First, there is an account of seven of the candidates for next year’s presidential elections as they appeared at the annual conference of the Medef, the French equivalent of the CBI. (Seven, by the way, is just a fraction of the hopefuls who are still touting their political wares.) Anyone who follows French politics will know how hot a topic is the age at which pensions can be drawn – ‘controversial’ hardly begins to describe it. President Macron bears deep scars from his efforts to raise the age from 62 to 64. The law has been passed and is currently being phased in, but remains hotly contested.

Two of the candidates at the Medef event reaffirmed their opposition to the raising of the pension age. These are the two candidates most likely, on current showing, to reach the final vote-off in May next year: Marine Le Pen of the far right Rassemblement National (RN), and Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the far left La France Insoumise (LFI). The probability of this being the showdown choice fills many French people – and myself - with dismay, for a variety of reasons but let’s concentrate here on where the line might be drawn on pensions.

France faces the prospect of a changing demographic with fewer younger and many more older people. This is common to many Western countries. But France currently spends a higher proportion of its GDP on pensions – around 14% - than almost any other EU country, partly because it has this unusually low pension age. It operates a pay-as-you-go system, so the pension commitments fall on current and future taxpayers, a shrinking population. The deficit on pensions is already several billion euros, estimated to rise to 14 billion by 2035. Elon Musk may be able to pay this without noticing, but E14 bn is not pocket money, even for a country as rich as France

How are the politicians reacting? Le Pen wants to abandon the reform and revert to the previous age of 62. I thought that as she gets closer to power she might be wavering on this, but on a recent episode from the excellent Talking France podcast, John Litchfield told us that she has reaffirmed her commitment to the restoration of 62. Mélenchon wants not just to reverse the move to 64, but actually to lower the age to 60. It will be paid for, he says, but writing off chunks of the national debt and raising a wealth tax. Mélenchon may make it through to the final vote-off next year, but only because the anti-RN candidates are so many and so disorganised. If he does he’ll lose to Le Pen by a mile, so his notion of pensionability at 60 is unlikely to be realised, but the fact he’s proposing it shows it appeals to a good swathe of the population.

I cannot claim to have followed the debate in detail. I am sure there have been informed analyses which go beyond budgetary calculations on pension ages and financial deficit. But I am struck by how simplistic the discussion has often seemed to be – simplistic in the sense of turning around single numbers for a single age. Macron’s proposals, to be fair, envisage a gradual adjustment of the age over time. But the whole issue is dominated by chronological age, irrespective of health, the changing nature of work, and the conditions for a fulfilling later life. To be fair again, the French debate has historically included, rather unusually, consideration of which occupations are physically demanding and therefore deserve earlier release, giving weight to number of years worked under such conditions as well as mere chronological age. But a single chronological age is still the focus. A good dose of Gallic rationality seems in order here, given the inequalities of health and prospective longevity. (Before I sound too smug about the UK’s relative position, I was glad to hear that K Lord Jim O’Neill has raised the issue of the triple lock on UK pensions – something that surely we cannot avoid for much longer.)

The second Le Monde item that caught my eye was one on experiments to counter social isolation. These ‘social prescriptions’ are designed to provide non-medical ways of improving people’s mental and physical health. They make obvious good sense, especially at a time when health budgets and health personnel are under so much pressure. The friend who brought me Le Monde is struggling a little with her solitariness. She lives alone in Paris, recently lost her partner, and though she enjoys her walks around Paris she knows she would benefit from more social interaction. Her friends have suggested – not prescribed - art classes as she is a talented painter but France is not well endowed with these forms of adult education. She complains that when she tried it the men in the class talked too much….

An ageing population obviously brings with it the likelihood of more people living on their own, especially women. But social prescription is relevant to all age categories, given the shocking accounts of isolation amongst younger people – 1 in 10 going entire days with no social contact. How to get them out of their rooms, away from their screens and in to something that involves relating directly to other humans? ‘Prescribing’ maybe strikes the wrong note – it’s not a question of instructing someone to get out there and do something. But the message is a strong one: we need a focus on the opportunities which enable people to forge new relationships and move on in their lives whilst doing something they enjoy.

Le Monde Item Three introduced me to a term which struck many chords with me: ‘temporal precarity’. The piece focussed on single parent families – ‘monoparentalité’ - where the parent (95% of them mothers) is unable to maintain any sense of control over their own time. This is usually from a combination of the children’s demands, a lack of material resources and an absence of social provision such as play areas. ‘Precariat’ is a term popularised some 15 years ago in seminal work by Guy Standing. He used it to describe the kinds of work which offers no stability or security. These are most obviously the kinds now all too familiar as zero-hours contracts, but Standing showed how the security levels in many jobs was being eroded, even in apparently established occupations.

‘Temporal precarity’ rang particular bells with me because some 40 years ago I worked with Michael Young on a book on how people manage the transition out of employment. (Yes, I know, 40 years on, and I’m still banging on about the same issues….). We drew our inspiration from the work of Marie Jahoda, whose classic 1933 work Marienthal: The Sociography and an Unemployed Community showed how, in an Austrian village hit by the Great Depression, men who became unemployed lost all sense of time. They had nothing to do but were always late for meals. Their wives had domestic work, and so maintained a temporal structure to their day. Michael and I found a similar, though not as pronounced, gender divide in the way our sample of Woolwich men and women aged over 50 managed the transition. Some did well, and were happy to be free of work constraints. But there were many sad cases. We left diaries for them to fill in, and often the only entries for an entire morning or even day would be ‘Had cup of tea…. Had a sandwich….Had another cup of tea….’ Life After Work, the title of our book, was not much of a life for them.^[1] Temporal precarity is not a new phenomenon, but it carries fresh significance today.

^[1] Marie Jahoda was still very much alive and thinking when we did our study. Indeed she contributed a fine essay to a volume we edited on The Rhythms of Society. It was a privilege for me to have such a link to past work, now almost 100 years old but still relevant.

Esther: Well, for one thing it might help you make your mind to take your retirement.

Victor: [rather secretively, unwillingly] It’s not the money been stopping me.

Esther: Then what is it? I just thought with a little cushion you could take a month or two until something occurs to you that you want to do.

Victor: It’s all I think about right now. I don’t have to quit to think.

Esther: But nothing seems to come of it.

Victor: Is it that easy? I’m going to be fifty. You don’t just start a whole new career. I don’t understand why it’s so urgent all of a sudden.

Esther: [laughs] All of a sudden! It’s all I’ve been talking about since you became eligible – I’ve been saying the same thing for three years!

Victor: Well, it’s not three years –

Esther: it’ll be three years in March! It’s three years. If you’d have gone back to school then you’d have your Master’s by now; you might have had a chance to get into something you’d love to do. Isn’t that true? Why can’t you make a move?

Victor: [pause; he is almost ashamed] I’ll tell you the truth. I’m not sure the whole thing wasn’t a little unreal. I’d be fifty-three, fifty-four by the time I could start doing anything.

Esther: But you always knew that.

The Price was first performed in 1968. In those days the idea of adults returning to college was still unusual. The US was a leader in providing such opportunities (mainly through the strikingly progressive GI Bill, which enabled millions of WW2 veterans to gain access to education). Even so, the very idea of a career change at 50 was something that didn’t come easily then – and it still doesn’t.

When Miller was writing the play, careers were still very much seen as a male preoccupation. (We never, I think, hear about Esther working.) They were also generally seen as a linear progression to a predictable, finishing point defined by chronological age, usually 65. Policing and similar professions had particularly clearly defined endpoints, after a specific period of service, well short of the average working life. They still do.

Yet even where retirement is predictable, that does not guarantee forward planning. As individuals many of us, I suspect, are like Victor and put thinking about life after work - and then reaching decisions - into the ‘too hard’ box. Equally, it’s very doubtful that many employers have really taken on board what is needed to enable ‘older’ people to make new careers. There is much good analytical work being done, for example at the Stanford Centre for Longevity and many other think tanks, and some shifts are happening. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s innovative 4-Quarter-substack/newsletter confirms how much pioneering work is still to be done on how to make the most of this stage of life – what she calls the Third Quarter.

Victor would have fitted exactly into this frame since the third quarter starts at exactly his age of 50, but as Esther observes he has done nothing to move things along. Now he suddenly receives a job offer. It comes, unexpectedly, from his brother Walter. The play revolves around the brothers’ meeting after a long estrangement. The meeting is caused by the death of their father; they get together to decide on selling the contents of the apartment where the boys grew up. Much of their childhood story is told as Victor and Walter wander round the apartment picking up things that remind them of old times – fencing equipment, clothing, and a harp that might have been sold to pay for the college education that Victor never had.

The most obvious ‘price’ of the title is the cash offer made by the play’s fourth character, the appraiser whom Victor has invited to value the goods. The appraiser, Gregory Solomon, is of Russian Jewish extraction, and boy does his language reflect his origins. He is also nearly 90 years old – but still working, a 62-year span which astonishes the two brothers and incidentally gives us another angle on career trajectories. Gregory is in constant negotiation mode; his final offer is less than generous. The price is low – though of course Gregory himself thinks of it as fair.

A deeper sense of ‘price’ emerges as the play runs on. Victor has been a street cop all his life, having abandoned higher career aspirations to look after their ailing father, ruined in the financial crash. Walter, by contrast, took himself away to medical school and enjoyed high professional and material success. And yet he is now divorced and personally adrift, alienated from wife and son. Because of his professional success he is apparently able to offer Victor an administrative job in a medical office. It would pay twelve thousand dollars, a huge jump in salary for the younger brother. The offer is intended to compensate for Walter having left Victor to look after their father financially and personally, as he went off to medical school. So there is Victor’s long-delayed second career, on a plate for him. It is the price Walter is now willing to pay for having, arguably, avoided his share of family duty. However the bargain is not struck: Victor is suspicious, and refuses the offer. The ensuing exchange gives us a different sense of the price both boys have paid:

Victor: But why do you have to offer me anything? It sounds like I have to be saved, or something.

Walter: I simply felt that there was work you could do that you’d enjoy and I –

Victor: Walter, I haven’t got the education, what are you talking about? You can’t walk in with one splash and wash out twenty-eight years. There’s a price people pay. I’ve paid it. It’s all gone, I haven’t got it any more. Just like you paid, didn’t you? You’ve got no wife, you’ve lost your family, you’re rattling around all over the place? Can you go home and start all over again from scratch? This is where we are, right here, now.

So both sons have paid their prices. Victor sacrificed his early aspirations to look after a bankrupt father (though, as we discover, he was deceived about the extent of the father’s poverty); as a result he never got the further education he might have had, and so condemned himself to 28 years on the beat. Walter escaped, and succeeded professionally. But he too has paid a high personal price for his one-eyed pursuit of this success. Walter tries to reduce the price both have paid at a single stroke: by offering Victor a new career he hopes to repair at least one aspect of the family life he has failed to safeguard. It doesn’t come off.

The play has much to tell us still about the shapes of working careers and how they do or don’t fit with family lives. It also has a very distinct historical context. The father’s bankruptcy came at the time of the 1931 crash. There was chaos all around.

Victor: I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. And I went out. I went over to Bryant Park behind the public library. The grass was covered with men. Like a battlefield; a big open-air flophouse. And not bums – some of them had shined soles and good hats, busted businessmen, lawyers, skilled mechanics….There was no mercy. Anywhere. One day you’re head of the house, at the head of the table, and suddenly you’re shit. Overnight.

It’s a powerful insight into the impact of the Crash as a historical episode shaping future generations – a period effect as it’s called. Yet, largely because of the intergenerational dynamics, the impact is very different on the two sons. And then there’s the further twist as they meet up later in life, struggling to look forward as well as back. The Price is a play with rich material for students of the life course.

Miller was early in writing about how people might anticipate retirement, or fail to do so. It was decades before the demographic changes we are now experiencing through increased longevity. The Victor of the play when it launched would have expected an unusually long period because of the generous early pension arrangements which existed for his profession, now and then. But Victor today could expect a full decade or so more of life after work than his 1960s colleague. Lives stretch further and further out. Working lives are being stretched too, but not in any neat elongated fashion. Newspaper columns may be full of columns about ageing societies, but our systems, institutions and attitudes struggle to adjust to the complexities of later life career changes. If a ladder no longer fits as an image of typical careers, what should replace it?

PS A different perspective on education and career change. I’ve just been dipping into Douglas Hofstadter’s still-extraordinary 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach. Hofstadter was a very bright young student (the son of a Nobel prizewinner) who graduated in mathematics aged 20. In the preface to the 20^th anniversary edition, he describes how he dropped out of math graduate school, switched to physics and then ricocheted around PhD topics and supervisors. He ‘finally closed the book’ on his doctoral thesis in 1975, aged 30, but was then able to ‘retool himself’, courtesy of a ‘2-year Hofstadter fellowship’ as he jokingly called it – a tribute to his generous and patient parents. The retooling was as an artificial-intelligence researcher – this, to remind you, is 50 years ago. The tome which emerged from this period was GEB, such an unlikely best-seller at 700+ pages packed with mathematical models (as well as wonderful images from Escher and musical motifs from Bach). Kudos to Martin Kessler, the publisher at Basic Books, who saw the potential and took the risk.

