Winding Down, Living On: The Future in Old Age

Our ability to think about the future beyond our own mortal existence is particularly complex, limited by our ability to imagine the world as it will continue to exist without us. Can we think of the future beyond the point of our own mortality? Can we imagine the world as it continues to turn without us, and could this ability help us to live better now? In this article, I combine moral philosophical and psychological approaches together with narrative fiction to demonstrate how we may be able to imagine the future as an extension of our own life story that lives on in and through others. In particular, I concentrate on the process of aging, which is typically subsumed under dominant cultural scripts of meaningless, decline, and fallibility. Older adults, it is assumed, think only of the past because they have no future worth caring about. Yet old age, I contend, is primarily concerned with the future. A greater understanding of aging as a steady process of reorientation towards others and towards the future may help us all to engage with notions of intersubjectivity, altruism, and responsibility today. Through a discussion of Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize winning Tinkers (2009), I argue that the aged protagonist in this end-of-life story thinks of the past not because he lacks hope or has only memories to comfort him, but as part of an ongoing process that orients him towards a future that will continue to unfold after his death. The subject’s recognition that the death of the self is not a definitive end but, for others, a lived experience that is integrated into their continuing lives helps us to move away from an understanding of old age as selfishly oriented towards the past, and towards an understanding of old age as future- and other-oriented. Tinkers shows us, in sensitive and imaginative ways, that life will go on without us.