Simone de Beauvoir on the Crisis of Retirement and Facing Old Age

What awaits us at the end of our working lives? For French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, retirement can be less a reward and more of an existential rupture: an event that causes the world to view us differently, and thus has the potential to alienate us from ourselves.

Western capitalist societies in particular tend to attach value to an individual’s productivity, and they especially champion the cheap labor and technological nativism of youth.

If someone no longer fits or opts out of the contemporary economic machinery, they are less profitable, thus less useful, thus less relevant. Push them to the fringes: their contribution to the world is done.

The crisis some people experience on retiring is part of the comprehensive ‘Othering’ our society inflicts on aging in general, Beauvoir observes. No one wants to identify as ‘old’, she writes:

Society looks upon old age as a kind of shameful secret that it is unseemly to mention.

Unlike death, which could come at any point, Beauvoir suggests that “age is removed from us by an extent of time so great that it merges with eternity: such a remote future seems unreal.”

In fact, given death is synonymous with nothingness, it actually poses less of a threat to our identity than old age does:

This nothingness can bring about a metaphysical vertigo, but in a way it is comforting — it raises no problems. ‘I shall no longer exist.’ In a disappearance of this kind I retain my identity. Thinking of myself as an old person when I am twenty or forty means thinking of myself as someone else, as another than myself.

Old age thus “looms ahead like a calamity”: it is age that is contrasted with life, not death; age that is treated as life’s parody.

From the perspective of society, the very old attain either the serenity of wizened sages — to be revered as a transcendent spirit between life and death — or, far more typically, they are consigned to the status of doddering old fools. Either way, they stand apart from humanity: they are Othered.

Beauvoir offers this analysis in her 1970 work, The Coming of Age. She studies the oppression of the elderly with the same unflinching rigor with which she evaluates the situation of women in her more famous 1949 book, The Second Sex.

What’s particularly odd about society’s attitude towards the elderly is the self-denial at its heart. “Die early or grow old: there is no other alternative,” Beauvoir outlines; but so thorough is our Othering of the elderly that we tend to ignore aging as something that will ever impact us personally:

We carry this ostracism so far that we even reach the point of turning it against ourselves: for in the old person that we must become, we refuse to recognize ourselves.

Our fearful rejection of aging is an expression of what Beauvoir and other existentialist thinkers call ‘bad faith’. Bad faith essentially means deceiving ourselves about our own lives, and there are two main ways we might do so.

Firstly, we might deny the pre-given ‘facticity’ of our lives: who we are, where we come from, what’s realistic for us, and so on.

Secondly, we might deny the ‘freedom’ of our lives: what we are able to do, who we are able to become, and the possibilities we could realize.

We live in tension between facticity and freedom, and to resolve this tension we often deny one side: we deny who we are (facticity), or we deny who we could be (freedom).

Denying the onset of aging is a facticity-denying form of bad faith. By treating the elderly as a foreign species, by pushing away ‘old age’ as something that only ever happens to others, the not-yet-old slip into an absurd kind of deception and inauthenticity towards their own lives.

This kind of bad faith can survive for decades — until one day the world forces us to confront it. Maybe it’s a fall, maybe it’s an illness, maybe it’s simply being greeted in the mirror by a wrinkled face.

Beauvoir recalls her own shock at how the universal passing of time had been unexpectedly sweeping her along, too:

I remember my own stupefaction when I was seriously ill for the first time in my life and I said to myself, ‘This woman they are carrying on a stretcher is me.’

But it is not just physical shocks; one of the most fraught confrontations with aging can be brought on by retirement.

Retirement transforms a productive human being into a pensioner overnight. Thank you for your service, says the economy, now make way for the new. Oh, and please go quietly: remember, now that you’re an old person, you’ve ascended away from the real cut and thrust of human life. Maybe take up gardening, while you still can…

Retirees of capitalism must wrestle with questions that can lead to a crisis of confidence. If you are a worker who is no longer working, then what value, what purpose, does your life now have?

The past is frozen and the future looks limited, so what now beyond managed decline? Am I just put out to pasture? Headed for the scrap heap? Is ‘old person’ all I can now be? Is it all I should be?

After a lifetime of facticity-denying bad faith, of pushing away the reality of aging, the retiree now faces the rampant ageism that such bad faith produces.

If ‘old’ is seen as synonymous with a kind of degradation or decline, then conditions are ripe for old people to view themselves this way, too. They slip into a freedom-denying form of bad faith, placing limitations on who they could be and what they could do. ‘I’m too old to wear this, travel there, or try that.’ As Beauvoir puts it:

If old people show the same desires, the same feelings and the same requirements as the young, the world looks upon them with disgust: in them love and jealousy seem revolting or absurd, sexuality repulsive and violence ludicrous.

The facticity-denying bad faith of the not-yet-old thus leads to the freedom-denying bad faith of the already-old. Because they are alienated by society, the elderly are at risk of becoming alienated from themselves.

So what’s the solution? How can we release ourselves from bad faith around work, retirement, and aging?

When our value as human beings is so intimately tied up with our status as workers, Beauvoir laments, it is little wonder that non-working old people face isolation, loneliness, and self-doubt.

Our working lives offer the illusion that we are forever working towards something: that a glorious destination awaits us. Conventional milestones like marriage, mortgage, and raising children reinforce this arc of a grand narrative.

