On Social Aging

Why your "age" is really about your relationship to your social position, your imagined potential

I went to a wedding last weekend. In fact, this summer involves five weddings, because I am a 33-year-old professional, and this is the precise age at which most professionals marry. 

This particular wedding was populated by my friends from undergraduate. Reunited, we dressed for the night together as always we used to, now with different bodies, alcohol tolerances and imagined possibilities ahead of us. It was sweet, bittersweet. And that, I think, has to do not only with the inevitable sadness of any passage of time but also with what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called social aging.¹ 

Bourdieu describes “social aging” as the “slow renunciation or divestment” during which people “adjust their aspirations to their objective chances, espouse what they are and make do with what they have.”

…oof. 

If you have ever been to a wedding with old friends (or heaven forbid, a college or high school reunion), you know exactly what Bourdieu is talking about. The slow renunciation. The adjusting of expectations. Events like this give you the opportunity to see people’s social aging not slowly but as a jump cut, a then-and-now. Those who went to university with me tend to have their now look like this: the middle management job, the house in the suburbs, the sensible car, the marriage to the guy they once called boring but who is also rather nice. But sometimes, it looks like this: the job one works with one’s hands, the houseshare in Philly with seven cats, the string of lovers and so on. Regardless, you get the idea. Here they are, the future selves of your former self’s friends, and there you are, also wearing the compromises and trade-offs you made, carefully phrasing your answer to “what are you up to,” conscious of whatever hopes you’ve had to modify or bury. 

I just finished one life stage (my PhD) and am approaching another (book! baby?) I thus feel my social aging all the time, more than I ever angst about wrinkles or cellulite. Where do I belong in the social world now? How should I behave? Are the trade-offs I’ve chosen going to leave me with enough true meaning and joy?

My mother-in-law and I on my 33rd birthday. Her tattoo says “Aging ain’t for the faint of heart.”

Bourdieu’s theory of social aging is a pessimistic one when taken personally, but it’s not driven by pessimism. It’s simply a reflection on what our current society’s structure necessarily does to the people within it. Even if rebellious, experimental, or full of ambition, you are going to have to surrender a great many hopes and selves. You are probably not going to become a rock star, supreme court justice, novelist, millionaire, whatever youthful-you imagined. But more than that, you’re going to have to end up somewhere you can maintain yourself. 

What you age into, is, in fact, your social and class position. “Aging” is (often) actually just what happens when people live in competitive, normative societies: in these conditions, aging not only means a change in one’s body or relationships but also a change, often a negative one, in one’s possibilities. As one ages, possibilities narrow and then many disappear: careers become foreclosed, dating markets thin, one’s social status, even one’s geographical location becomes increasingly determined, sometimes for better but often for worse. People are not naturally prone to become “boring” as they age; they have to change for material reasons. 

And this “social aging” doesn’t just happen to us; we do this to ourselves, which is sensible, but also, heartbreaking. I have socially aged myself many times: I have left beautiful impractical relationships with people I loved; I left Berlin to work the job in London that made my career. I have also socially aged in small everyday ways, for years. I have gone home early rather than gone clubbing. I have forgone piercings, tattoos, hair dye, for jobs, so I can be taken seriously. (I hate doing this, and I also don’t really like it about myself). I have poured my time into a few things that are likely to be rewarded with either professional status or money, not because I like status or money in and of themselves, but because I like the possibilities they allow me to not foreclose. There is an irony to that giving-up of possibilities to get some. I have also let certain possibilities narrow and fade away because anything else is just too hard, given the way the world works. 

Some may say: that’s just life. And what happens as we age is, also, “life” e.g. partly about time and nature; if aging is a house, one of the walls, the studiest one, the one that we can’t really shift, is about biology and physics. We can only live so long, we can only feasibly date so many people (yes, even the polyamorous!), we each only have so many years for biological reproduction (yes, especially those with ovaries), we can only do a few things intensively with our lives (no matter how much those with “portfolio careers” would like to believe otherwise).

