A narrative of decline dominates the ageing process in the Global North. At the same time, older people have shared more positive stories of ageing, particularly with respect to their leisure practices. I explore this tension by drawing on an interview-based study with people playing walking football in the United Kingdom. My contention is that older people express multiple meanings of ageing that disturb deficit-focused cultural scripts of later-life, albeit in ways that can be fraught with tensions and contradictions. First, I explore how older people cultivate an alternate identity departing from assumptions of loneliness and degradation, with walking football providing an opportunity to develop friendships and a sense of belonging. Second, older people emphasise their own (good) health and the embodied demands of walking football, yet in doing so, can reinforce ageist discourses by distinguishing themselves from the inactive and isolated (older) other. Third, older people reflect on their current and future involvement in walking football in positive ways. However, through attending to the temporal character of their experiences, I show how, whilst older people express a desire to continue participation, this is threatened by the realities of their ageing bodies in ways that align with deficit framings of later-life. I conclude by calling for recognising the multiplicity of older people's experiences and exercising caution about reproducing over-simplistic and sweeping celebrations of ageing.

The COVID-19 pandemic in Australia has profoundly affected older adults, particularly in the state of Victoria, which experienced strict lockdown restrictions six times since the pandemic began in 2020; totalling 245 days over three years. This study explored the experiences of older adults living in retirement villages during the first three lockdowns in Victoria from March 2020 to February 2021. We draw on the concept of the ‘third age’ to explore how residents’ post-retirement social and lifestyle aspirations were disrupted by the pandemic and associated lockdowns. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 14 residents during January and February 2021. All data were analysed using thematic mapping. Five key themes were identified: (1) benefits and frustrations of retirement village living during a pandemic; (2) the loss of amenities and activities; (3) heightened loneliness and social isolation; (4) reaching out to others; and (5) variable experiences of operators’ response. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted short-term and long-term issues around social isolation and the management of retirement villages, it has also demonstrated the resilience of residents and the strength of community ties and relationships. Retirement villages are promoted as age-friendly environments that enable an active and healthy post-retirement lifestyle. Yet our findings reveal heterogeneity within village populations. When services closed during lockdowns, this revealed a tension between the policy assumption that retirement villages are a housing consumption choice, and the unmet needs of those residents who depend on village services for day-to-day functioning.

Late-life divorce is increasingly common in many Western countries, however, studies on this transition remain scarce. The purpose of this article is to study attributed reasons for late-life divorce, and if any life phase-typical aspects can be identified in these attributions. Qualitative interviews were carried out with Swedish men and women aged 62–82, who after the age of 60 had divorced from a cross-gender marital or non-marital co-habiting union (N = 37). The results, analysed using principles from Grounded Theory, revealed four different types of narratives: (a) incompatible goals for the third age, (b) personality change caused by age-related disease, (c) a last chance for romance, and (d) enough of inequality and abuse. A central insight and an original contribution generated by the study was the importance grey divorcees attributed to the existential conditions of later life in their divorce decisions. The results are discussed in relation to theories of late modern intimacy and the third age.

In light of recent social pressures leading to a reimagining of the “Third Age” as a time of constant activity rather than repose and relaxation, this article explores the pressure on individuals to age “successfully” by engaging in physical activity in later life. Through semi-structured interviews with 15 retired or semi-retired gym-goers (eight women and seven men), the article examines how this call to increased activity impacts the ways active mid-life and older adults understand themselves and others. Drawing on Foucault’s understandings of the productive nature of power, we argue that those who perceive themselves as successfully heeding the call to active aging position themselves in contrast to inactive peers. Within a neoliberal framework, these participants self-identify as morally responsible citizens who, as a result of engagement in fitness activities, are authorized to survey and discipline the bodies of those “others” who will not or cannot engage in regular exercise.

In this article, we draw upon interviews with 14 men and 15 women aged 51–92 to examine the embodied experiences of Canadian power mobility device users. In particular, we investigate how individuals ageing with mobility impairments perceived and experienced the practical impacts and symbolic cultural connotations of utilising a power mobility device. Our findings reveal that those participants who had begun to use their power mobility devices later in life were dismayed by and apprehensive about the significance of their diminishing physical abilities in the context of the societal privileging of youthful and able bodies. At the same time, the participants who had used a power mobility device from a young age were fearful of prospective bodily declines, and discussed the significance and consequences of being unable to continue to operate their power mobility devices autonomously in the future. We consider the ways in which the participants attempted to manage, mitigate and reframe their experiences of utilising power mobility devices in discriminatory environments. We discuss our findings in relation to on-going theoretical debates pertaining to the concepts of ‘biographical disruption’ and the third and fourth ages.

