Time is not up: temporal complexity of older Americans' lives

The clock-dominated American discourse of time contributes to creating an image of the elderly as useless people who sit idly and wait to die. This article challenges such negative views of old age and illustrates the temporal complexity of older Americans' lives. It discusses various ways they cope with the tyranny of the clock and the dialectic relationships among the past, the present, and the future, as well as their meanings in old age. My examination reveals three major points. First, clock time is not as objective as is generally assumed but is imbued with tensions and contradictions. Second, the dominance of clock time does not eliminate other forms of time (e.g., cyclical, pendular, static), and older Americans live in multiple temporalities. Third, the elderly are active players with time, not only shaped by time, but also shaping time. The ethnographic data for this article derive from my long-term fieldwork at a senior center from 1987 to the present.