29/7/26

“The biological, emotional and social consequences of a disaster do not disappear on the same timeline as debris removal or reconstruction.”

This is Alika Mounakea, co-director of a study of the effects of massive wildfires on Hawaii three years ago. The study, quoted by Oliver Millman in the Guardian (29/7), showed how effects such as increased blood pressure and post-traumatic stress continued to show up years after the original events. The idea of different timelines applying to the three different types of effect chimes perfectly with the triple helix approach to the life course. We cannot squeeze everything onto the same linear trajectory.

Clearing up the physical damage from natural disasters is necessary and doing this fast may help people to recover. I’ve never been directly affected by a physical disaster of this kind, but I can imagine that there is another side to it: the rapid effacement of the visible effects may actually make it more difficult for some of the victims to come to terms with what has happened. Rescue teams rush to clear away debris, and rebuilding might be carried out with admirable speed, but the emotional effects cannot be repaired as quickly and neatly.

I assume psychotherapists and psychoanalysts routinely use the idea of variable timelines to investigate the causes of emotional stress. (Since my wife is a psychotherapist, I guess I should get on and ask her.). An event may seem to have only limited or no impact at the time, only to surface years later as a significant episode in someone’s emotional development. It may be tricky, of course, to assign causality – was it event X from three years ago or episode Y from much earlier that is now recognised as causing distress. But the idea that there might be long time lags between an event and its consequences showing up is obviously sensible, even if it cannot always be measured in the way the Hawaii study has managed to do.

So the process of recuperation – whatever that means – from stress and trauma will take different forms and run at variable speeds. As a doctor who specialised in HIV and other diseases, Richard Coker has seen plenty of loss. In a fascinating recently published book - with the great title of Timor Mortis - he has this to say about grief:

“Grief is a complex and deeply personal experience. Sometimes, grief ambushes us, a tidal wave of emotion following a sudden and unexpected loss. This is often the case with traumatic grief, where the shock and horror of the event can leave us reeling, struggling to make sense of what has happened. At other times, grief creeps in slowly, casting a long shadow before the actual loss occurs.”

It’s not only the form trauma takes, it’s the pace at which it occurs, the pattern of events and even their exact sequence.

I think of my mother’s death. She was 98, and very well looked after in an excellent care home. She was not demented but had simply run out of energy; she would respond if we talked to her, but that was about it. She was a precious person to me but I felt no acute grief after she died. It was more that over time she had taken her leave of us, gradually and with no specific moment of transition. It was definitely non-traumatic – maybe fittingly for a woman from the North-East of Scotland who never made a drama out of anything.

Coker describes different types of grief – prolonged grief disorder, when someone simply cannot get over a loss; hidden grief, where silence about loss is used as a defence mechanism; and disenfranchised grief, where grief goes unacknowledged or is regarded as somehow socially unacceptable. There is no fixed or predictable pattern. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ well-known 5-stage sequence (denial-anger-bargaining-depression-acceptance) may be a useful heuristic, but it does not reflect a universal trajectory. I understand that she later ceased to hold to it as an exact linear sequence.

To revert to the current environmental catastrophes, I find it hard to imagine how a citizen of Bordeaux must feel when their city is evacuated and there is a real prospect of its destruction. If it escapes such a fate, which I devoutly hope it does, I wonder whether some kind of residual trauma will show up in the Bordelais – a kind of grief provoked by what might have happened, even though it did not. Let’s hope that it is restricted to just that – an eventuality, not an actual event.

And finally, on the theme of different timelines. I’ve just heard that babies which got little sugar as a result of rationing at the end of WW2 are showing unusually low levels of dementia. The claim is for a biological effect with a c 80-year time lapse, which is impressive. But how they control for intervening social effects is beyond me.

BoB has three functions. It makes me pause a little after finishing a book and think what I think about it. It enables me to make quick and easy recommendations to friends if they want to know about something I’ve read. And it gives me a record of what I have read; for occasionally as I glance back through past pages I find examples of books I have simply no recollection of having read (but only one example of a book noted twice without apparent reference the second time to my having read it already).

I started BoB with handwritten entries into a sequence of diaries, but do it now on a single electronic file, which make searching easy. At the head of the document is a simple reminder that I started it in 2019 after a conversation with my old friend and former colleague John Field. The occasion was a celebration event for Bob Fryer, another stalwart in the lifelong learning field. (We all worked on the Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning, whose findings I think still make a lot of sense.) Bob died soon after the celebration event – and John died very suddenly last year, so opening the file is always something of a memento mori.

One quite early BoB entry I found on browsing back recently is on David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends. I rated the book v highly. It was published in 2018 and many of its insights have become only more relevant, and thought-provoking, in the years since. One such example:

“Human beings have an inbuilt tendency to value immediate gratification over future benefits; to want to hold on to what they have; to seek reinforcement of their beliefs; to overestimate how much other people are paying attention to them; to underestimate how different their future selves might be from their present ones.”

Some of it already looks prescient. On technology Runciman observes that the danger is not that machines become too much like humans, but the reverse. He refers to Facebook and its capacity to find ways of manipulating us, but of course this danger has taken different and more powerful forms since he wrote.

There is much more in the book (it was one of my longer BoB entries) but two comments are particularly relevant to my preoccupation with the lifecourse and how our understanding of it needs new models of ages and stages.

The first is on ‘mid-life crises’. Runciman applies the term to our democratic institutions and not to individuals. Mid-life crisis is a bit folkloric, offering faintly ironic but also stereotypical images of balding men roaring around in overpowered cars. He acknowledges that applying this to our democracies might be stretching its analogical power. Nevertheless , he argues:

“….To suffer a crisis that comes neither at the beginning nor at the end but somewhere in the middle of a life is to be pulled forwards and backwards at the same time. What pulls us forwards is our wish for something better. What pulls us back is our reluctance to let go of something that has got us this far.”

Runciman uses the notion to explore loss of direction or identity in political setups. Some contemporary factions clearly want us to retreat directly into the past, a tendency surely far more pronounced now than when Runciman wrote those words. Across the Atlantic we see explicit efforts to row back to a time when women had only family roles and religion governed (cf JD Vance’s bizarre attempt to establish his Catholic credentials), plus much else. Here in the UK the backwardlookingness maybe less overtly reactionary. But I’m struck by how persistent is the appeal, maybe to the subconscious, that this small island should still claim a world status beyond that of a middle-ranking nation, with all the personal superiority that this implies. It is indeed the loss of power - sexual, social or symbolic - that prompts midlife crisis and the behaviour that ensues.

Obviously we shouldn’t push the notion too hard, at the level of the polity or of the individual. But it’s a useful prompt for reflecting on where we have got to and what the future brings. In the case of democracies, what do the subsequent stages look like? After all, Runciman’s title talks about ‘ends’ and his book was published at almost the same time as one with a very similar title: How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. These authors look at countries such as Venezuela, Turkey, Thailand, Poland and Hungary. The book was written in the first Trump presidency, when most of the signs were already there of the damaging impact of a corrupt and childishly imperious regime. If we’re talking death, will the second presidency be ‘fatal’, and what would ‘fatal’ mean?

Unlike for individuals there is no defined political lifecourse, with a formal certification of political death, but at least the last two countries in the list, especially Poland, have arguably escaped the grim reaper/risen from the grave, at least temporarily. Democracies don’t ‘age’ quite as humans do. But – and here we get to the second point where Runciman’s book relates directly to the triple helix – the ageing of humans can have a major impact on how democracies function. This is not just about the ways different age groups or generations vary in their political views or voting patterns. Runciman makes a far more original and punchy point:

“This natural equality [of life length] may soon be a thing of the past. Technological transformation opens u[ the possibility that some people will try to buck death without any help from the Leviathan. It will be, to start with, only the hyper-privileged few who can afford to experiment with futuristic medical treatments that promise to reverse the ageing process. …Vastly extended human life spans, and hugely unequal life prospects, undermine the rationale of modern politics.”

I have already referred to the billionaire immortalists. and will be writing a separate post about how differences in life expectancies should affect our understanding of ages and stages. Runciman’s focus is a directly political one. The Bryan Johnsons of this world are not just able to employ a whole retinue of medical attendants and consume implausibly expensive treatments; they can also exercise their power to shape political choices in their favour. But the argument reaches further: those of us who are far from being billionaires and want nothing to do with immortality but are nevertheless way above average wealth levels are also more likely than not to exercise our political preferences to our own advantage. Something to think about there.

Since it’s the tenth anniversary of Brexit, I can’t resist one more quote from Runciman:

“Democracy asks only that the voters should be around long enough to suffer for their mistakes.”

He might have added that it’s not just the voters who should stick around. But then I would definitely not wish to see the other B Johnson return to the scene of his ‘triumph’.

On the whole we are pretty poor at preparing for our end. With a few exceptions – techbro would-be immortalists prominent amongst them – we know we are going to die but most of us are slow to accept this and do the necessary. By ‘necessary’ I don’t mean just the organisational stuff of will-writing, decluttering, access to your IT files etc, but the personal stuff too. This includes the spiritual, however you choose to interpret that.

Most of us will know of examples of unpreparedness. Last year a friend of mine, driving home from a concert, fell asleep at the wheel and went off the road. The car turned over but Tilly crawled out with nothing worse than a painful shoulder. We met up for lunch a few weeks later and she told me she was ok, and driving again. “And,” she added, ‘at least I’ve now made my will.” Tilly is a savvy, intelligent woman - and at 82 had been will-less until now….

How might we prepare – and when? Another of my interviewees is Walter, a tour guide and activist from Liverpool. He started his response to one of my standard questions - ‘When do we start dying?” - by saying:

“The chair of philosophy in Harvard University is this guy, Cornell West. When he gets his philosophy students in for the very first lecture he asks them, ‘why are you here?’ and they say, ‘Of course, we’re here to get wisdom, knowledge. I’m here to get a degree or, you know, I’m here to advance my career.’ He says, ‘no, no, no, you’re not here for any of that. You’re here to learn how to die right now.’”

Not many college students – at least not those of the conventional ‘student’ age – would think they are signing up to that challenge as their basic curriculum. If they are young adults they may, however, have had just a few years ago a different kind of conversation – the FoL:

When the world never seems
to be living up to your dreams
it’s time you started finding out
what everything is all about

When the boys you used to hate you date,
I guess you best investigate
the facts of life you gotta get ‘em right
the facts of life,
the facts of life,
the facts of life.

At least some of the FoL are almost universally covered in the school curriculum. They are, rightly, bracketed with issues about personal relations, linking the social and the psychological with the biological – the triple helix. But no such institution exists for those approaching the final phase of life. And there’s not much support for those seeking to understand more about it even though they may be still some distance away from reaching it. Your parents are on the whole unlikely to feel that it’s their job to talk to you about preparing to die. And your children are not much more likely - nice though it would be to think of such a neat inversion of intergenerational responsibility.

Talking about death is something many cultures are uncomfortable with. We do have research activities in universities and elsewhere, and some teaching, that explicitly address mortality issues beyond the medical and health spheres. In the UK, the Centre for Death & Society at the University of Bath is one pioneer in the field. Tony Walter, the Bath CDS director, makes the following paradoxical observation on where the growth of thanatology – the study of death-related issues - is happening most:

“In the USA and the UK, the presence of the dead is not generally or publicly acknowledged. It is in such societies that thanatology has developed.”

Is this changing, as the longevity discussion broadens? Might we see Facts of Death conversations emerge, just as we (or some of us) have had Facts of Life ones? Just what are the FoDs? A very open question. There are probably some elements of a ‘mortality curriculum’ that would be seen as universally relevant. The list might start from understanding one’s likely/possible physiological trajectory, through dealing with outstanding matters of personal relations and saying things you’ve always wanted to say before it’s too late, to thinking about wider spiritual issues. (I write as humanist funeral celebrant, and use ‘spiritual’ loosely to refer to areas that are matters of personal belief and values.) The conversation might go on to include a broader discussion of how we treat death and dying in our societies – the rituals and conventions we do or don’t have, and how these might be improved. In short, the three strands of the triple helix – the biological, the psychological and the socio-cultural - might in this context exactly provide a curricular framework, to use the educational jargon.