Awareness of risk factors for loneliness is a prerequisite for preventive action. Many risk factors for loneliness have been identified. This paper focuses on two: poor health and widowhood. Preventive action by developing a satisfying social network requires time and effort and thus seems appropriate for people unexposed to risk factors, i.e. third agers and non-lonely persons. The third age is the period in old age after retirement, before people's social relationships deteriorate. This paper addresses three questions: Are older adults aware of poor health and widowhood as risk factors for loneliness? Are there differences in awareness between third and fourth agers? Are there differences in awareness between lonely and non-lonely older adults? After being introduced to four vignette persons, 920 respondents from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam were asked whether they expected these persons to be lonely. Older adults, especially third agers, expected peers exposed to the risk factors to be lonely more often than peers who were unexposed. The results indicate that awareness of loneliness-provoking factors is high among third agers, which is a first step towards taking actions to avoid loneliness. Compared to lonely older adults, non-lonely ones expected peers to be lonely less often, suggesting the latter's lower awareness of the risk factors. The results provide evidence for policy makers and practitioners that combating loneliness might require early action.

In an increasingly ageing society, its older members are receiving considerable political and policy attention. However, much remains to be learnt about public perceptions of older age, particularly the views and experiences of older individuals themselves. Drawing on qualitative interviews carried out with members of two British cohorts (N = 60) who have reached the ‘third age’, this paper discusses perceptions of age, focusing particularly on how perceived advantages and disadvantages differ by respondents' self-reported physical capability. The interviews were carried out in 2010 as part of the HALCyon (Healthy Ageing across the Life Course) collaborative research programme. Findings suggest there is some difference in the way older people view aspects of ageing by capability and that although advantages are widely perceived, physical decline and associated health concerns were the overwhelming theme across the conversations. The article concludes by making tentative suggestions to inform the positive ageing agenda and its related policies.

This article explores how outdoor adventure activities in a New Zealand community-based programme are experienced and understood as successful ageing strategies. Outdoor adventures are seen as positive leisure experiences that include challenging physical activity, social engagement and the natural environment. Using a sequential exploratory mixed-methods design, a combination of seven interviews and a survey (N=80) were conducted with a Third Age adventures group. The research outcomes confirmed the attraction of adventure for this cohort. Risk engagement and uncertainty were perceived as less important in favour of emotional, social and environmental engagement through fun, excitement and pleasure. The natural environment was considered integral and defining of the experience with the participants demonstrating a strong environmental ethos. Opportunities for building social capital were plentiful and well illustrated. The benefits of engagement for health, wellbeing and successful ageing are identified through the physical, social and psychological domains. The research supports adventure participation as a successful ageing strategy that is relatively low cost, community based, has many preventative health benefits, builds communities and embraces the environment.

The end of the ‘Golden Age’ of welfare capitalism in the 1970s was the prelude to a period of greater individualisation within societies and was accompanied by an increase in the importance of consumption as a way of organising social relations. During the same period there was also an expansion in the discourses aimed at enhancing the government of the autonomous self. One such discourse operates around what has been termed the ‘will to health’: it suggests that health has become a required goal for individual behaviour and has become synonymous with health itself. The generational groups whose lifecourses were most exposed to these changes are now approaching later life. We explore the extent to which social transformations related to risk, consumption and individualisation are reflected in the construction of later-life identities around health and ageing. We examine how the growth in health-related ‘technologies of the self’ have fostered a distinction between natural and normal ageing, wherein the former is associated with coming to terms with physical decline and the latter associated with maintaining norms of self-care aimed at delaying such decline. Finally, we consider anti-ageing medicine as a developing arena for the construction of later-life identities and discuss the implications of the social changes for researching later life.

This paper presents a critique of both the concept of age equality and of the limited scope it offers as a means for challenging old-age prejudice. The equality constructs that feature in anti-ageism initiatives and in current discourses on intergenerational equity have proved susceptible to political and ideological manipulation, which has led to the illegitimate dissociation of ageism from older age and promoted damaging notions of age equivalence. The consequence has been that old-age prejudice has been de-prioritised, and older people have been de-legitimised socially and as a welfare constituency. The corrective is best sought outside the confines of age equality frameworks, although legal remedies may play a useful role if human dignity is incorporated as an equality criterion. This paper also assesses other approaches to tackling old-age prejudice that avoid the constraints of equality constructs and engage more firmly with its roots. The notion of the ‘third age’ with new social roles merits reconsideration as an affordable alternative to current policies of work obligation and pension retrenchment. Radical interventions in the labour market in favour of older people may also be needed. Age activism and advocacy will increasingly influence policy on prejudice and well-being in older age, but changed emphases are needed, as from defensive strategies and the ideologies of generational interdependence and solidarity, towards the promotion of organisational, financial and social autonomy in older age.

With reference to the concept of ‘the stages of life’ rather than ‘ages’, this paper examines the possibilities of estimating population figures for the First, Second and Third Ages in the United Kingdom, both for the present and at points in the past. The approach utilises the economic status of the citizenry – in particular, before, during and after paid work – rather than their ages or birth dates. The quantitative approximations are accompanied by a social commentary about the leverage of economic pressures, especially the calls or otherwise of employment, in effect, the Second Age, on the relative size of the First and Third Ages. It is concluded that much may be gained from ‘redrawing the composition of the population with social rather than demographic contours’.

