Senior Networks

Life Review and Self-Knowledge

In the shared predicament of old age, older people's social networks tend to form in the revival of old connections as well as the creation of new ones. Social networks of youth may be reconnected as friends from an older person's history come to be remembered, then contacted, and then visited in person. Older people have a tendency to reminisce about their past in a process of collective life review. In the years immediately following retirement, a person's life purpose in terms of self-fulfillment conventionally comes to be replaced by the question of the meaning of life in terms of self-knowledge. In this reevaluation, selfhood often takes a more social form. Self-knowledge in the life review process involves not only reflection, but also action to achieve the objective of truth. Such action may involve the tracing of social connections such as family trees, which may uncover living relatives who subsequently become correspondents or companions.

The process may involve a desire for a collective spirit of belonging, as groups of older people who shared a specific experience in an earlier part of their lives may reunite to celebrate their achievements or protest against their treatment in the present. Such social networking often serves as the most effective means of achieving representation to overturn the lack of cultural recognition for the truth of older people's lives.

Older people's social networks have traditionally occupied a marginal place in understandings of social life. The attempts of such networks to achieve political objectives in recent times have corresponded with a relatively recent change in the sociological perception of older people's social networks. In this new perception, togetherness appears to occur in the adventurous adoption of an eclectic range of social activities, such as—in extreme examples—scuba diving or bungee jumping. Studies have come to reevaluate old age as a time of personal development through social interaction. The concept of a “third age” of leisure in early old age, between the “second age” of wage-labor in adulthood and the “fourth age” of decline, connotes the theory of a social return to the “first age” of experimentation in childhood. After a narrower phase of social networking in middle age, when associational life tends to cluster around the focal points of occupational or domestic responsibilities, social networks may become more wide-ranging in later life. A diffuse variety of social networks, including friendship networks from the first age of childhood, which the second age of adulthood obscured, may be revived in the third age. For older people, social networking may come to function less as a means to an end than as an end in itself. In this middle-class version of [Page 772]older people's social networks, older people have a new freedom to design their social lives in the years following retirement. Networks no longer develop unavoidably in connection with a career or with the friendship between the children of the respective parties, but rather as a fellowship of shared interests.

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