Most of any such conversation will depend on the particular circumstances, of the mortal and of their close ones. Adolescents are assailed by hormones, inducing wild swings in behaviour and temperament, which can make FoL conversations difficult; similarly at the other end people will change their minds and their attitude to dying and death, perhaps just as capriciously. The range of issues to be covered is arguably far wider for the older group; there are practical matters to be dealt with which affect whole families, as well as all the emotional and physical issues which may reach a long way back into personal histories.

Bracketing ‘mortality’ and ‘curriculum’ as I have just done is more than a tad provocative. I’m not suggesting that we sit in schoolrooms while someone at the front tells us about dying and death (not that I assume that is how adolescents are taught about managing their transition). Such learning will generally be highly informal. Death Cafes are one excellent model of structured but informal learning. They bring people together who want to explore death-related issues, for a wide variety of reasons.

In the Death Cafes in which I have participated, an experienced convenor introduces the topic, and volunteer facilitators then sit with groups to enable the conversations to flow around whatever topics the participants have brought along with them. The conversations are very much powered by the concerns of those who take part. After the small groups have discussed for a while, there is a break and then a more general pooling of thoughts and reflections. Generations mix; those present are not only older people thinking about their own death. Café-frequenters may share painful experiences, but the sessions are not bereavement-management or therapy, and the atmosphere is often light-hearted.

So to be clear: I’m not calling for a circular from the Department for Education specifying a compulsory course on death preparation, with a test at the end of it, the passing of which entitles you to move on to the next level…..But there is a lot to talk about, and most of us could do with some help in getting the discussion going. (For one very useful resource, see this personal service offered by my friend Ann Kenrick.)

Maybe things are changing. When it comes to preparing for death, Esme, a 40-something theatre artist, thinks we are moving in the right direction, at least in her circles:

“The idea of just bringing, just welcoming death into the party more and more and more, it does feel like that’s happening ….I feel like people are becoming more psychologically educated, and so they understand that if they don’t look at their own selfish behaviours, for example, they’re going to have an impact on the people around them. That’s sort of entering the kind of public mindset, I think.”

She stresses that such preparation is not just a personal matter; it’s a social obligation:

“I feel like in not confronting your own death, you’re asking so much more of the people around you.”

This final phase of life may be very extended indeed, whereas for adolescence the general hope is that the quicker the phase is over the better for all concerned. So it’s up for grabs what should be in the FoD conversation, and when it should happen. What we might look for, in addition to materials that help productive conversations, are the kinds of social signals and supports that will enable such conversations to be initiated and accepted as a normal way of life. And with all due respect it shouldn’t need a car crash to trigger them.

“The age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales is 10 years old. This means that children under 10 can’t be arrested or charged with a crime….Children between 10 and 17 can be arrested and taken to court if they commit a crime.”

10 – a good round number; apart from that it’s hard to see much of a rationale for this. Yet somewhat perversely, the unease about how we define criminal responsibility has bubbled to the surface recently because of several horrific cases of violence committed by teenagers, and the judicial responses to them.

Most recently, two boys of 13 and 14 who had raped a young girl were spared custodial sentences. Judge Nicholas Rowland said the first offender, J, was described as having ADHD and “slight cognitive difficulties”, but he said that did not reduce his personal culpability.

The second defendant, N, was found by experts to have an IQ in the bottom 1% compared with his contemporaries. He had both ADHD and “extreme neurological impairment” which meant he could not cope with ordinary schooling. His mother had described him as being more like an eight-year-old boy. “I am quite sure that N’s culpability was reduced as result of his profound impairments,” Judge Rowland said.

So on the one hand we have a greater awareness of the actual age, which seems pretty ludicrous to most of us (in Scotland it is a slightly less ludicrous 12). On the other hand we see understandable public outrage at individuals committing acts of adult violence but being spared adult punishment.

Where – and more importantly how - should the line be drawn? I’m not a legal philosopher and these are deep waters, but clearly it must have something to do with assumptions about when people are, or should be, capable of understanding right and wrong, and realising that what they are doing is wrong.

My first question to the 60 people I interviewed for the TH book was “When did or will you become an adult?”. You won’t be surprised to know that not one of them said that it was when they passed the age of criminal responsibility. (Two of them had been to prison for crimes committed later on in life – one in their twenties, one in their thirties. The latter, Ken, described tellingly how this had actually sent him back into a state of juvenile dependence, but that’s another story.)

Once again, simple chronological age is a pretty poor index, in this case of capacity for moral reasoning. But we can hardly introduce nationwide tests to ascertain this capacity and certify individual adult responsibility. (I would be quite in favour of a public debate on the relative levels of (im)morality of different actions, and on matching penalties to crimes; I suspect the current tariffs might look quite out of kilter with public morality.)

The issue of responsibility was in my mind as I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Kathryn Paige Harden, titled Original Sin. Harden was raised as an evangelical Christian, with sin central to the family culture. In her twenties she broke away from that faith and became a psychologist specialising in genetics and how they influence behaviour, but her Christian upbringing remains a constant background to her reflections.

Harden is concerned with responsibility generally, not just that of how we decide when young people assume responsibility for their actions – criminal or otherwise. As we understand more about genetics, and especially about the interaction between our genomes and our environments, the concept becomes visibly more complex. There is the occasional gene or mutation which is likely to provoke terrible behaviour. For males who carry a mutation in the MAOA gene the effects can be catastrophic:

“It leads to a buildup in the neurotransmitters that neurons use to communicate with each other….and a tendency toward explosive outbursts of anger, especially in response to fear or frustration. To inherit this mutated gene [which, by the way, a woman has a 50/50 chance of passing on to her male child] was to be prone to engage in arson, rape, assault, or even homicide.”

Harden gives examples of this resulting in terrible crimes. But as a general rule she absolutely does not want us to think in single-gene terms. Her discussion shows how often environmental issues such as violent upbringings are associated with subsequent violent criminal behaviour. This much may seem unremarkable, but we are now reaching a level of understanding on the interaction between genetic profiles and the environments in which people are raised which prompts truly important and challenging questions about responsibility.

Already we have had pleas made in court for people to be absolved of criminal responsibility because of certain physical or psychological characteristics. (Think of the wonderful film I Swear, the true life story of a sufferer from Tourette’s and the very gradual understanding of why he shouts his verbal obscenities; if you haven’t seen it, make it a priority.) Harden asks the difficult question: as our understanding of environmental influences grows, what will this do to our definitions of moral responsibility? And even harder: as we also gain subtler and more in-depth understanding of genetic influences, will we starting adding the two together to produce higher levels of determinism and lower levels of responsibility?

This raises an alarming prospect: the more we know about the reasons for our actions, the lower the claims we can make on people to act ‘responsibly’. Harden draws on the philosopher Peter Strawson:

“Strawson argues that that determinism is, in the end, simply irrelevant to be a person in human relationships – to be subject to their demands and expectations. Moral responsibility is a social condition, not a supernatural one.”

So “the practice of holding each other responsible is an inescapable feature of being human”, and we can’t allow the escape route of genetic or environmental destiny.

Deep waters here. Let’s get back to the marginally less tricky issue of how to approach the age of criminal responsibility. I have just two observations.

First, the triple helix as a model for understanding the life course has obvious relevance. Biologically, boys may be capable of rape, and other horrible actions, but psychologically they may be way off maturity; and our social judgment of adult responsibility has to reflect both the relationship between these two strands and how we as a society want to signal our expectations of how people should behave at any given age. There are many forms of responsibility; it is not something that is assumed wholesale in a single swoop. Once again, chronological age may be a starting point for understanding behaviour, but it should not determine our response.

The second point is closely related. I applaud the judge’s wish to emphasise rehabilitation. But the damage to the girl, and her family, has been done. We need to find ways of signalling disapproval, from its mildest form up to utter abhorrence, which do better than the counterproductive crudeness of current penal policy. We can draw on the kinds of science that Harden tells us about to develop a more effective balance between punishment and rehabilitation. And this applies to people who commit crimes at any age.

I went recently to the excellent Coming of Age exhibition at the Wellcome Collection. The title is a gentle play on words: there is some material on how people make the transition to adulthood, but the primary focus is on the population transition at the other end of the life course: the demographic shift towards older people.

Quite rightly the exhibition kicks off with a note on language, addressing the key issue of how we talk about ‘age’. I reproduce the note below, with apologies for the wrinkled asymmetry of my photography.

The note does a good job in alerting us to the range of possible meanings and flavours in any discussion of ‘age’ and ‘ageing’, and the exhibition goes on to illustrate these with a wide variety of objects.

Writing in the exhibition’s booklet the exhibition’s curator Shamita Sharmacharja goes further:

“We often think that ageing happens later in life, but we are all getting older every day. Across cultures and eras, people have tried to map life into stages: childhood, coming of age, middle age and becoming older. From 19^th-century prints to contemporary birthday cards, this is often represented as a linear path from growth to decline.”

She goes on to say that although these narratives suggest a predictable journey, the idea of a single path through life is outdated, and questions how far lives ever really followed these patterns. Challenging linearity is the central theme of my case for the triple helix as a model for thinking more broadly about the life course, so naturally her argument resonated strongly.

One of the high points for me was the painting by Paula Rego, titled ‘Nursing’. Again there is deliberate ambiguity. Reading the blurb quickly I first thought the picture is of Rego’s mother. In fact it is of the person whom Rego habitually used as a model; the title was prompted by having just placed her mother in a nursing home, with all the mix of feelings that this can provoke – nursing now needed for the person who had been her primary nurturer.

The second ambiguity is in the title: as the blurb says, this both evokes breastfeeding and the care extended to older people such as Rego’s mother now needs. The painting points simultaneously to both ends of life.

The exhibition’s exploration of such nuances takes me to a related ambiguity, around the notion of caring. This is something I’ve encountered often when asking people the awkward question of when they think we start dying. Naturally some of my respondents talked about loss of independence, and hence the need to be cared for. But caring is not just a matter of physical looking after but of all the attendant factors which make the difference between basic functional and high quality care.

The broader psychological question is how far people as they get near the end of life cease to care not for but about others. Of course I don’t mean that older people at some point resume the egotism of adolescence, nor that there is a culpable onset of heartlessness. I mean something more diffuse: a shrinkage in the capacity or inclination to care for others beyond the family, to empathise and engage with the wider world.

The notion of ‘disengagement’ by older people – their withdrawal from the world – which this may seem to imply is highly contested, on the grounds that it encourages older people’s marginalization; they are eased to one side, irrespective of their inclinations and potential for fruitful engagement. So we need to tread carefully. But is there a general tendency to focus more on near ones as one gets older? There may be insights to be gained from better understanding older people’s capacity for caring and how the profile of this capacity changes over time.

The exhibition does an excellent job in raising this kind of question. I hope it will act as a prompt for wider discussion – not only on ageing as such, but on how this requires a rethinking of all ages and stages in the life course.

On a different note I can’t resist including the exhibition’s advertisement for Kellogg’s All Bran, made around 1930. It’s a forerunner of all the promotional stuff which today promises eternal youth. The ad shows two men – well, the same man but in one image some additional lines have been etched onto his face. The blurb reads:

“These two men are the same age. One had driving – power -energy – the will to succeed. The other is listless- tired all the time – it is an effort for him to plod through each day’s work.”

The magic cereal will do the trick. If only Bryan Johnson could get his hands on that cereal….

For the past several months I’ve been part of a group of ‘ambassadors’ for Stanford University’s Centre for Longevity. The Centre promotes fresh thinking about the implications of increased lifespans, for us as individuals and for our societies. It does an excellent job in fostering new ideas, but also in encouraging entrepreneurial activities which should help us to make the best use of added years.

Our cohort of ambassadors - about 15 strong - were drawn from all quarters of the world, and a most energetic and stimulating bunch. I noticed particularly strong representation from Portugal, which is now Europe’s fastest ageing country, looking at leadership on longevity as well as health issues. Another member spoke about the work that Ashoka does to encourage multigenerational understanding in India. And so on.

My contribution to the Stanford group, such as it was, was about models of the life course, and how a Triple Helix might help us better understand the implications of greater longevity. Many of the group, by contrast, were working on far more applied initiatives, exploring new longevity-related organisational or marketing initiatives. Not currently being involved in such applied work I was probably something of an outlier . (The applied side of my work is more linked to criminal justice - though even in this sector there are age-related issues as the numbers of older prisoners goes up and up.) Anyway, Learning Throughout Life is one of the Stanford guiding principles, and I was able to contribute a little on that.

My membership of the group spurred me to get back in touch with the Unesco Institute for Lifelong Learning, and specifically with their initiative on Learning Cities. The Learning Cities initiative has grown to a network of 100s of cities which all stake some claim to the title, though interpreted in very varying ways. I was keen to find out which of them focus on ageing issues, and Mo Wong, senior UIL analyst, obliged with very helpful information. Their recent analyses of ‘grey digital divide’ and ‘intergenerational learning’ are particularly rich.