This article aims to identify and analyse the lifecourse and contextual factors that influence the quality of life in early old age. We conceptualise quality of life as distinct from the factors which influence it, and employ a model of the quality of life that is derived from an explicit theory of human need. The operational measure (CASP-19) consists of 19 Likert-scaled items which cover four theoretical domains: control, autonomy, self-realisation and pleasure. A postal questionnaire was sent to 286 British people aged 65–75 years who were members of the sample for the 1930s Boyd-Orr study of health and diet and who had been followed up through retrospective interviews during the late 1990s. The 286 were broadly representative of their age group. The survey's response rate was 92 per cent. Respondents provided information on a number of contextual influences on their quality of life in early old age, notably social support and participation, the quality and quantity of social contact, feelings of trust and reciprocity about the local neighbourhood, health and financial security. In the analyses reported here, a series of conceptual and operational influences on quality of life in early old age is identified using block regression models. Finally, the relative impact of each predictor on CASP-19 is examined. The findings suggest that the legacy of the past tends to be best captured by people's feelings about the adequacy of their pensions and their status as owner-occupiers as well as a feeling that the area in which they live is deprived. The quality of the social contact people describe and how close they feel to those around them will ameliorate the negative impacts of the past and the immediate environment. In addition, we must recognise that people remain vulnerable to the impact of loss: recent bereavement, and major illnesses can impact on a person's quality of life.

Lifecourse perspectives on ageing need to consider more seriously the meaning of ‘self-actualisation’, as it is currently used by the burgeoning industries that service the needs of those in the middle years. The prevalent meaning derives largely from an existentialist ontology, which is radically individualistic and cannot adequately account for the inter-connectedness of generations; that is, the need for one generation to provide for the needs of the next. Nor can an existentialist ontology adequately prepare mid-lifers for their older age and the life crises that accompany later life. This paper uses Giddens's notion of ‘life trajectory’, a very influential theory of the self in high modernity, to highlight this problem. The existentialist ontology that informs Giddens's notion reflects those values of youth that the new social movements have brought to the political agenda as ‘life-politics’. These values may well be challenged as the youth of the 1960s reach middle age and begin to confront their mortality. The paper argues that Erikson's notion of ‘generativity’ might provide a more useful ontology for lifecourse politics, and is more attuned to an inter-generational perspective.

In this paper we consider some of the ways that the third age can be thought about and studied. Taking the work of Peter Laslett as our key source, we explore his ‘aspirational’ approach toward redefining post-working life and look at some of its limitations as both definition and explanation. There is a need for a more sociologically informed approach to the third age, and we outline three potentially important structures that might better explain it – class, birth cohort, and generation. Whilst it might seem attractive to see the third age as a class-determined status, based on the material and social advantages accruing to people who have retired from well-paid positions in society, the historical period in which the third age has emerged makes this explanation less than adequate. Equally a cohort-based explanation, locating the third age in the ‘ageing’ of the birth cohort known as the baby boom generation, fails fully to capture the pervasiveness and irreversibility of the cultural change that has shaped not just one but a sequence of cohorts beginning with those born in the years just before World War II. Instead, we argue for a generational framework in understanding the third age, drawing upon Mannheim rather than Marx as the more promising guide in this area.

I wrote a newspaper article describing a branch of the University of the Third Age (U3A). It was given the sub-title ‘It keeps us young’ by the editor without my knowledge or consent. I objected on the grounds that it gave a totally misleading impression of the nature and purpose of the U3A, one which may lead people to suppose that members were striving to be ‘young’. This experience raised the question of the language used to describe those in the Third Age, a controversy in which a number of contemporary gerontologists are involved. It is suggested that some writers are reinforcing the concept of ‘the Ghost in the Machine’ that is commonly held by many lay people, and this leads to confusion about self-identity among those in later life. It is argued that elderly people will be able to map out strategies for successful ageing only if they come to terms with accepting themselves as being old. Longstanding ageist prejudice has tended to create a negative aura surrounding words such as ‘elderly’ and such words need to be rehabilitated.

This paper is concerned with the emergence of consumerism as a dominant theme in the culture surrounding the organisation and provision of welfare in contemporary societies. In it we address the dilemmas produced by a consumerist discourse for older people's healthcare, dilemmas which may be seen as the conflicting representations of third age and fourth age reality. We begin by reviewing the appearance of consumerism in the recent history of the British healthcare system, relating it to the various reforms of healthcare over the last two decades and the more general development of consumerism as a cultural phenomenon of the post World War II era. The emergence of consumer culture, we argue, is both a central theme in post-modernist discourse and a key element in the political economy of the New Right. After examining criticisms of post-modernist representational politics, the limitations of consumerism and the privileged position given to choice and agency within consumerist society, we consider the relevance of such critical perspectives in judging the significance of the user/consumer movement in the lives of retired people.