But then retirement comes with the rude insinuation that it was all for nothing. The machine trundles on, discarding its old parts at the side of the road. As Beauvoir puts it:

[A]ll at once a man discovers that he is no longer going anywhere, that his path leads him only to the grave. He has climbed to a peak; and from a peak there can be a fall. ‘Life is a long preparation for something that never happens,’ said Yeats. There comes a moment when one knows that one is no longer getting ready for anything and one understands that the idea of advancing towards a goal was a delusion. Our personal history had assumed that it possessed an end, and now it finds, beyond any sort of doubt, that this finality has been taken from it.

While this realization is often disturbing — even devastating — Beauvoir thinks in the right conditions it can also be a catalyst for longer-term authenticity and joy. Old age has a number of significantly unsung positives.

Indeed, even with the backdrop of Othering and ageism, some nevertheless experience retirement as a great liberation. No longer do they have to behave in ways for the sake of climbing a career ladder, improving their reputation with a certain group, or adding more money to their pension pot:

This sweeping away of fetishes and illusions is the truest, most worth-while of all the contributions brought by age.

One way to combat the bad faith around aging, then, is to re-examine what it opens the door to. Yes, work is over; but work isn’t the only thing we have to offer. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle argued that it is in leisure, not necessarily in work, that we can best express our human excellence.

Rather than a crisis of identity, retirement could be seen as a form of graduation to a more authentic way of life. People can focus on the pursuits they find genuinely stimulating: grandparenthood and family life, building communities, developing new skills, learning things there was never time to learn…

In other words: cultivating the qualities that make us human.

“There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life,” Beauvoir thus writes,

and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.

Preparing for retirement, then, is not just a case of ensuring we have enough money, a place to live, and a few hobbies to entertain us. We also need to have a sense of the commitments, pursuits, and projects that will sustain us to the very end of our lives.

Perhaps a more transitional or phased approach to retirement could help facilitate this, as could the continual decoupling of our identities from work no matter our age.

We should ask ourselves repeatedly, not just at the end of our careers, what it is we want from life, and strive to structure our lives around it long before we cease working for money.

For many people, however, this may not be realistic. In a culture that defines its citizens through work, it might feel impossible to really show up for or explore anything else. Not everyone has the luxury of discovering and refining their passions...

Someone may just be keeping their head above water paycheck to paycheck, or be part of an industry that disincentivizes the pursuit of anything but the job, or have a family to care for. Upon retirement all they see around them is an arid wasteland, an elephant graveyard of lives not lived.

All of society’s failures converge in the loneliness and banishment of such people, Beauvoir declares. The Coming of Age is her battlecry for transforming society in such a way that elderly people are not discarded or alienated by the economic machine, but have a valued place in day-to-day life, a route to expressing their inner passions, a means of sharing the depth and color of their lived experience, and of celebrating their full and continuing humanity.

Younger people must recognize that the way society treats the elderly will be how the world treats them, too. We cannot dehumanise the very people we are destined to become, Beauvoir implores:

We must stop cheating: the whole meaning of our life is in question in the future that is waiting for us. If we do not know what we are going to be, we cannot know what we are: let us recognize ourselves in this old man or in that old woman…

Wearing one’s years with pride is easier said than done in a society obsessed with the value of youth, but it is a vital form of resistance against the bad faith culture around work, retirement, and aging.

Physical changes and challenges will come with age, but they need not be accompanied by social or existential alienation. Just because our lives do not have an ultimately glorious destination doesn’t mean they cannot still be filled with various projects we find engaging and that add value to the world, Beauvoir writes:

The greatest good fortune, even greater than health, for the old person is to have his world still inhabited by projects: then, busy and useful, he escapes both from boredom and from decay. The times in which he lives remain his own, and he is not compelled to adopt the defensive or aggressive forms of behavior that are so often characteristic of the final years. His oldness passes, as it were, unnoticed…

Indeed, given the right conditions, given a life filled with meaningful pursuits and relationships, old age could in fact be the happiest and most authentic age of all.

However, Beauvoir concedes, if one’s experience doesn’t quite match up to this, it is far from a personal failing. There’s little chance of dignity in old age if there is no dignity in the work people must do to get there:

For this to be the case he must in his middle age have committed himself to undertakings that set time at defiance: in our society of exploitation this possibility is refused to the immense majority of human beings.

Fully releasing ourselves from bad faith around aging will thus require a great upheaval in our current economic system.

Other cultures throughout history have honored and respected the life experience and wisdom of the elderly, granting them valued places and roles in society.

In contemporary Western society, however, so long as we judge the value of an individual according to their productivity and profitability, so long as we treat people like economic units to be wrung out and discarded, old age will continue to be feared and reviled, and those experiencing it will face existential challenges far beyond physical decline.

What do you make of Beauvoir’s analysis?

• Does Beauvoir’s ‘bad faith’ critique of aging and retirement resonate with you?
• If you are younger, how do you feel about aging?
• If you are older, what have your experiences been? What challenges have you faced?
• Do you agree that old age be liberating, given the right conditions?
• What fears do you have about getting older, if any?
• What is your advice for those approaching retirement or old age?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related articles:

• Aristotle On Why Leisure Defines Us More than Work
• Elizabeth Anderson on the Tyranny of Being Employed
• Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness
• Byung-Chul Han’s Burnout Society: Our Only Imperative is to Achieve
• Hannah Arendt on the Human Condition: Productivity Will Replace Meaning
• Sartre’s Waiter, ‘Bad Faith’, and the Harms of Inauthenticity
• Authentic Love: Simone de Beauvoir on What Makes a Healthy Relationship
• Simone de Beauvoir: the Best 7 Books to Read

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