Several members of the Stanford group are focussed on expanding learning opportunities for older adults, so it had some resonance. Interestingly, in some cases demographic trends mean that universities are having to look at this area for self-interest, as the numbers of young people coming through decline steadily.

As you can see, the Stanford Centre has an imaginative approach to mapping - literally imaginative, as they use pictorial representation well. I’ve interspersed a few of their diagrams in this post, and applaud their vivacity. I’d love to have the capacity to play around more with these kinds if visual representation.

So now to dying and death. I did offer one challenge to the Stanford Centre, and to my fellow ambassadors. I noted that the phases covered in the New Map of Life stopped short of the final one. Preparation for dying and death do not figure in the charts. The emphasis, understandably enough, is on living longer lives to the full, but this does not seem to include looking forward to the actual end. Shouldn’t the map extend to include the final phase - however long that might be?

I suggested that we might like to encourage ‘Facts of Death conversations, as a parallel to the Facts of Life conversations that supposedly help usher adolescents across the threshold. Both types of conversation cover the TH’s three strands: biologically, FoL cover what’s happening to adolescents’ bodies, and so should FoD to our more aged ones; psychologically we need at both ends to understand how getting older affects our mindsets and outlooks; and socio-culturally we need greater awareness of the conventions, practices and rituals that govern the transitions, both to adulthood and to our final stage. You get the parallels.

Of course this raises the question of when and how such conversations should take place. There is no obvious physical equivalent to puberty to mark the transition at the other end. I put to my TH interviewees the simple question “When do you start dying?”. The most common response to this was ‘when you are born’, often accompanied by a slight deflecting chuckle. This showed how inadequately the question was framed; it also brought to mind R.D. Laing’s famously mordant observation that ‘life is a sexually transmitted disease with a 100% mortality rate’. We are all on the path to death, and none of us knows how long that path will be. What are the signals, beyond the mere passage of chronological time, to tell us that we are in some sense entering a new and supposedly final phase?

Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have observed that most people die at 25 but are not buried until they are 75. Less brutal are the reflections of the recently retired professor in Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Go, Went, Gone:

“Maybe a cardigan is more appropriate to his new condition.Seeing that he no longer goes out in human society on a daily basis, it’s surely no longer necessary for him to shave every morning.Let grow what will.Just stop putting up resistance –or is that how dying begins? Could dying begin with this kind of growth?No, that can’t be right, he thinks.” [my stress]

What other markers are there, apart from abandoning a daily shave? I’ll have more to say on this - how we might want to think about the final transition - in future posts. But by chance yesterday’s Guardian (9 Feb) carried a telling piece about the ‘longevity obsession’. It chronicles the emergence of a new anxiety-driven fixation with living as long as possible. Some people apparently check in to hugely expensive clinics to treat the disorder, which has led them to impossible food and exercise regimes, with obsessive physiological self-measurement.

This was certainly not an issue for my Stanford fellows, but I have to say that my remarks on the need to include dying as a final phase evoked little response. This may have been my clumsiness in presenting them, but I have some sense that the high-energy activity-focussed outlook of most participants maybe tended to sideline thinking about the final phase. I’ve noticed before, in a different group),that some anti-ageism campaigners seem to want to defy/sideline the inevitability of mortality. Arguably - and I recognise this is a contentious line - the denial of decline and final destination is itself a form of ageism.

I’ve just finished Eliza Filby’s lively book Inheritocracy: It’s Time to Talk about the Bank of Mum and Dad. The book is explicitly aimed not at septuagenarians like myself but at Eliza’s fellow millennials, and the bracketing generations X and Z. Her main argument, which I agree with, is that when it comes to inequality we should be paying more attention to the intragenerational dimension than to the intergenerational. The focus on the contrast between wealthy boomers and impoverished millennials obscures the bigger issue of how the inequalities then play out within younger generations.

The book is laced with details of Filby’s own story, endearingly embarrassing at times but serving a genuine illustrative purpose. Her parents were not well off, and not typically middle class, but they were able to support her financially as she zigzagged her way through several degrees and a lot of parties to a seemingly conventional marriage and kids – and especially to the ownership of property, which is the central theme of the book. In most families wealth takes the form of housing, especially in London and southern England. Filby addresses how that wealth is used to advantage the prospects of some, but only some, segments of younger generations.

There is much here of general interest, and indeed of political and social significance. How does it relate to my support for the Triple Helix as a model of the life course? Some of the book certainly relates very directly: in Filby’s remarks about the postponement of adulthood, or rather its morph as a life stage into an extended ‘kidulthood’ (which she says stretches from 18 to early 30s); in the change of pace as middle age suddenly arrives at a completely unexpected speed (“I had taken the slow lane into adulthood but felt I was being fast-tracked into middle age”); and in the changes we are seeing in the sequencing of life’s markers:

“I found myself organising my one-year-old son’s christening, my father’s funeral and our wedding (in that order), all taking place within four months, which was a juddering bolt into adulthood if ever there was one.”

The timing of parenthood (as well as its place in the sequence) is a major issue. Time, she observes, ‘is inextricably linked to womanhood’, because of fertility. Obvious enough, you may think, but Filby makes the point trenchantly:

“Since the 1990s we have allowed a corporate culture to develop where women are almost encouraged to think that they need to get to a certain point in their career before they can have children. This is madness, and fuels a culture where egg freezing is sold as a job perk.”

The link between biology and social practices could not be more salient. I’m reminded of one of my interviewees, Bronwen, a 47-year-old primary school librarian with one son. She had listed some of the superficial symbols of adulthood as she perceived it at the time: having a bottle of whisky and a bottle of perfume on the mantelpiece, and the ability to take a taxi. These were meaningful symbols for her, which shows how fast what counts as a marker changes. But for Bronwen biology was still the primary framer:

“Women’s lives are framed in a physical way that men’s aren’t – it’s starting and stopping being able to reproduce.”

Egg-freezing as a job perk is a chilling phrase (no pun intended). The way forward is surely to think more about the structure of careers more broadly. As I argued in the Paula Principle, we need to pay much more attention to changing male careers, rather than always expecting women to mould their career and life course patterns around male structures.

From the TH angle the most pertinent parts of Inheritocracy come when Filby addresses ageing. She does this as a matter of social relationships, not just of individual biology. What obligations do parents have to their children? How are family relationships affected by the expectation of inheritance? The prospect of dependency affects these relationships, even when death itself is denied, by children as well as parents, as is so often the case. Filby’s focus on inherited wealth brings these issues out graphically, notably in discussion around the timing of bequests: should/do people wait until they die before handing on the assets which will enable their children to have their own homes?

Filby illuminates the variety of dependency crossover points – the moment or time when parents cease to be the family head and, willingly or consciously or not, cede responsibility to their children. Derek, one of my interviewees who worked in finance, got married at 22. His mother had died six months before this, and from then on his father became dependent on him. But the switch had been foreshadowed; Derek told me the highly symbolic story of how his perception of his father changed just before his mother died. The whole family – mother, father and three children – were walking home after dinner, across Hampstead Heath. They came to Hampstead Gate, and Derek vividly recalls his brother picking up his father and handing him over to him on the other side of the gate. Physical moments like these stay in the memory. I distinctly recall my mother stumbling on a pavement in Edinburgh, 35 years ago. It was not the fall itself, but the way she fell (happily without too much damage) which told me that she was now in a different stage.

Filby rightly makes much of eldercare, and how this affects family relations, and attitudes to assets. She gives us the chilling figures for institutional care costs – up to £70K a year - which can rapidly erode even a substantial legacy. The focus throughout is on the complex and nuanced nature of family relationships, now rendered still more complex by the blending and reblending of families and the presence of multiple step-relations.

I haven’t said much about the third TH strand, the psychological, but in a sense it’s a pervasive theme. Filby observes how simply knowing that there are assets in family provides a kind of reassurance, a confidence in one’s ability to give things ago. This reminded me again of my librarian Bronwen: at 16 she went off to live in Paris, somewhat prematurely as she now says. She had an attic room on the Place des Vosges, tiny and crowded. She was not comfortable, feeling she was out of her depth. A boy she had given the key to transgressed, she was (falsely) accused of having a party there and she was asked to leave with no notice. She found herself on the street, with of course no mobile phone. It was a very uncomfortable experience, but crucially she knew that there was a home to go back to.

Knowing that there is a home, somewhere, enables one to take risks. Not all risks pay off, and some may even have dire consequences, but the security of a home asset expands the range of possibilities in ways that may be hard for those who have never lacked it to understand. This is the essence of Filby’s argument. It applies, I think, not only to younger generations but to people of any age as they contemplate what might come next in life.

One or two well-known examples were mentioned, such as Susie Orbach marrying Jeanette Winterson after having been married and having children with Joseph Schwartz. I offered the view that this kind of transition is maybe more common in women than men but no one seemed to know much about trends or patterns on this, and we moved on to other issues. I found myself thinking a little more about it – because, naturally, it seemed to me to be a topic where the triple helix model finds suitable application. The three strands – biological, psychological and socio-cultural – should give us better insights into what might be happening.

I did a little bit of further research, but without much joy. There are some stats which are somewhat relevant. Divorce in opposite sex couples is going down for most age groups, but older people are bucking the trend: between 2005 and 2015, the number of men divorcing aged 65 and over went up by 23% and the number of women of the same age divorcing increased by 38%. We know a little about same-sex partnerships established at different ages - which are also more common in women than men. But we need, ideally, longitudinal data to tell us more about switching. There is a certain amount about fluidity of sexual orientation in later life , but I couldn’t find anything which track people over time and could tell me about switches from heterosexual to homosexual around middle age or later.

Here, from this position of ignorance, is why I think the TH model is so relevant to understanding what might be happening – and yes, this is of course all very speculative. First, some of the switching may be due to physiological changes, most obviously to do with the menopause. Whether men experience anything like the menopause is the subject of some speculation (usually fairly unhelpful) but I don’t think there’s any doubt that most women go through a physical change which is much more significant than any notional male equivalent. There is no sudden drop in testosterone equivalent to the lowering of hormones and period cessation in women. I have no idea what implications such biological changes might have for sexual orientation, but it’s something we might want to understand better. (For informative analysis of ageing effects generally, including longitudinal data on its biological effects, see John Bateson’s Substack on Consumer Ageism.)

Secondly, though, the psychological strand: how women and men feel about relationships generally and partnership in particular differs, often very considerably, and this may become more apparent later in life. Less about sex, and more about companionship. This is not confined to older women, but may become more pronounced later in life. Women have finished child-bearing – though not of course parenting – and this may alter their outlook on who makes a good partner. Roles and priorities change, and as a result so do people’s views on what they are looking for in the person they live with. To the extent that this is the case, it is more likely to be women that change in midlife or later.

A good example of this, coincidentally, came from my (all-male) book group. We were reading Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye. In our group, whoever has proposed the book gives a brief intro to it before we get down to eating dinner (yes, we’re very structured…). I learnt that Spark was married early (very unhappily) and had a child, and after her divorce had at least one long-running heterosexual relationship – and then for her last twenty or so years lived with a female companion in Italy. The relationship was apparently one of deep friendship, nothing more. Reading a little about Spark I found her a fairly unpleasant character (and disliked the book) but maybe she was a pioneer of one form of this particular switch.

So to the third strand, the socio-cultural: what are our social attitudes to such a switch? My sense is that it is socially easier for a woman to move into a same-sex relationship than for a man to do so. I have absolutely no solid evidence for this, but it seems to me that attitudes to such a change are different according to which gender is involved, and make it easier for women to make the switch. Women cohabiting may simply be friends (as the Spark example shows). I can think of several instances from my personal experience of cohabiting women with who are not partners in the standard sense. My own mother, though she never co-habited after divorcing my father, had very close female friends – one next door and one across the street – with whom she also went on holiday. I don’t think there was ever any sexual element, but it would have been unsurprising – to me and to others - if she had actually chosen to live with one of them.

For men, I think this would be socially much more difficult. Unless the couple were explicit in talking about their relationship, the switch would be more remarked upon than if they were two women. The commentary would not necessarily be unsympathetic, but it would raise more eyebrows. It would be interesting to hear of examples of male equivalents to Spark and Orbach.

Is this a correct perception of gender differences in this crossover? Which of the TH factors play a greater role? Maybe a reader can answer….

For the biologist, senescence – growing old - is mostly about the progressive deterioration of cells, organs and tissues associated with increased chronological age. A typical, and gloomy, definition runs as follows:

“A progressive deterioration of physiological function, an intrinsic age-related process of loss of viability and increase in vulnerability.”^[1]

There may or may not be decisive moments in this process; mostly it is gradual, and normal or predictable. Ageing begins when deterioration sets in, and there’s not much to be said on the positive side. This is one source of tension between biological approaches on the one hand and psychological and sociological on the other. The aspiration of some biologists to treat ageing as a disease to be cured is understandable, but causes considerable unease amongst those of us who would wish the occasional positive or just neutral aspects of ageing to be recognised.

