Gerontologists complain that older people’s lifetimes and their insights are not generally treated as significant. Their own struggles to bestow impact on older people’s views and understandings, by contrast, take place in a variety of ways with importantly different implications. In this chapter we shall explore this work, separating out some contrasting strands in work on meaning, as well as examining how they can be used in combination. Then, in the second section, we shall be able to interrogate some of what this implies for methodology in life-course studies. This will draw attention to further aspects of the need for interdisciplinarity, particularly in view of the need to overcome the atomism endemic in much contemporary work in the social and human sciences. Since many of these attempts have centred on concepts of social and political practice, lastly we shall interrogate some connections between meaningfulness and shared practices, investigating how practices significant for the development of lifecourses can be traced and evaluated. To the extent that the term ‘wisdom’ has been associated with specific forms of meaningfulness, we shall ask if any of these lifecourse-related practices can reasonably be described as particularly constructive or as wise.

Insight and the lifecourse in gerontology

H.R. Moody and Thomas Cole (1996: 247ff) have been tireless in drawing attention to a pervasive ‘problem of meaning’ in relation to older people and the process of ageing, urging the need for a forceful ‘emancipatory discourse’ in opposition to this crisis. Older people need to be freed to engage in conscious, creative ageing, clear that there are positive advantages to later stages of the lifecourse; but this is a counter-cultural cry to arms, one demanding active resistance to discourses in which it is taken for granted that ageist expectations simply make sense (Moody, 1993). As Dannefer and Settersten underline (2010: 10), ageist assumptions have become ‘naturalised’ in the social world: norms dictate often-inaccurate suppositions that certain sorts of conduct are appropriate only at certain ages. These suppositions ‘are legitimated by the pronouncements of pop psychology and supported by some serious clinicians and scholars’, hence ‘widely believed and followed, and in some cases defined and sanctioned by the state, which makes them plausible and compelling’. This is despite the fact that ‘the very awareness of “age-appropriateness” as a behavioral issue is socially and culturally constructed ‘ (2010: 10; cf Dannefer and Kelly-Moore, 2009).