But some of the narrowing of possibility as we age is also more than “just life”; it is the constriction of life by society in general and the economic system in particular. Why do most of my friends end up doing one hyper-specialised thing, leaving all other dreams? Because it’s an efficient way for our economy to work, and so it is rewarded. Indeed “intense career” is often the only path that is financially stable or liveable. Why such pressure to marry or partner with “sensible” people?² Because your spouse is the person who will do social reproductive labour with you, making it possible for you to keep going day after day, caring for your aging parents or raising small children. If we lived in larger family units, or raised children with our few closest friends, the choice of a single romantic partner who is “sensible” would matter less. Bourdieu’s point was this: some of aging is nature and “just life”, but much of it is about the constraints our current society places on us without pronouncing them directly. 

The material nature of aging (material in the sense of money, not cells or molecules) is why “rebellion” tends to happen in very particular and age-sensitive ways. It’s why we it’s often the youth who go to protests, become punk rock (or whatever the kids using tiktok are now, lit?), or spend some time “fucking around”: they are young enough that their possibilities have not yet broken down in front of them, so there is (or appears to be) some wiggle room for rebellion and chaos. Similarly, no wonder so many middle-aged people tend to have breakdowns and midlife crises, when they see their possibilities diminish and feel trapped as to what they can do about. And, perhaps more cheerfully, I am always heartened by the elderly climate protestors I see, who point out that, now that they don’t have employers, they can take the risks once again as they would have done in youth, and get arrested for a cause they believe in. Theirs is a second youth dedicated to the future of others. 

Punk rock/lit. From here. 

Of course, some communities experience all this very differently. The “working class” tend to experience age as an entirely different set of constraints (as I profiled on the specific question of monogamy). If one doesn’t have a career to build to, one doesn’t have to ‘act professional’. One might also worry far more about the breakdown of the body and its effect on one’s ability to survive. There’s more to be said here, but it probably can be done more wisely and artfully by someone who has lived it. The point is social aging varies wildly by class, because that’s what it is about. 

Queer people have always also lived with a different set of challenges related to social aging, which is not necessarily to say they’re having a better time (often quite the opposite). Especially if they come out later or transition later, it means they go through a rather different set of milestones, or else experience similar ones to straight/cis people, but later. This different set of possibilities (some foreclosed, or sometimes, joyfully, opened) is what “queer time” or queer temporality is all about. On this topic I once again largely defer to those more expert and personally affected than myself. But although queer people can find living and aging within queer time extremely disorienting and difficult, they can also occasionally find it freeing, especially if it allows them to redefine their value outside of certain markers of material productivity, or if it means they can embrace social reproduction, relationships, and families another way. Queer time suggests, in a way, that all of us could, possibly, live entirely alternative timelines in another, less-limiting world. 

There is one more thing to be said about a group of people that do not socially age according to the straight, bourgeois norms I have laid out above, and that group is much larger: it is many, possibly even most millennials, and the generations that follow them in the west. Much has been written about how millennials are bucking the trends; that is, not buying houses, not having kids, focusing on work intensively, and also, not turning rightwards politically as they age. This was not a set of spontaneous personal choices or a disembodied fad; it is driven by what millennials share, which is an economy that will not give them their parents’ set of possibilities, however limited, for aging, that will not allow them even the suburban house, the savings, the kids. Many millennials are quite simply downwardly mobile, and this is reflected not only in what they can buy or what family units they can form but even in their jobs, for which they are often overqualified. So millennials, perhaps more than other previous generations, not only face the pain of social aging but the disappointment that they are not even given one set of stable trade-offs they can make that will afford them respect and status; they might not even have possibilities to gain by sacrificing other possibilities.³ No wonder they are often seen as immature; this should not be understood as a question of personality or entitlement (although commentators often lunge there). No, what facile commentators are actually noticing is that millennials are “immature” in the most simple material sense: they are not achieving the class mobility that we usually attribute to “age.”