A fundamental plank in my argument for a new model of the life course is that our difficulties in measuring out the life course stem in part from the weaknesses of chronological age as a measure. One striking alternative to this measure is the Horvath clock. Using over 350 epigenetic markers on the DNA, Steve Horvath, the eponymous professor of human genetics and biostatistics, devised ways of making predictions which link such methylation levels to biological ages. He established a high level of accuracy on many dimensions.[2]

At the cellular level the key transition is when cells lose their capacity to reproduce themselves – replicative senescence. They reach the Hayflick Limit: the biologist Leonard Hayflick discovered that cells can divide and so reproduce themselves only a limited number of times, around fifty. This is the process of mitosis. After this limiting point, they break down (apoptosis[3]).

Hayflick did not describe the mitosis process as a clock but as a ‘replicometer’. His pioneering work was taken further by the Nobel Prize winners Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider who showed how the cell indeed keeps a tally of the number of times it has divided during its progress towards the Hayflick Limit – a kind of internal marking of how ‘old’ it is becoming.

It’s worth noting that the capacity of cells to reproduce is not always a positive, most obviously in the case of cancer, where diseased cells often multiply with fatal results for the organism. Hence the alarmingly titled but essential process of autophagy - literally self-eating – where the body stops its cells from reproducing in order to defeat cancerous mutations. In the case of humans, cancers are relatively rare for the first four decades, after which there is an upsurge as autophagy’s capacity to deal with increasing numbers of mutations diminishes. The increase is much sharper for men, as the chart below shows (I am still looking for the source of this).

Why, in an evolutionary setting, do cells and bodies age as they do? I ask the question not as a scientist, obviously, but because of its relevance to how we decide on age-related categories and their value. One approach to explaining this is the theory of mutation accumulation. The theory suggests that nasty genetic effects which only occur later in life avoid being eliminated by natural selection exactly because they only come into play after the period of reproduction. Carriers of the genes are thus not prevented from passing them on, and the mutations therefore are able to continue to accumulate. The disease of Huntington’s Chorea is a dreadful example. Inherited from parents, its symptoms include stumbling and clumsiness, involuntary jerking or fidgety movements of the limbs and body, mood swings and personality changes. It usually strikes its victims between the ages of 30 and 50, so they have had easily enough time to have had children themselves.

A second theory, rejoicing in the name antagonistic pleiotropy, suggests that some genes have a positive early effect, for example in enabling a build-up of calcium for healthy bone growth, but those same genes go on producing the effect which may later become harmful to older people, since it causes hardening of the arteries. The initial positive effect is enough to ensure the genes’ continuation. In other words what works well at an early stage ensures survival but turns foul at another, biologically speaking. In this line of evolutionary thinking, it is the loss of reproductive capacity that marks the decisive, and explanatory, turning point.

The equivalent for the organism of replicative senescence in cells is also when it loses its reproductive capacity. For humans, this is at menopause for women, but usually much later for men. The menopause is a transition that is only recently attracting due attention, mainly because it is not one that has had a meaningful definition for men. (Though it’s not one of my key markers I’ll come back to the menopause in a future post; apparently only humans, chimps and killer whales experience this transition, which allows them all to play grandmother roles of caring - and discipline….)

Possibly the clearest visible example of divergence between the biological and other strands occurs in cases of diseases such as the Hutchinson Guilford syndrome, a form of sequential progeria, or vastly premature ageing. For those afflicted, some parts of the body age at terrifying speed but not others. Those affected suffer loss of hair and pigmentation spots already as children, but never reach sexual maturity and usually die at around age twelve. A more common disease is Werner Syndrome, a form of adult onset progeria. Here symptoms of ageing appear during the teenage years: greying of hair or baldness, the atrophy of muscles and osteoporosis, with a median age of death at 47. Both syndromes exhibit a terrible mismatching of the physical and the chronological, as well as their intrinsic affliction.

So far, so bloody miserable. But read on for a different angle on what ageing means. And I’ll return in a future post to other perspectives on ageing and ageism, in part arising from my engagement with the Stanford Centre for Longevity and its work on a New Map of Life, led by Professor Laura Carstensen.

The biogerontologist David Gems argues that we are still lacking a theory of ageing. (Professor Gems kindly allowed me to sit in on his UCL course on the biology of ageing. This was hugely helpful as well as enjoyable; Professor Gems is not responsible for any failure on my part to grasp the content.) The nearest plausible candidate is an established set of nine ‘hallmarks’ (cellular senescence is one such hallmark; others include telomere attrition, epigenetic alterations, and stem cell exhaustion), but Gems holds that these do not add up to a genuine theory. In the search for a theory of ageing, he is a determined and eloquent proponent of the view that we should regard ageing as a disease, and then we will be able to tackle it in a comprehensive fashion, as opposed to identifying and treating individual symptoms. I could not possibly challenge his scientific position, but I suggest that this works only as a biological theory. To treat ‘ageing’ as a disease, and to suggest that we are at the same stage now in respect of ageing as were centuries ago with tuberculosis (ie yet to establish it as a defined disease), implies that all aspects of ageing are harmful and ideally to be eliminated.

Tuberculosis is the example Gems chooses; his fellow biogerontologist David Sinclair of MIT uses malaria and HIV, but is similarly uncompromising in arguing that ageing should be seen as a disease. None of these diseases has any positive aspect, as far as I know, but ‘ageing’ is not only a medical condition; the term has far wider application, in the social and psychological spheres. To think of it only as a disease is to ignore the far more nuanced, and in many respects positive, assessments of development and growth in these spheres. Wisdom, freedom, integrity, the capacity to care and many other positive or at least neutral attributes and characteristics: none of these is remotely guaranteed by ageing, but they are all identifiable as achievements which often accompany it, and which clearly do not fit at all in a category of disease.

In a guest lecture in Professor Gems’ course, Andrew Steptoe suggested the following as complements to the established Hallmarks of Ageing: sensory loss; decline in physical capacity; disabilities; cognitive impairment; reduction in social and cultural participation; an increase in diseases such as diabetes and cancer. These are, to be sure, all highly relevant to our theme. But again, all are indices of decline, to be avoided or deferred as far as possible. All are physical, except for the participation one.[4]

For a broader and more balanced mapping of the life course it seems to me we need two guides. The first is a good sense of the typical onsets of physical change and their trajectories over time, in the population as a whole and by segment of population. Included in this is how such trajectories have changed historically, ie at what ages they are now occurring compared to some decades ago, and how they develop over time. Plus, crucially, how we can challenge unwarranted assumption about what ‘old’ people can and cannot do. One of the triumphs of scientific and economic progress is the extension of lifespans; how do we increase the chances that these are healthy ones?

Secondly, we need to map these physical changes against the social and psychological trajectories which accompany them, so that we can compare and contrast their effects and their interactions. How, for example, does cognitive impairment, as and when it occurs, interact with a changing social environment? What adjustments can be made in different work or social environments to cope with such changes? At what ages (measured chronologically or biologically) are particular kinds of health information or education most relevant, and how are they best delivered? And how do such indicators relate to the personal and psychological reactions which my respondents gave in the previous post. And how do we maximise the opportunities for a fulfilling later life? Such questions are exactly the ones which the triple helix as a model should help us to address.

Let’s end with a very different perspective. My two youngest interviewees were Ethan, 13, and Bertie, 15, friends whom I interviewed together. In some ways their views on how if at all we know when we’re old coincided closely with others from different generations. For Bertie:

“Some people’s bodies keep going until, you know, later ages and some people are bed-bound at 70 and some people are still out cycling across London at 90. So everything is more of a much more broad age range….Similar with turning into an adult there’s different ways of being old. So, there’s the way society sees you as old. There’s the way you feel inside yourself is old. … A society could say once you retired maybe that’s like the cut-off point. You might be old in society but still young physically.”

Ethan argued against the idea of definite dividing lines, a more subjective view:

“I think your age just passes by and you just slowly physically and mentally become older. But, actually, there’s not a thing where it’s like, OK, I’m old now. Age is a number and you just carry on going, you can’t just say, ‘oh, I’m 60, I’m old’. It’s the same as ‘I’m 18. I’m an adult.’ It’s basically like, your number of your age, just moving along so slowly, slowly till you are just very, very.....”

He stopped, and Bertie added: ‘near death”. So death as the end definitely has something to do with defining old; the problem is knowing how close it is. Neither of these boys is likely to be calculating any time soon how much time they have left to live.[

1] João Pedro de Magalhães, founder of the website https://senescence.info/ De Magalhães disarmingly declares himself a gerontologist who is terrified of death.

[2] Confirmed by Nobel prizewinner Venki Ramakrishnan: “In fact they [methylation patterns] are more accurate than chronological age alone at predicting age-related diseases and mortality.” Venki Ramakrishnan, Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest f or Immortality, Hodder Press 2024, p98. A

[3] s in the previous post, Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead provides illumination. The narrator Janina muses on the theme, and introduces a fascinating analogy: “Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism – it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components – the senses – succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means ‘the dropping of petals’. The world has dropped its petals.” Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Fitzcarraldo 2022, p63. [my stress]

[4] In my notes written up after this lecture I wrote “So I think there are the following questions: in what sense do we aim to treat aging as a disease: to eliminate it, as with TB? In which case what happens to death? Or manage/control it, so that it has few/no bad effects, longer lives ensue but then death occurs (how?). Or is the wise approach to do the managing, but at the same time get both aging and death into perspective? So my notion of ‘proportionate’ refers to getting the balance between achieving greater healthspan (by treating aging holistically, rather than its discrete symptoms) and yet confronting death – and accepting changes.”

“ ‘I don’t really like Great Granny,’ says Harriet. Casual.

‘Why ever not, for goodness’ sake?’

‘She’s old,’ says Harriet. ‘I don’t like old.’

Connie stops. She pulls Harriet to a halt. She looks down at her. ‘Harriet,’ she says ‘one day you will be old, like Great Granny.’

Harriet laughs. ‘No, I won’t.’

Connie is exasperated, as she is rather often, with Harriet. ‘And how would you feel, if a little girl was rude to you and didn’t like you?’

‘You’re just being silly,’ says Harriet ‘how can I be old? I’m me.’”

When do people in general think they become old? It’s a short word that carries so many different implications. [1] There are huge variations across cultures, as the anthropologist Jared Diamond discovered:

“In rural New Guinea, however, where relatively few people reach the age of 60, even 50-year olds are regarded as old. I recall arriving at a village of Indonesian New Guinea where, when the local people learned that I was (then) 46 years old, they gasped out ‘setengah mati!’, meaning half-dead, and they assigned a teenage boy to walk constantly beside me to ensure that I would not come to grief.”[2]

When asking my interviewees when they thought they had, or would, become old I got into predictable difficulties, mainly because of the differences in the way people interpret terms which appear very similar but carry different connotations – ‘ageing’, ‘old age’, ‘elderhood’ and suchlike. Some referred to this verbal melange explicitly, as a personal as well as wider conceptual problem.

Bronwen is 47. She has recently retrained to become a primary school teacher, and lives with her son Simon, aged 16. Her outlook on life is in some ways unusual, but captures many of the issues of change over the life course, including the perils of nomenclature:

“I embrace that I’m old. I remember that in Portugal at the turn of the twentieth century life expectancy was 35. I’ve been practising calling myself old since I was about 40.”

Some people thought that she was fishing for compliments by saying this, so she had to be clear that she wasn’t:

“I think I want to accept where I am, whatever age I am at. Previously I don’t think I did that, not as a teenager, or some of my twenties - I mean not being present with both the liberties or limitations of these ages. So asserting that I have come to this ‘middle age-getting older’ is positively claiming my stage and place. And getting used to that….one semantic quirk is that I am happy to say I am getting old, but not that I have entered ‘old age’. I can’t justify why, I’ll have to think about the difference. ‘Old age’ is maybe the same as ‘elderly’ and I don’t think I’ve crossed that threshold. I see that as a time when my influence and participation in society and the responsibilities I have, along with my age[3], separate me from other generations. And knowing that the time ahead of me is so much less than what I have lived - living with the proximity of death.”

Bronwen finds it easier to accept that she is ‘old’ than that her body is becoming dysfunctional:

“I’m aware I’m in an age group where you can see the consequences of a life lived, people getting cancers and so on. They are now my peers, not my parents’.”

Looking back, to her previous stages and seeing that she didn’t ‘claim’ them for themselves; looking forward, to the time left to her, and assessing the balance between that and what has passed (even though, in spite of what she says, she could well live for more years than she has already had); and looking sideways, at contemporaries whose experiences may now resemble those which she previously instinctively attributed to older people. This mix of perspectives encapsulates much of the complexity involved in our perceptions of where we are in the life course. The perceptions may not, of course, be conscious ones, as we absorb without knowing it the various social nudges that influence how our view of how far we are along our personal trajectory.

