The Year of Turning Seventy: Finding Myself Among the Young-Old

Abstract

This chapter explores recent efforts to reimagine the life cycle in a society where people are living and working longer, leading healthier lives, and eschewing traditional notions of retirement. Erik Erikson, the well-known social psychologist and my onetime Harvard professor, becomes a focus of my ambivalence about theories that map life as a linear succession of stages through which we pass rather than as a series of recurring challenges to which we repeatedly cycle back over a lifetime. Stories from my young-old age resurface the childhood tension between autonomy and dependence, as well as the determination to make a mark on the world, which I witnessed in the early childhood classroom. I find solace in identifying as young-old and new research that forefronts senior cool and gerotranscendence in the old-old.