuilt. In this it is more
like youth than the middle years of life. Those who
remain married must adjust to retirement and to
children leaving home. The most vulnerable appear
to be those who have focused through their adul-
thood on a single sphere of activity: work-centred
men and child-centred women in role-divided mar-
riages, which we found also tended to be less inti-
mate and sexually unfulfilled. Even if after
retirement they tried to shift their day-to-day roles
at home, it seemed too late to create either new
fulfilments in outside activities or a truly nurturing
mutual relationship. The quality of marriage in
later life to a marked extent was shaped by earlier
choices.
Two other factors seemed particularly import-
ant. The first was the transmission of particular
family cultures. There was clear evidence in a
number of families of transgenerational marital
problems. A second crucial influence was age at
marriage. The discontented couples had married
at an average age 3 years below that of the con-
tented.
Still more strikingly, however, some of those in
second marriages seemed the happiest of all-like
honeymoon couples. They had experienced unhap-
piness and loneliness and had now seized a new
chance of life. Jackie Stephen (b. 1916), for instance,
a Lancashire coachbuilder’s widow who worked
as a market stall assistant, remarried a factory qua-
lity controller 4 years younger, also widowed, when
she was 60. It is transparently a love-match. They
sit in the house, she knitting and sewing while he
plays the organ or writes stories, or doing a cross-
word or playing scrabble together; they go out to
walk by the sea; and above all, two or three times
each week they dance. She had had no meaningful
sexual relationship for 20 years, and was deeply
hesitant when he wanted to marry her, making him
wait 2 years, but ‘I’ve never regretted it. We’ve had
a marvellous 10 years, both of us’.
The greatest challenge of all in later life comes
with the loss of intimates: husbands, wives, and
also friends. One historically unique feature of con-
temporary ageing is that longer life expectancy has
also brought a new strangeness to death itself,
which is no longer a common experience right
through life. Today many people only have to come
to terms with close loss through death, and the
 ‘I DON’T FEEL OLD’
imminence of their own mortality, in later life.
Whether they confront or evade it, this will be one
of the most difficult tasks they ever face. Little can
take away the pain and suffering which this brings
(Bowling and Cartwright, 1982; Marris, 1958).
Recovery demands both determination and
social skill, and is approached differently by women
and men. Women commonly form new social
networks of other widows, with whom they often
mix exclusively. Widowers, by contrast, have both
male and female friends, including younger cou-
ples. On the other hand, widowers appeared to
suffer from a special problem in expecting to find
intimacy physically through sex rather than
through talking about their feelings. They therefore
tended to have more difficulty in finding sustaining
friendships after bereavement. More eager to
remarry, they adapt with much more persisting
reluctance to life on their own.
There are certainly widows who find that living
alone can be turned into a positive source of oppor-
tunity. Marjorie Dickens (b. 1907), banker’s widow
of 80, still active at golf, is off to Tunisia with an
older brother. She has the financial means to fulfil
this dream. ‘I like it that I can do as I please, go
where I want to, and if I can afford it, buy what
I want to and eat what I want . . . I would never
have dreamt of marrying again.’ And with less
means, but in a similar spirit, Glenys Howells
(b.1914), Welsh pitman’s widow, who spends her
days with family or friends or out walking on the
hills on her own, puts it, ‘I think the freedom I’ve
got now is something I enjoy, because I get up in
the morning and if I wanna go out for the day
there’s nothing to stop me. I’ve got no one to think
about. So I can just pack up me bag and go’. If
she doesn’t meet somebody to talk to, she just lis-
tens to the trees, and dreams of trips to Shanghai
and the Grand Canyon.
CONCLUSIONS
Later life is a time of constant reconstruction. I
have emphasized the variety with which older men
and women describe how they build, how they find
meaning. It is a particular strength of life history
evidence that it allows us to examine this individual
consciousness and praxis.
These personal accounts need to be situated
within a frame of three types of constraint. The
first is place. The social resources offered by parti-
689
cular local communities-in terms of friendship
networks, transport and education, health and wel-
fare-vary greatly. The second is the long shadow
of class, in terms not only of material resources
but also of health and life itself. Formerly working-
class men and women suffer more physical disabili-
ties as well as dying earlier (Bytheway et al., 1989).
The third constraint is universal: the spoiled per-
sonal identity threatened by widespread demeaning
popular images of old age.
The men and women whom we interviewed are
by definition survivors of their generation. There
are many reasons why some have lived longer than
others. Women survive men. Differences in income,
housing, occupational hazards, diseases and stress,
drinking and smoking, and possibly diet, help to
load the class dice. But the ability to maintain a
meaningful life focus may be equally crucial.
