Thinking about the future in older age

Abstract

Older age is often conceptualised as a stage of life in which the future is considered to be less relevant than the past. This is reflected in literature that emphasises the importance of the past in later life but overlooks the significance of the future. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by analysing narratives that older people write about the future. We do this through secondary analysis of diary entries written by older respondents to the British Mass Observation Project in 1988, in response to a directive about time. The aim of our analysis was to develop conceptual understandings of the relationship between older age and future time. Our thematic analysis identified four main orientations that respondents had towards the future: dreading the future; time running out; taking one day at a time; thinking beyond finitude. Underpinning all of these was a reluctance to contemplate and plan for changes in physical and cognitive health and future care needs, a finding echoed in more recent research. Drawing on critical time perspectives that foreground the fluid, complex and social nature of time, we suggest that reluctance to acknowledge and plan for the future in later life reflects conceptualisations of the future as unpredictable and inseparable from past and present temporalities. This contrasts with more instrumentalist ageing discourses that imply the future can be ‘managed’ from the present. We conclude by calling for a greater repertoire of how we imagine and narrate the future in later life.