Much of social aging is, quite simply, painful. All the more painful the less one has a script for it, which may be increasingly true for millennials and others today. Often social aging is difficult because it means that one is forced to switch strategies in life in order to be successful, “cool” or even just vaguely accepted. I notice, for example, that having a scrappy startup is somehow very cool at 20, fine at 30, but considered a dubious or frivolous life decision at 40. (No wonder midlife crises are so painful; reinventing oneself can be seen as a little desperate after a certain point, even though, at some level, it surely becomes necessary after enough time on planet earth!). Another area of profound disorientation: no one I know seems to fully have a sense of how to be hot-yet-appropriate over the age of 40. Women are seen as dressed wrong if they show skin; men are viewed as especially creepy. All of this is simply bad news for those of us whose marriages won’t work out, or who never entered longterm monogamy in the first place. 

Overall, what worked for any of us, in any area, at 25 or even 32 is unlikely, probably, to work well at 45 or 50 or more. So we face the challenge of closing off possibilities but we may not even know how to navigate the ones we’re left with in a shifting social landscape, where many of us are still not satisfied with what meaning, status, and possibility remain. 

This all sounds bleak, I know. But I want to paint a picture of it as a social phenomenon: the limitations, the catch-22s, the challenges, before I get to the larger philosophical, personal question, which is: how much should we “adjust [our] aspirations to [our] objective chances, espouse what [we] are and make do with what [we] have.”? 

Plus: what should we do about this socially, politically?

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I suspect there are at least two wrong answers to the challenge of social aging, and at least two right-ish starting places for addressing it. 

One wrong “answer” (perhaps obviously) is to fully embrace the apparent requirements of social aging and seek fulfillment in whatever social script is provided by society. This answer is “wrong” because overly generalized scripts can rarely justify themselves (there isn’t really a reason 45-year-olds shouldn’t go to raves, at least not minus tinnitus or the cost of a babysitter.) For that matter, I’d love a world where we can all wear clothes with dinosaurs on it (why did we leave that to kids??) without worrying about what our colleagues will think. Why can’t we have green hair? Why can’t we have highly-themed birthday parties without it being cringe? I realise some people do buck these trends, and I myself hope for a highly-themed birthday party, but ultimately the things I’ve just described are largely aesthetic, and we can’t solve the problems of mortality that way (that way lies only Burning Man). 

The wider point is what is at stake structurally, socially: why haven’t we contested the norms and the class-related nature of aging more, those of us who think society isn’t all that great anyway?

More seriously, however, a narrow social script for aging is unlikely to truly fit even most people. Which means those that fail to follow it (by say, remaining single, not climbing any particular career ladder, or having a kid particularly young) end up feeling alone and ashamed.

A second answer that doesn’t work is to insist it’s all “just” a social construct, so do whatever you want! This answer doesn’t work because social constructs, however good or bad, are extremely powerful and often durable objects. We do have bank accounts, employers, social groups we belong in. We are going to end up making choices every day to get by and get things we want. Also: sometimes social constructs have, at their core, a kernel of something valuable, like stability or companionship or meaningful work. (That’s why I cry shamelessly at weddings, big salty happy tears, yes even me, a hardened critical theorist). Many scripts related to social aging exist in part because they help people to deal with the actual real challenges of aging, the yet-inescapable ones, like the biological clock and the exhausting-ness of toddlers and the need for companionship and care for the elderly and the desire older people feel to believe they’ve made something of their lives. We can’t easily just buck these things because they are often our best shot at getting the kinds of relationships or communities we want, and because it is difficult to build alternatives, at least on our own (more on this momentarily).

Which brings me to one right-ish answer at a personal level, (and here I am not political-theorizing so much as philosophically-theorising): we have to accept the choices we do and do not have, and actively make the choices we do have. Because aging—“actual” aging, not just social aging—is at its heart a real and existential thing about the uncertain number of years left in our life; it is ultimately about, well, our life in light of our death. 

