“With Friends Like These”: Unpacking Panicked Metaphors for Population Ageing
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Materials and Methods
3. Metaphorical Thinking about Population Ageing
3.1. The Tsunami Metaphor
3.2. The Age-Friendly Metaphor
Global Age-Friendly Cities and Communities
4. Discussion
4.1. The Trouble with Active Aging
The risk goes beyond but includes creating a “deserving elder” whose flipside is, of course, another older adult who does not deserve, that is, has not earned through action, social supports that they may need even more later in life. If that older adult needs long-term care, the implication is that their inactivity led to this need. It thereby comes across as a form of preventable greediness rather than as the deserving earned by someone who took all the individual approved steps but somehow still ended up requiring long-term care. The discourse promotes the dangerous idea that remaining within the third age, forever delaying the fourth age, is within individual control and even becomes a moral responsibility.The ideal older people are portrayed as active in sports or going to the gym and participants in voluntary organizations, rather than spending time watching soap operas, enjoying horse races or other activities perhaps more associated with a working-class than an educated middle-class lifestyle.[32] (p. 6)
4.2. Age Panic and the Neoliberal Imagination
5. Conclusions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
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Chivers, S. “With Friends Like These”: Unpacking Panicked Metaphors for Population Ageing. Societies 2021, 11, 69. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc11030069
Chivers S. “With Friends Like These”: Unpacking Panicked Metaphors for Population Ageing. Societies. 2021; 11(3):69. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc11030069
Chicago/Turabian StyleChivers, Sally. 2021. "“With Friends Like These”: Unpacking Panicked Metaphors for Population Ageing" Societies 11, no. 3: 69. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc11030069