Big Talk on Ageing

Big Talk is the opposite of small talk.

Come and meet new people via deep meaningful dialogue.... Watch here for more info:
http://www.makebigtalk.com/

Schedule:
6pm-6:30 - Arrive/social time
6:30 - Presentations will start
8:30 - Planned finish, but may go over a bit.
9pm - Venue closes

Format:
First half: 'Speed Big Talking'! 3 x 20minute random 1:2:1s with choice of deep and meaningful questions to encourage deep and meaningful dialogue!

Second Half: Small group discussions on 'ageing'....specifically with reference to the following post from the Philosophy Break Academy (https://philosophybreak.com/articles/simone-de-beauvoir-on-the-crisis-of-retirement-and-facing-old-age/)

"What awaits us at the end of our working lives? For French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, retirement can be less a reward and more of an existential rupture: an event that causes the world to view us differently, and thus has the potential to alienate us from ourselves.

Western capitalist societies in particular tend to attach value to an individual’s productivity, and they especially champion the cheap labour and technological nativism of youth. If someone no longer fits or opts out of the contemporary economic machinery, they are less profitable, thus less useful, thus less relevant. Push them to the fringes: their contribution to the world is done.

The crisis some people experience on retiring is part of the comprehensive ‘Othering’ our society inflicts on aging in general, Beauvoir observes. No one wants to identify as ‘old’, she writes:
Society looks upon old age as a kind of shameful secret that it is unseemly to mention. In fact, given death is synonymous with nothingness, it actually poses less of a threat to our identity than old age does:

This nothingness can bring about a metaphysical vertigo, but in a way it is comforting — it raises no problems. ‘I shall no longer exist.’ In a disappearance of this kind I retain my identity. Thinking of myself as an old person when I am twenty or forty means thinking of myself as someone else, as another than myself. Old age thus “looms ahead like a calamity”: it is age that is contrasted with life, not death; age that is treated as life’s parody.

From the perspective of society, the very old attain either the serenity of wizened sages — to be revered as a transcendent spirit between life and death — or, far more typically, they are consigned to the status of doddering old fools. Either way, they stand apart from humanity: they are Othered.

What’s particularly odd about society’s attitude towards the elderly is the self-denial at its heart. “Die early or grow old: there is no other alternative,” Beauvoir outlines; but so thorough is our Othering of the elderly that we tend to ignore aging as something that will ever impact us personally: We carry this ostracism so far that we even reach the point of turning it against ourselves: for in the old person that we must become, we refuse to recognize ourselves.

Our fearful rejection of aging is an expression of what Beauvoir and other existentialist thinkers call ‘bad faith’. Bad faith essentially means deceiving ourselves about our own lives, and there are two main ways we might do so. Firstly, we might deny the pre-given ‘facticity’ of our lives: who we are, where we come from, what’s realistic for us, and so on. Secondly, we might deny the ‘freedom’ of our lives: what we are able to do, who we are able to become, and the possibilities we could realize.

We live in tension between facticity and freedom, and to resolve this tension we often deny one side: we deny who we are (facticity), or we deny who we could be (freedom). Denying the onset of aging is a facticity-denying form of bad faith. By treating the elderly as a foreign species, by pushing away ‘old age’ as something that only ever happens to others, the not-yet-old slip into an absurd kind of deception and inauthenticity towards their own lives.

This kind of bad faith can survive for decades — until one day the world forces us to confront it. Maybe it’s a fall, maybe it’s an illness, maybe it’s simply being greeted in the mirror by a wrinkled face.

“There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life,” Beauvoir thus writes, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.
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What do you make of Beauvoir’s analysis?

• Does Beauvoir’s ‘bad faith’ critique of aging and retirement resonate with you?
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• If you are younger, how do you feel about aging?
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• If you are older, what have your experiences been? What challenges have you faced? Do you agree that old age can be liberating, given the right conditions?
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• What fears do you have about getting older, if any?
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What is your advice for those approaching retirement or old age?

See the full article here:
https://philosophybreak.com/articles/simone-de-beauvoir-on-the-crisis-of-retirement-and-facing-old-age/

Feel free to share or not share, as you like. I always try to encourage respectful, non-judgmental conversation regardless!