I have an acquaintance who every year has a new idea for what he’d like to do with his life. In our 30s, this was slightly charming. He was always asking people to coffee to get advice about it. He considered being a professional ____ (it would take years of training)! He made some actually quite impressive art. (I really liked his art!) He wanted to do all sorts of clever political things. (He also absolutely could not commit to his girlfriend). Time passed. He committed to none of the projects and the girlfriend left him. He’s in his 40s now, no more decisive and no happier for what I can see. I do not think there is anything wrong with not being a professional ___ or artist or hardcore activist per se; there’s nothing wrong with being girlfriendless either. But being or having nothing that appeals because it all appealed is a tragedy of one’s own devising.⁴ Increasingly, I see friends who dislike all their options struggle to choose any of them. It’s human, but it hurts us. We have to try to choose, in part to re-assert that it is actually our lives that are at stake, not an imaginary version of us that we are curating for later. 

We will inevitably face a narrowing of possibilities, because that’s how the world we live in works. All we can do, at the absolutely individual level that is, is eschew the smaller conventions (e.g. go raving in your 40s, go traveling in your 60s, wear dinosaur pajamas to parties, whatever) and be clear-eyed about the big things, which are, generally speaking, trade-offs between one possibility and another. For (and I say this with equal measure to those rushing to the altar and those collecting many lovers, those going off the grid and those gathering accolades, those raving or those saving to try to get a mortgage) however we choose to face social aging, none of it will impede the passage of time. Social aging may be about class and status, but non-social-aging is about death and making the most of life. And all of us have to do that.  

The second thing that might be a starting point for addressing social aging is political; it is to think about what would have to change in the social world for us not to feel confined, at least not profoundly. I can immediately tell you the biggest thing that constrains me right now, that forces me to age socially: the lack of free or affordable childcare. If that existed, I’d have a kid tomorrow instead of later on, and I’d not worry about the trade-off between the books I want to write and the stage of life called motherhood. I might even occasionally still get to see my friends while mothering, which is an important thing for people to do even (or especially) if they’re raising small people. Some other things that would help me: easy-to-access spaces for communal living; unions for freelancers that worked for what I do, free or cheap social spaces to access near my house. None of these are exactly a utopian vision on their own, but together they’d probably erase most of my fears and angst about being in my 30s or even my 40s. Or even my 80s! 

Unfortunately, aging has, at least until my generation, had the opposite effect on many people. Hardening into their social roles and class positions, they have turned away from ideas about how to make the world bearable for others to age into. Aging has, until my generation, been associated with people becoming more politically and socially conservative as a sort of act of self-preservation, not to mention pouring their energy into making money and doing social reproduction rather than looking outwards at social problems. (Indeed, many older generations have voted to in effect pull up the social ladder and secure their position, at cost to future generations). But since millennials are bucking this trend, earning less, and reproducing less, who knows what could happen. Aging can also be a great equaliser, too. None of us escape it (except the unluckiest, who die young). Perhaps if the social aging script is breaking down, we can also look at this as inspiration to make life more kind and just. 

Individually, right now, I have to make tough choices because of social aging. And so do you. But collectively, we could build a world where that’s not quite so necessary. I really hope we do.  

1. Thank you to Laurel Rogers for chatting with me about this one and offering this term! You can read Laurel’s work here.

2. To be clear, this can mean a variety of things, from “doesn’t go to raves much” to “is only so mentally ill” to “fits in with your ethnic community”

3. This is why I find cultural thinkpieces on why millennials are so infantile for liking Pokémon or eating brunch (or whatever) so terribly insulting and silly; of course millennials have aged differently, because social aging is the result of one’s class position and millennials’ class positions are precarious and downwardly mobile. They can’t grow up, even if they wanted to. And, at least when it comes to brunch and Pokémon, why should they? Why should they, especially, when, so many of the challenges of social aging are much more difficult than which hobbies are “suitable” and “grown up”?

4.  I chose a male friend here as an example, but of course related things always attend the struggles of women and uterus-bearers who cannot decide whether or not to have kids. There is no right answer for everyone, obviously; “yes of course” is a great answer if you feel it, “no absolutely not” is a great answer if you feel it, “I could go either way so let’s see” can be okay too. The only truly tragic thing, I’d suggest, is to put off making a decision in such a way that you arrive at a default that you then do not like, that you fail to really see the trade-off and challenge as it truly is. (E.g.: that you have a kid because it seems like the right thing to do, but then hate it; or you tell yourself you’ll decide later, miss a workable window and then regret it).