Frances is a little younger than Bronwen, an entrepreneur and coach, married with two children. Her expectations of becoming old are shaped a little by earlier perceptions, but that doesn’t relate closely to current experience:

“I remember my grandmother being in her 50s and I thought she was ancient, you know, she looked old. She died this year when she was 98. I don’t think she looked very much different to me than when she was in her 50s.”

(Grandmothers figure frequently in people’s accounts, much more than grandfathers, presumably because they tend to live longer and to be more directly involved in their grandchildren’s lives.) But how will that apply in her own case? Frances is currently very fit:

“When will I know that I have become old? That’s a good one. I don’t know, because what is the definition of old? Well, that’s when I can’t run around the house and go swimming in the ladies’ pond.”

Apart from the physical slowing down, Frances expects to see a change in her perception of herself:

“ When I’m certain that I have a certain level of wisdom. So experience and judgment and all the magic as well, that’s in the mix there. But what’s the word I’m looking for? Well, a certain level of having had my own experiences around what it is that we may be talking about. But is that being old?“

At 66, Suzanne is a generation older than these two, a former corporate investigator and now a journalist with a PhD. But like Bronwen, she thinks of the crossing point as when you have fewer years left ahead than are behind you:

“At the age of 66, soon to be 67, I definitely have made that transition. I mean, I can’t claim I’m a young person. It would be ridiculous. No matter how fit you are and how good you look….Apart from the physical, well, for me, age isn’t just a number, but I am Swiss, so I take this and then I think, well, I have the vast majority of my years behind and sometimes I think how many do I actually have, you know, at 66.”

Bronwen is less than half way to a century, Suzanne is two thirds of the way; what, we may ask, accounts for when people think they’ve crossed the line?

Suzanne’s key discriminator is the capacity for engagement:

“When you become old is when you stop being interested. It’s not that you are interesting, but interested [her stress]. I think that very much happens at a certain age, but then I’ve also reflected of course it happens throughout the life course: if you’re 18, you’re no longer now interested in playing with Barbie dolls anymore. So that is an interest that you leave behind.”

But although Suzanne says it happens at a certain age, she also stresses that this is not generally a sudden moment, but creeps up:

“I can’t tell you a moment, but it’s when you think, ‘oh, I have heard this argument, been there, done that….And I already know what’s coming because I’ve heard it so many times.’ And then you opt out, you no longer engage. ..you’re not interested in listening anymore because you think you have heard it all before. But you are much more interested in pontificating about what you know, where you stand.”

She points out that there is often a clear biological connection, in that people’s hearing often deteriorates, and as a result they disengage. But also she sees a gender difference:

“ I think sometimes, well, oftentimes with my peers, especially men, I have to say, it just becomes very boring because of that dynamic.[4] But then I thought, so I discovered that in others and of course I reflect on myself, I have that too. But then I think, okay, I’m not so interested anymore, but new things come up.”

In effect, she is saying, you’re old if you’ve given up on learning, formal or informal. Changing interests over the life course is an inevitability. What Suzanne points to here is the sense of losing interest in anything at all. It doesn’t have to be a brand new interest, but could be an interest in new developments in a familiar field. In other words, it could be deepening or broadening, or both; but in any case it means that one is not running round the same circuit.

[1] Sigmund Freud offered the following, typically sweeping, assertion on one line of demarcation:

“Psychotherapy is not possible near or above the age of 50, the elasticity of the mental processes, on which treatment depends, is as a rule lacking – old people are not educable.” (quoted in Lewis Wolpert, You’re Looking Very Well, p48).

We know Freud was wrong. Plasticity - the neuroscientific equivalent of his elasticity - continues well into later life. People of all ages are educable, and certainly more than capable of changing their outlooks and behaviour. Freud was, typically, convinced he was right - probably in his case unchangeably so, although it’s somewhat ironic that he seems to have made the statement in 1905 – aged 49…..

[2] Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday, Penguin 2012, p 211.

[3] ‘Perhaps in my 70s? If I had to put a number!’, Bronwen added in a later email.

[4] In this Suzanne finds support from Janina Duszejko, the narrator in Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, who describes one of her neighbours:

“It was hard to have a conversation with Oddball. He was a man of very few words, and as it was impossible to talk, one had to keep silent. It’s hard work talking to some people, most often males. I have a Theory about it. With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts.” Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Fitzcarraldo 2022, p33.

The primary such trend is demographic - the changing shape of the population, most evident in the ageing of almost all advanced (OECD) economies. For the UK, not atypical in this respect, these are the relevant shape-shifts:

For the individual, ‘ageing’ is what happens as we move along a chronological timeline – clock-smoothly in one sense, but with variances in both pace and evenness that can always surprise and disconcert. But for a population it means not just that more of us are living longer, but that there are more older people relative to younger age groups. This is the case wherever the line is drawn on when ‘ageing’ is taken to begin. It’s worth stressing: the ageing of the population is not only about there being more old people. It embraces every segment of the population; indeed the ageing of the population redefines every age group. In other words, increased longevity means that the balance and shape of the whole population are shifting; so too are the relationships and interactions between the age groups.

Divisions don’t have to be divisive but they can indeed lead to feelings of unfairness or exclusion, whether it’s of young people from social coteries or older people from jobs, or middle-aged people from either. Line-drawing – marking out people from each other - is a sensitive affair, often invidious or contentious, and how it is handled can have major social consequences. As Milan Kundera observed, ironically but with real sense:

“It is deplorable, but it is a fact that we have learned to see our own lives through the eyes of business or government questionnaires.” [1]

At what point you are regarded as adult, or as old, differs according to when you are born: what age you are, obviously, but also at what historical moment you were born and grew up. Annie Ernaux captures the protean nature of both aspects brilliantly as she describes herself musing over a photo of her dead cat, and then over the people who have died – her parents, her last maternal aunt, her first lover:

“What has most changed in her is the perception of time and her own location within it. And so she realizes with amazement that back when she was asked to do dictations from Colette at school, the author was still alive, and that her own grandmother, who was twelve when Victor Hugo died, must have had a day off school on account of the funeral.….As the time ahead objectively decreases, the time behind her stretches farther and farther back, to long before birth, and ahead to a time after her death. She imagines people saying, perhaps in thirty or forty years, that she was alive for the Algerian War, just as they used to say of her great-grandparents ‘they were alive for the War of 1870’.”[2]

Belonging to the ‘over-65s’ today, for instance, is for most people on balance a much more favourable location than it was twenty years ago, for a whole variety of reasons. Some of these reach back across the entire life course: healthier nourishment as a child, physically less taxing jobs and enhanced pension provision being just three.

At the same time younger cohorts may look at their predecessors and think of themselves as worse or better off, but it’s important to know whether they are comparing themselves to the position that older people occupy now (in terms of income, house ownership and so on), or to the position these same folk occupied at an earlier age, 25, 35 or 45 years ago. The older generation may seem very comfortably off now, but their childhood and youth wouldn’t look quite so appetising to those who can’t imagine life without an iphone and the internet. The verdict may not unambiguously favour one group over the other: a generation might have more opportunities and options than their predecessors in some material respects, but lower security of employment or fewer career openings may at the same time detract substantially from their overall satisfaction and security.

The lengthening of the average lifespan means that we have more age-based layers - more potential lines marking off one age group from another. But having more layers doesn’t necessarily mean stiffer segregation; it may also offer more opportunity for enjoyable and mutually beneficial cross-age communication. We have an upsurge in multi-generational families where members of younger generations get to know their grandparents at the very least, and quite commonly their great-grandparents too. This is not only about warm family relations; practically, grandparents now often play a central role in childcare and without them many households could not function as economic units in the same way. This is one reason why Sweden has recently launched a groundbreaking new law, allowing grandparents to step in and get paid parental leave while taking care of their grandchildren for up to three months of a child’s first year.

To some extent, of course, this is a reversion to earlier practice, where family members lived and worked together, whatever their ages. But globally the ratio of grandparents to children under 15 has changed dramatically, from 0.46 in 1960 to 0.8 today, changing the shape of the family and the nature of the relationships within it.[3] There are, in short, many and assorted ties that bind in these extended family gatherings.

Mirroring the family sphere, four-generational workplaces are now common.[4] The stretching out of the population therefore augments and resculpts the multiple internal relationships that exist between several generations. But at the individual level the general ageing of the population also affects the way we locate ourselves in our own life course. Consciously or not, we might as a result modify how we conceive of the timetable for our life’s goals or ambitions. More prosaically, it will shape how we manage the general process of moving from one phase to another: from promising youth to realistic adult, from multi-tasking parent to serene Third Ager, from dependence to independence or vice-versa, and so on. This sequence, though, is emphatically not a simple linear one; we do not slough off one role or persona and emerge reconfigured into a totally new one.

In short, the lengthening of the average lifespan affects most if not all of the categories we use to divide up the population along chronological lines. It renders some of them obsolete or visibly antiquated, others in need of marginal revision. The change in the overall shape of the population – from pyramid to pillar, as it’s sometimes put (see Figure 1 above) generates different answers to some key judgments, such as ‘is it too late to….?’ or ‘when is the best time to…?’. It radically affects at least two of the main questions I put to my interviewees: ‘when do we become adult?’, and ‘when do we become old?’ It impinges on us all, wherever we find ourselves in the chronological chart.

[1] “Milan Kundera, Immortality, Faber & Faber 1991, p.341.

[2] Annie Ernaux, The Years, tr. Alison L Sayer, Fitzcarraldo 2008, pp219-20.

[3] ‘The age of the grandma’, The Economist, 14 Jan 2023.

[4] See Catherine Collinson & Michael Hodin, ‘Best Practices for Engaging a Multigenerational Workforce’, Harvard Business Review, October 2023. What constitutes a ‘generation’ in the workplace is less clear than it is for families – not that it’s always obvious even there, with reconstituted families producing varieties of kinship forms that confound simple genealogical mapping.

In our smaller session my talk on the triple helix was sandwiched between two excellent presentations of contrasting focus. Anat Zohar, of Hebrew University, has switched her research attention from pedagogy to geragogy, exploring the differences - and overlaps - between how young children and older adults learn. Anat draws heavily on Laura Carstensen’s theory of socio-emotional selectivity. She reminded us that humans are the only animal with an internal clock which at some point - not tied to chronological age - starts us thinking about our mortality. (I meant to ask her how we know that monkeys or lions don’t do this.) This in turn lead us to change our priorities, towards more present, emotionally meaningful, experiences.

Francesca Romana Loberto, from Milan, presented her in-depth study of just 10 older women in a single village in Northern Italy. Learning for them is a matter of keeping connected, of carrying on caring though not in the same sense as earlier. Francesca introduced us to Antonia Scardicchio’s wonderful phrase: 'sapere claudicante’, or limping knowledge, referring to the kind of knowledge that is built up through a tentative dialogue between scientific research and subjective accounts.

We allowed good time for discussion. One angle which particularly engaged the audience - which was, pleasingly, slightly larger than any of us had expected given that research into older adults is still very much a minority interest - was that of agency and ageism. Some of those battling ageism do so by presenting admirable examples of older people who carry on doing the things - physical or mental - which steretypically are thought to be the preserve of younger folk. Images of octagenarian marathon runners and the flourishing of U3As are good evidence of this. But the flipside of this stereotype defiance is in effect the reinforcement of the perspective that ageing carries few or no benefits - that what we should be doing is postponing or avoiding it for as long as possible. This devalues any positive aspects.

This led us into some discussion of how and why ageing is referred to and treated as a disease to be cured. Sadly we had no biologists present, but it’s probably fair to say that this is generally their position. The aspiration to treat ageing as a disease to be cured is understandable, but causes unease amongst those of us who would wish the occasional positive or just neutral aspects of ageing to be recognised. Let me expand.

In writing the Triple Helix book I realised I needed to understand better the biology of ageing. My sights were set low: I am the product of England’s shamefully narrow education system and had done no science at all after the age of 14. So I enrolled with the kind permission of UCL Professor David Gems in his MA course on the biology of ageing. I was the oldest student by a factor of at least two and struggled at times, but both learnt from and enjoyed the course, and am very grateful to Prof Gems for the experience (he bears no responsibility for any failure on my part to grasp the subject).

