[Our future selves: individual behavioral aspects. Discussion and comments].

Abstract

We will summarize this part of the plan against a historical background (Havighurst, 1969, 1071; the second White House Conference on Aging, 1971) and compare some parts (personality and adaptation, death and dying) with the list of priorities in the 'summary report'. Policy- making and planning research appear to be too different tasks. Our comments concern especially: - the choice of the design for the research-plan; - too little is said in the plan on the conditions (money, research centers, education, necessary for realization); - themes missing: the meaning of old age, given by the individual older person in connection to time-experience; sexuality and aging; suicide and pre-aging mortality; - the splitting of the research-plan in three parts has advantages but also disadvantages. There are three (independent) fields with not enough overlap, i.e. not enough interdisciplinary research-proposals; - another point is the unequal level of testability of the different proposed themes; - the last point is, that the concept of aging, which forms the background, [corrected] is a rather negative one. Therefore, few proposals concern the positive aspects of growing older and being old. This is perhaps related to the handicap, that there is not one general theory on aging (if that is possible?).