Recent British medical research by Murphy el al.
(1988) has suggested that among the elderly,
depression can precipitate a fatal illness, and may
even bring a doubling of deathrates. Similarly,
Antonovsky (1979, 1987), through a longer series
of studies in Israel of how people who had suffered
intense stress managed to stay reasonably healthy,
has concluded that ‘the sense of coherence’ is their
key defence. Recent work by British psychologists
and sociologists has begun to explore more particu-
lar sources of meaning: Sixsmith (1986), for exam-
ple, the importance of house and home, Evers
(Fennel1 et al., 1988) that of daily routines, and
Coleman (1986) that of remembering itself; while
an American anthropologist, Kaufman (1986), has
picked out a wider variety of thematic sources of
meaning in later life in The Ageless Self. She identi-
fies the key to later life in how ‘individuals symboli-
cally connect meaningful past experiences with
current circumstances’.
To a greater or lesser extent all the stories we
recorded convey this search for meaning. Physical
ageing does not necessarily imply feeling old. Men
and women in their twenties or thirties or forties
can feel they have failed to find the right person
to marry, or have made the wrong career choice,
and that they are ‘too old’ to start again. Feeling
old is feeling exhausted in spirit, lacking the energy
to find new responses as life changes. It is giving
up. Feeling ourselves means feeling the inner energy
which has carried us thus far in life. It means accept-
ing our own pasts as part of our present. It means
feeling a whole person.
In later life this remains essentially the same. You
may be categorized as an ‘old person’ with a pen-
690 P. THOMPSON
sion and cheap travel concessions at 65, or accord-
ing to medical and sociological specialists you may
cross from the ‘young old’ to the ‘old’ at 75, but
there is no reason why you should not still feel
the same person inside. The real turning points are
in your own life: giving up work or starting a
hobby, losing a loved one, or finding a new friend.
And what matters, in later life just as earlier, is
how you can respond to the challenge of change.
The fact is that you are by now a survivor. So long
as you feel yourself, you can still make the best
of your life.
Feeling yourself and feeling old thus remain
essentially different at any age. Nor is this surpris-
ing given the image of old age which is constantly
thrust at us: an image of later life which is, in fact,
completely misleading. Thus the standard warning
sign for old people crossing the road is of a grotes-
quely hunched old couple leaning on a stick, evi-
dently both suffering from osteoporosis, ill as much
as old. An actor will typically portray an old person
with the exaggerated shakiness of Parkinson’s dis-
ease. The typical old person is transformed into
patronized welfare recipient, only one step removed
from the ‘poor dears’ in nursing homes, not to be
listened to very seriously, if at all, ‘not quite whole
people, not people like us’. But everyone knows
real old people who do fit the stereotypes, so the
active next-door neighbour, the national political
leader, artist or intellectual, the well-to-do couple
on their constant travels, are defined out of the
frame. ‘They are not a problem, they have no
obvious needs, hence they cannot really be elderly’
(Fennel1 et al., 1988). Even the most outstanding
sociologists of ageing in Britain, such as Townsend
(1957, 1964), have effectively fed this false image.
The vast majority of British old people look after
themselves in their own homes with no more than
occasional help from their family. Despite heart-
rending titles like Old and Alone, even among those
over 75, four-fifths do nor feel lonely (Tunstall,
1966; Abrams, 1978).
The image of old age which we absorb is there-
fore a seriously unbalanced version of the realities
of later life. It is not only scientifically wrong, but
helps to sanction social and health policies which
focus on the old in crisis, rather than ‘preventive’
measures which can encourage their resourceful-
ness and which need to start at least in middle age,
such as adult education, occupational health pro-
grammes, marital counselling, facilities for specia-
lized activities like dancing, bowls or the University
of the Third Age which are popular with older
people but enable them to make younger friend-
ships, good cheap public transport, and so on.
Equally, it is no wonder that those whom we
interviewed do not recognize themselves in this
image. Later life from the inside-like life at any
age-is a story with its dark side, its pain and suffer-
ing. But the message which comes most strongly
from these accounts is of resilience in the face of
the twists of fate; of adaptability; and in some of
these lives, of a powerfully continuing ability to
seize or create chances for fulfilment, whether in
work, leisure or love.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research depended on many kinds of h e l p
from those who were interviewed, Michele Abend-
stern, Catherine Itzin and Graham Smith as
research officers, other interviewers, transcribers
and the comments of colleagues and friends-more
fully acknowledged in Z Don ’t Feel Old (Thompson
et al., 1990). An earlier and longer version of the
present article was published in Ageing and Society
(1992) 12, 2347. The project on ‘Life Stories and
Ageing’ was funded by the Economic and Social
Research Council.
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