David Gems is a determined and eloquent proponent of the view that we should regard ageing as a disease, and then we will be able to tackle it in a comprehensive fashion, as opposed to identifying and treating individual symptoms. I could not possibly challenge his scientific position, but I suggest that this works only as a biological theory. To treat ‘ageing’ as a disease, and to suggest that we are at the same stage now in respect of ageing as we were centuries ago with tuberculosis (ie yet to establish it as a defined disease), implies that all aspects of ageing are harmful and ideally to be eliminated. Tuberculosis is the example Gems chooses; his fellow biogerontologist David Sinclair of MIT uses malaria and HIV, but is similarly uncompromising in arguing that ageing should be seen as a disease.[1] None of these diseases has any positive aspect, as far as I know, but ‘ageing’ is not only a medical condition; the term has far wider application, in the social and psychological spheres. To think of it only as a disease is to ignore the far more nuanced, and in many respects positive, assessments of development and growth in these spheres. Wisdom, freedom, integrity, the capacity to care and many other positive or at least neutral attributes and characteristics: none of these is remotely guaranteed by ageing, but they are all identifiable as achievements which often accompany it, and which clearly do not fit at all in a category of disease. These are the kinds of learning my fellow panellists Anat and Francesca were illuminataing.

For a broader and more balanced mapping of the life course it seems to me we need two guides. The first is a good sense of the typical onsets of physical change and their trajectories over time, in the population as a whole and by segment of population. Included in this is how such trajectories have changed historically, ie at what ages they are now occurring compared to some decades ago, and how they develop over time. Secondly, we need to map them against the social and psychological trajectories which accompany them, so that we can compare and contrast their effects and their interactions. How, for example, does cognitive impairment, as and when it occurs, interact with a changing social environment? Is such impairment accompanied by other forms of non-cognitive adaptation which are more positive? What adjustments can be made in different work or social environments to cope with such changes? At what ages (measured chronologically or biologically) are particular kinds of health information or education most relevant, and how are they best delivered? Such questions are exactly the ones which the triple helix as a model should help us to address.

[1] Earlier Sinclair declares: “I believe that aging is a disease. I believe it is treatable. I believe we can treat it within our lifetimes. And in doing so, I believe, everything we know about human health will be fundamentally changed.” (David Sinclair, Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We don’t Have To, London: Thorsons 2019, p156.) When Sinclair says ‘within our lifetimes’, I’m left wondering what that means if we’ve ‘cured’ ageing….

Visual and metaphorical representation are crucial tools for understanding the ages and stages of our lives. Let’s focus here on the physical images used to illustrate - not the number of stages , but the shape of the life course as a whole. The authoritative starting point for this is Thomas Cole’s superb book, The Journey of Life. It gives us a detailed account of how attitudes to ageing evolved over time, but above all it provides a wonderful survey of the images used to portray it. Cole describes in detail how these images were used to help us approach what he calls “the mystery of human temporality.” [Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Ageing In America, Cambridge UP 1992, p.xxxi.]

In mediaeval times, the dominant image was that of the circle: life as a preordained pattern, repeated down the ages with little or no chance of deviation. In a typical image, childhood gives way to adulthood (allowing for the fact that the status of childhood was not at all clearly defined, as Philippe Ariès has shown); adulthood then curves into old age, which then carries on the circular pattern, bending back to birth/rebirth. Obviously it was not the same person being reborn (at least in the case of Western iconography; for religions which entail reincarnation it could be), but the circle epitomised the way in which new lives were expected to recapitulate the old in a largely unchanging process.

[image from The Transition Culture]

Rather surprisingly, in some closed communities this circularity can still dominate today. Tara Westover’s fascinating account of her upbringing, in the 21^st century but in an isolated Mormon family in rural Idaho, captures this pattern perfectly:

“I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical.The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak.The snows that fell in the winter always melted in the spring.Our lives were a cycle – the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons – circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all.I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal.” [Tara Westover, Educated, London: Penguin 2018, p2]

In mediaeval times the circle of life could be sliced in different ways; the principal divisions were into three, four or seven stages. At some point in the sixteenth century the dominant image changed significantly: the ends of the circle were unhooked and it was, so to speak, bent outwards to form an arch or stairway, often resembling one of those hump bridges that span a Venetian canal. Typically the steps rise to a peak somewhere in middle age, and then drop back down symmetrically to old age and death – without this reconnecting to birth.

There was a definite social angle to this visual change, as Cole observes:

“The new iconographic shape of a man’s life from cradle to grave implied a hierarchy of values consistent with the north-western and central European marriage pattern, where power over economic resources rested primarily with middle-aged men.”

This C18 Spanish image (not from Cole) shows it well:

Source: Wikimedia

But all was not secure, even for bourgeois men:

“The rising and falling staircase attempted to span the uncertainty, ambiguity and helplessness of life. It depicted the middle-class struggle for success, as well as its fear of falling into social decline and eternal punishment.”

Gender too was ignored at first, and then given a highly predictable angle:

“Women had been literally invisible in medieval stages of life doctrine and iconography. New representations of an ideal female life cycle reflect the growing significance accorded to women in male-dominated, bourgeois culture….The new iconography of women’s life cycle focused on daily life and women’s duties to create and maintain a proper family.”[1]

---

[1] Ibid. p26.

Circle and wheel, staircase and arch: these images of the life course remain potent ones. Of course there are many representations – painted, etched, woven or abstracted into words - of single or multiple stages which present rich material for interpreting what people of the time understood by ‘youth’, ‘adulthood’, ‘old age’ or any other of the many possibilities.

In later centuries, the image changed, to greater realism. Below is Edvard Munch’s Four Stages of Life, showing four women in a Norwegian street. The youngest, a girl aged about ten, stands proudly in the front; the picture follows a backwards spiral through the next three stages, finishing with an old woman hunched by the side of the street. Their individual positionings, and the relationships between them, are powerful indicators of their life course locations.

[1] Ibid. p26.

I find the Munch picture sombre but illuminating. It invites us to think about the different generations; why they are facing the ways they are, what their simply sketched facial expressions and postures convey, and what the relations between them are.

Let’s come up to date - and down to earth with a bump. Below is an illustration from a faily recent (2019) UK government publication Health matters: Prevention - a life course approach. It’s a worthy document, full of good advice. It’s imaging of the life course is, shall we say, simple and linear:

I wouldn’t expect a government publication to spend much time (or public money) on a nuanced image of the life course, and I fully support the aim of tailoring advice to different ages. This is, though, quite striking in its chunking - especially, given its focus on health, in the way it lumpis all those aged 65+ into a single category. I’m not quite clear why a pregnant woman represents preconception, but there we are….

More on imagery in a future post. I hope this may have sparked some thoughts about what images or metaphors might better represent the complexity of our lives.

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players,

They have their exits and entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

Then, the whining schoolboy with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school.

And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow.

Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth.

And then the justice In fair round belly, with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws, and modern instances, And so he plays his part.

The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side, His youthful hose well sav'd, a world too wide, For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice, Turning again towards childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.

Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

The stages of the speech in As You Like It are not attached to specific chronological ages. Roughly speaking you could say that in a modern context the first two would be located in childhood, the third in adolescence, and the fourth, fifth and sixth in early, mid and late adulthood. Given the sixth’s pantaloon characterisation of old age, the next and final phase is barely a stage as such, more a kind of limbo.

Here’s a contrasting approach, in a rather touching poem by Eve Pearce. Her classification methodology is decidedly unusual (and redresses Shakespeare’s gender imbalance…):

My Life in Shoes

Two years old - bare-toed sandals in Mediterranean sun.

At four, Wellington boots plough through Scottish snow.

Seven brings mourning black patent for Mummy.

New brogues travel to London at twelve.

High-heeled straw sandals herald maturity.

Navy blue marriage suedes promise too much.

Principal Boy – satin heels with fishnets.

Low heels for pregnancy – three times;

Happiness – despair, a seesaw, so many shoes.

Old now, fear falling – non-slips, low with Velcro bar.

I guess we could all produce a somewhat similar list. When did I move from sandals -definitely not high-heeled but brown, buckled and a rather humiliating sign of childhood - to the teenage glory of chelsea boots? From shorts to long trousers, on to bellbottoms and then to comfortable jeans? Picking the clothes sequence that most effectively defines our recalled progression could make a good parlour game.

What would a modern version of Jaques look like? As I came near to concluding revisions of the Triple Helix book, AI irrupted noisily onto the scene. I asked Claude (3 February 2025) first for an update on Jaques. Here is is, Claude’s tongue firmly lodged in techno-cheek:

The Seven Ages of Modern Life

All the world's still a stage, and everyone's posting their part online. In life's feed, we scroll through seven chapters:

First, the Newborn Influencer – endlessly photographed, every milestone documented on parents' social media, tracked by countless apps from first smile to first step.

Then the Minecraft Warrior – backpack laden with devices, lost in virtual worlds, balancing screen time with soccer practice, living between digital and physical playgrounds.

Next comes the Angsty Teen – AirPods permanently attached, navigating high school drama on TikTok, stressed about college apps, caught between FOMO and finding themselves.

The Young Professional follows – drowning in student debt, living on coffee and career anxiety, swiping through dating apps while building their LinkedIn presence.

Fifth appears the Burnt-Out Parent – juggling remote work with daycare pickups, comparing themselves to Instagram-perfect families, surviving on meditation apps and wine delivery.

The Middle Manager emerges – greying at the temples, fighting to stay relevant, reading about anti-aging biohacks, watching their retirement accounts like day traders.

Last scene is Second Childhood – posting blurry photos to Facebook, struggling with smartphone updates, video-calling grandkids, leaving long voicemails no one checks.

Sans teeth, sans style, sans filters, sans everything.

Source: https://claude.ai/chat/87632fee-3118-4591-b7ea-b192f7a85402, 26/12/24.

I was immediately struck by the sense of ironic humour - not something I associated with AI. I then asked Claude to produce some metaphors for the lifecourse. They obliged instantaneously, with staged outlines from an impressive range of metaphorical angles: rivers, geological formations, trees and musical composition. This last one is particularly interesting to me, so I asked for an elaboration. Here it is, coherent and with real substance:

TS Pl elaborate on the musical one. are there any gender differences involved?

Claude:

“Let's explore the musical composition metaphor of human development through various life stages and potential gender-related nuances.

**Musical Composition of Life: A Developmental Symphony**

**Childhood (Prelude)**

- Universal: Initial exploration of sound, rhythm, and basic musical elements

- Gender-neutral: Pure spontaneity, unconstrained by social expectations

- Like a child randomly exploring piano keys - no predetermined structure, maximum creativity

**Adolescence (Experimental Jazz)**

- Gender Variations:

- Traditionally, males might experience this as more aggressive improvisation - louder, more disruptive

- Traditionally, females might explore more collaborative, nuanced improvisational styles

- Shared experience: Finding individual voice, testing boundaries

- Emotional intensity, rapid tempo changes, unexpected harmonies

**Early Adulthood (Emerging Musical Style)**

- Gender Differences in Composition:

- Males often compose with more linear, goal-oriented structures

- Females tend to create more contextual, relational musical narratives

- Developing personal "musical signature" - career, relationships, identity

- Increasing complexity, more intentional orchestration of life's themes

**Mid-Life (Complex Harmonies)**

- Gender Convergence:

- Breaking down traditional compositional boundaries

- More integrated, holistic musical expressions

- Counterpoint of personal and professional melodies

- Wisdom emerging from accumulated musical "techniques"

**Late Life (Contemplative Composition)**

- Universal: Distillation of life's entire musical journey

- Sparse, meaningful notes replace earlier complexity

- Reflection on the entire musical score of existence

- Gender differences become less pronounced

- Focus on essential themes, emotional resonance

**Broader Insights**:

- Music metaphor suggests life as a dynamic, improvisational process

- Gender isn't a rigid constraint but a nuanced, evolving dimension of experience

- Individual variation always transcends broad generalizations.”

I leave it to you to judge the quality; to me (with no technical understanding of music) it is not just interesting but eerily convincing. Could be a good text to introduce into a music class, or for that matter any class - at any age. I ‘m particularly struck by the emphasis on gender convergence in later life (and the ‘traditionally’ which qualifies the stereotypes of female and male adolescents).

Of course these are all linear classifications, sketching out a sequence which traces a single unidirectional line. Isn’t that exactly what the TH (triple helix) contests? Yes, but as I’ve said, I’m not out to eject time or chronological age from our analytical armoury; just to introduce a model which allows the greater complexity and higgledy-pigglediness of our lives to be traced.

Age of conscription: where to draw it?

On a more sober note, but still on the theme of how we demarcate our stages. Here is an extract from the excellent father-son Freedman Substack Comment is Freed; it was posted on 24 August by Lawrence F, who is professor of war studies at Kings College, London:

The challenge facing Ukraine has been compounded by problems with mobilisation. After the full-scale invasion there was a surge of volunteers into the armed forces, but since then Ukraine has largely relied on conscription. The unusual feature of this conscription compared with that adopted by other countries is that youngsters are exempted. Until 2024 the mobilisation age was 27 to 60. It was then brought down to 25 but there is strong public and political resistance to bringing it down to 18. It has become a divisive issue with those who do fight resenting the efforts of those who hide or leave the country to evade service.

It brings into stark relief the question of how we decide not just on the capacity to fight as an adult, but also the obligation of adult citizens to their country. You can understand the desire to protect a nation’s youth. But it makes you wonder how 26-year-old Ukrainians feel about 24-year-olds who avoid service.

Readiness for combat illustrates all too well the kind of tension which exists between our three strands Is the rationale for a 27- or 25-year cutoff that we now know that biological development continues until around age 25? Hardly. Is it because the younger ones are not psychologically ready? Maybe. But it’s a tough decision - an intensely social one - being made.

Below is a fascinating picture of Crick and Watson in the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge, in 1952. They are gazing at a large-scale model of the nucleic acid DNA, built from rods and plates and screws. Crick is pointing with a slide rule to a twist in the backbones, while Watson looks on. The double helix structure of DNA – deoxyribonucleic acid - is singled out by the art historian Martin Kemp as the iconic scientific image of the age.[1] According to another historian, that photograph

“came to represent the turning point in our modern conception of life. One historian ranked it as one of the most important photographs of the twentieth century, along with Einstein’s portrait and the image of a mushroom cloud.”[2]

In a BBC interview the two scientists described the simple physical processes of model-meddling which led to the breakthrough discovery:

Crick: “We used balls to represent atoms and rods to represent the bonds between atoms. There is a very large number of ways, given the chemical formula, that you can build the model.”

Watson: “I cut some things out of cardboard and made the right shapes and pasted things on to indicate hydrogen atoms.”….

Crick: “Something came out of the model-building which Jim hadn’t put in, and that’s always a sign you’re on the right lines. Everything was done except for the actual work of producing an accurate model. Jim wasn’t much good at the sort of thing, the models tended to flop around in his hands. I worked continuously for about four days and then came the point where we saw that everything fitted, and I was so tired I went home to bed.”[3]

I still struggle to understand how physical manipulation of a laboratory model could lead to such a mould-breaking scientific insight, but the actual image of researchers going about their work in this way – in this case with such sensational results – made a strong impression on me. It sowed a seed of a sort, from which gradually emerged the idea of an analogy with the DNA structure as a means of addressing the wider life course. (Just in case: the ‘analogy’ is simply that - I trust it’s clear that I am not claiming any ‘discovery’ status for the TH, let alone one remotely akin to the DNA result.)

I’d be very interested to hear of any similar types of ‘modelling’ inspiration. On this particular topic let me warmly recommend Erica Thompson’s book, Escape from Model Land. She is a mathematician specialising in climate change modelling, but with an admirable capacity from that highly technical perch to explain the use and the abuse of models. Thompson won my heart by her sympathy for qualitative as well as quantitative evidence, but especially for endorsing the way metaphors can help us think collectively as well as individually.

So now to the TH, with its three strands: the biological, the psychological and the socio-cultural. The strands interact with each other the whole time, sometimes intensely, sometimes only very loosely. My central argument is that we can only get a proper grasp of the life course by looking at those interactions, at how the relationships between these strands are changing and in what issues these changes throw up for us as inhabitants of our various social worlds. This applies both to the trajectories of individual lives and to patterns across populations. Chronological age (CA) can only take us so far in understanding these trajectories and patterns; quite often its linearity will lead us down the wrong path.

It’s unlikely I will ever be able to build a model and play around with it as the DH pair did. Maybe such a physical construct wouldn’t help that much, but I think that sometimes putting hands on would bring the issues alive. What I do hope to do - if I can find the right help - is to construct a digital interactive version of the TH that would allow people to map their own position against wider data. Take one of the main questions I’ve been dealing with: when do you become old? How might we know when that transition happens, for ourselves or more widely? If such a TH app were available we could, for example, provide links to the formal state pension age in different countries, map that across to employment rates of older people (S-C strand) and to probable longevity (B strand). We could link these to attitudinal questions about when people begin to feel old (the P strand), and so on. We could track how these positions have changed over time. Using these measures individuals could check out when they have made the transition, or think they will, on any or all of the strands, and compare that with their contemporaries. It’s a project I’m chewing over - but as I say, I need help.

I hope that’s given you some idea of how we might literally model ages and stages in the life course. Now let’s have a first look at evidence from a couple of individual cases. I’ll just remind you that the TH is intended to apply to the life course in full, not just to issues around ageing. So as well as the question about becoming old, I also asked when people had become - ir will become - adult (and about at what point you start dying - a rather different question). In both cases I left it to them to interpret the key terms ‘adult’ and ‘old’; they could make their own decisions on what criteria or markers they wanted to use.

Ken is a former solicitor. He was already established as a partner in his firm, married with children – in other words well into full adulthood with responsibilities in every sphere. Then he became involved in a mortgage fraud, which sent him to prison for several years. This meant, inevitably, a traumatic change in his social position. Prison institutionalises and even infantilises:

“I felt very vulnerable when I was in prison, which almost took you back to that sort of juvenile perspective where you needed your family support, you needed protection….. You know, obviously, a prison environment could be seen in many ways like a tough inner city school.”

Ken had slipped a long way backwards psychologically, as well as downwards socially. He felt he had been thrown back into a kind of adolescent dependency. After several years, taking advantage of educational opportunities in prison he has now recovered his confidence, embarked on a new career post-release, and started a new family. So on both the P and the S-C strands he has crossed the threshold to adulthood for a second time. But the effect endures:

“In a weird way, certainly in later years, I have had little flashbacks to that vulnerability, feeling vulnerable. I'm 53 and obviously as a result of my crimes, we haven't got kind of the security that we would have otherwise. And that creates some vulnerabilities that you would perhaps associate with more youthful years than more upper middle age years.”

Kelly offers a distinct contrast, though with striking overlaps to Ken’s story. She defied her parents’ conservative plans for her as a young woman, and went off to university. She married, had children and decades later (like Ken, though under very different circumstances) completed a doctorate. Suddenly her marriage collapsed. There was separation, and then the hard physical and emotional work of moving house after 30 years:

“This was a major downsize: clearing the loft, clearing the garage. Clearing out everything of the children's we ever collected. You know the whole of your life flashing before you. Emotional and physical exhaustion, with a splitting up…..

For me personally, I think I've become old this year, specifically this summer. This house move has put ten years on me. It's been so traumatic. Depleted energy, loss, sleep disturbed, appetite. I feel and look much older. I've got grey hair I never had before.”

Kelly had never had health issues before. Her journey along the B strand has been suddenly accelerated in a way she definitely did not wish for, just as she was acquiring higher social status. Psychologically the contrast with her expectations has been hard to handle.

The twist in Ken’s trajectory is certainly unusual - not many solicitors (of any age) go to prison. Kelly’s is less so in the sense that divorce amongst older people is growing, but it was nonetheless traumatic for her, and certainly disturbed the linear pattern which she anticipated. Ironically, her doctoral dissertation was in the discipline of gerontology so she was more than used to thinking and talking about ageing; but she could not have expected the forward acceleration of physical and psychological ageing which she experienced.

Ken and Kelly’s stories illustrate how people move between stages at different paces, and sometimes heading off in very unexpected directions. Even when we move away from a unidirectional linear approach, these are not easy to show in any physical diagram or map. But at least the TH gives us a way at looking at the interactions and relations between the different dimensions, and this should help us build a richer picture of life’s stages and the transitions between them.

In a future post I’ll have a look at some of the historical images used to portray the life course, from the circular ones of the Middle Ages to the ascending and descending staircases of C17 and C18. But the immediate next post will deal with the most famous set of life’s stages, that of Shakespeare’s Jaques - and how AI reinterprets it today. For the moment I’ll leave you with this quote from Iain McGilchrist, whose intellectual and professional career moved from philosophy and literature through psychiatry to neuroscience:

“All advances in science are made by observing patterns, by using metaphors and formal analogies.” Iain McGilchrist.[3]

[1] At a lecture in the Royal Institution, 9 March 2024.

[2] Carl Zimmer, Life’s Edge, Picador Books 2021, p195. The picture itself, it’s worth adding, was a staged one.

[3] Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, Vol 1, Perspectiva Press 2021, p42.

Why have I spent on and off almost exactly a quarter century on this project - more off than on (luckily for my other work) but with quite a few deviations and restarts. The short answer is that I found the arbitrariness of the lines we draw across our lives both intriguing and problematic. As an adult educator I was used to people saying how transformative the opportunity to learn later in life had been for them, helping them break away from an established pathway or giving them a fresh outlook on life; and to encouraging students to think it was rarely too late to start again. But I found the models we use to describe the life course - the metaphors and the physical images - limited and constrictive. In particular, they almost all mapped out lives against chronological age, so lashing themselves to a single linear axis.

The attachment to chronological age (CA) is entirely understandable, and I am not advocating its abandonment. CA gives us important guidance on probabilities: the likelihood that someone of a certain age will have certain physical characteristics (eg fertility) or had certain experiences (eg parenthood) or achieved a certain status (eg voting rights). They will have moved in life from one recognisable stage to another. But CA is remorselessly linear. You can edit your birth certificate, lie to your friends and thumb your nose at all kinds of social convention but CA marches on regardless, always at the same pace and in the same direction. Billionaires may be able to refresh their blood cells and reelasticise their skins, but even they cannot turn the clock back.(1)

I can’t honestly recall when I first thought of a triple helix as one way of escaping from simple linearity in the way we think about the trajectories of our lives. What I can recall is the reaction when I first gave a paper on it, at a conference of adult educators. In my career I’ve had some polite compliments on talks I’ve given on different topics, and a rather smaller number of seriously positive reactions. This paper brought more genuinely enthusiastic responses than I’d ever had. People engaged with the idea because it seemed to give them a fresh way of thinking about familiar issues.

Yet life moved on - as it does. I changed jobs and cities, and a new daughter appeared. So the TH got put on a back burner, where it simmered away, very gently indeed. But woahh - we’re four paras in and I’ve said nothing about what the TH is. So here’s the summary, and I’ll come back to the trajectory of the concept in another post.

The triple helix has three strands: the biological, the psychological and the socio-cultural. An individual’s growth can be mapped along each of these strands discretely: on the biological (B) strand, from embryo to foetus, to baby, through puberty and many further stages, to senescence and death and decay; on the psychological (P) strand, from (according to one hugely influential schema, by Erik Erikson) basic trust or mistrust in infancy through intimacy/isolation in adulthood to ego integrity/despair in old age; and on the socio-cultural (SC) strand, from schoolchild to independent householder to pensioner and so on, all with manifold variants along the way. None of these sequences are absolute, in their direction or in their sequencing; stages can be missed out, or come in different order, or be repeated. Sometimes the transitions are sudden and traumatic; in others they are entirely predictable and gradual. Crucially, the strands interact with each other the whole time, sometimes intensely, sometimes only very loosely. My central interest is in those interactions, in how the relationships between these strands are changing and in what issues these changes throw up for us as inhabitants of our various social worlds.

For my first stab at the triple helix my former colleague Neil Christie at Edinburgh University produced some schematic designs for me to present - on an overhead projector, the technology of the time. These serve still to give the basic idea (the ABC labels in Neil’s diagram are arbitrary).

Drawing a horizontal line across the helix at any chronological age invites one to try to align where anyone – or any group or population – is in their development. Looking first at the individual, on the biological strand we can locate points such as the age of puberty, the completion of the brain’s neurological structure or (in the case of a woman) the menopause, and map these across to what is happening to the psychological state of the person and to where they are located in their social trajectories. The image is entirely schematic, but at least it enables us to track the changes that are happening and relate them to each other.

But, of course, people do not develop smoothly along these pathways at steady speeds. The directions of development deviate from the straight, sometimes wildly so; and if we retain chronological age as the vertical axis, development occurs very unevenly across the strands. In other words, someone can move more rapidly along the B strand than along the P and the SC, or vice versa: the child in a man’s body, or the young girl who shows unusual maturity. So far, so completely obvious – though we are already into complex and potentially contentious areas such as what constitutes ‘maturity’, or indeed what makes someone a ‘child’. The challenge is to capture these variations in a way that allows us still to retain a coherent sense of the life course as a whole.

In future posts I’ll discuss other images of the life course which are much less schematic, and much more intrinsically interesting. Personally I have zero gift for graphics or visual imagination, but casting an eye over how such images have evolved over the centuries is a great way into thinking about the trajectories of our lives and how they are shaped and reshaped.

(1) On exactly the day I write this: ‘Mariah Carey: “Ageing doesn’t happen to me - I won’t allow it.” ‘ - headline in The Times (29/7/25). In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar UK the singer goes on,: “It [ageing] just doesn’t happen. I don’t know time, I don’t know numbers. I do not acknowledge time.”

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