I'm at the best age. What is the best age in a person's life? The best age for a man is...

From a philosophical point of view, the best age is the one at which a person feels happy, fully realized, and life itself is full. But research results provide different information on this matter.

A wealth of evidence indicates that happiness peaks on average around 29 years. As a rule, the main criterion is the number of friends: at this age it averages 80 people, while in other periods of life the figure fluctuates around 60. However, some experts do not agree with this and remind that the majority of “friends” “during this period - work colleagues with whom the person goes to lunch. A kind of “food” company that creates the appearance of psychological comfort and has nothing in common with real friendship. Therefore, if you are not 29 years old, do not be upset.

Those who like confirmation of facts can safely ignore this paragraph: the survey presented is rather curious, its data should not be considered the only correct one, but nevertheless they are interesting. The Onion resource reports on a survey of older people, which revealed that the most important events that left behind the most vivid memories occur before the age of 25 years.

Hair dye manufacturer Clairol Perfect asked 4,000 women of different ages how happy they were in different aspects of their lives. The overwhelming majority of respondents answered that in 28 years they are most satisfied with their sex life, 29 years- peak career satisfaction, and 30 years- the age of maximum satisfaction with your relationships with others.

One of the British deodorant manufacturers conducted its own alternative survey of 2,000 people, the result was different. Respondents - both women and men - mostly named the ideal age 37 years. In their opinion, this is the age of achieving life goals, satisfaction with oneself and the world around us.

More serious studies, surprisingly, are no less curious. Some time ago, Gallup analyzed the answers of more than 85 thousand older Americans to the question: “Are you satisfied with your appearance?” Most of those who are satisfied turned out to be... over 70 years old. But at the age of about 50, there were much fewer people satisfied with themselves.

In July 2013, the results of its own study were published by the London School of Economics, which surveyed more than 23 thousand German residents of different ages. The survey revealed that respondents’ peak satisfaction with life occurred twice: around 23 years old and approximately 69 years old. Twenty-three years is the age of expectations, when a person experiences happiness “in advance,” simply because he expects all the best from his future life. Often these expectations are too high, and dissatisfaction with the difference between what was dreamed of and what was realized gradually increases. Approximately at 55 years there comes a peak of depression and disappointment with life, and then dissatisfaction gradually fades away and is replaced by a realistic assessment of the past period of life and prospects for the future. Double peaks in indicators are a common occurrence in in-depth studies of social factors. The scientists plan to continue their work in other countries and social groups to confirm their theory.

And in conclusion - some interesting facts about a variety of people and their best age.

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 4 years in just half an hour he could memorize an entire piece of music.
• American chess player Bobby Fischer, who turned 15 years, 6 months and 1 day(it was 1958), became the youngest grandmaster in the world. This record stood for 33 years! Today, the youngest grandmaster in the world is Ukrainian Sergei Karyakin. He set his record in 2002, when he was 12 years and 7 months.
• Julie Andrews, a famous English actress and owner of a unique voice, achieved a vocal range of four octaves in 8 years, which even for professional performers is a very early age for voice formation. For comparison, the voice range of the vast majority of singers, not to mention non-professionals, is no more than three octaves.
• Tori Amos is another unique singer - just a 5 years became the youngest student at the Baltimore Conservatory of Music.
• The inner feeling of age sets the tone for your entire life. Robard Radford turned down a role in The Graduate because he felt he wasn't "young enough." As a result, Radford's place was taken by... his peer, thirty-year-old Dustin Hoffman.
• Actor Sidney Greenstreet made his debut in one of the leading roles in the film "The Maltese Falcon" in 62 years old!
• Sergei Prokofiev wrote his first opera in 9 years.
• At the recent Olympic Games in Sochi, another age record was set: Russian Yulia Lipnitskaya aged 15 years and 249 days became the youngest Olympic champion in women's single skating. The overall record for figure skating still stands from 1936, when German pair skating athlete Maxi Gerber became Olympic champion at the age of 15 years 4 months and 5 days.

Previously, this figure was given very approximately - between 25 and 60 years. Now, scientists, having asked 2 thousand respondents aged 40 years and older, have discovered what age people considered the happiest for themselves, as well as what key factors make a person happy at different stages of life.

The question of the happiest time in life has interested researchers before. For example, in 2013, psychologists from the London School of Economics, based on a survey of 20 thousand people from around the world, calculated that in the fate of every average person there are two “peaks of happiness” - 23 years old when a person is young, devoid of negative experiences and full of hope, and 69 years old, when he has accumulated life wisdom and knows the value of eternal values. A little earlier, British sociologists indicated the figure as the “age of happiness” 58 - this was what was most often mentioned in the survey by the majority of 1,000 pensioners over 60 years of age.

According to the authors of a recent study, most adults call their happiest age 34 years, since by this moment, usually the one who wanted to, has already managed to realize himself: start a family and give birth to children, get an education, achieve success in his career and save some capital. However, scientists agree that you can feel happy at any age, only the reasons for this will be different. What factors are most valuable for the main age categories?

20 years and older

• Youth and health.
• Less responsibility and more freedom than the older generation.
• Most people like their appearance.
• Many people get married.
• All the money you earn can be spent on yourself.
• Meeting your first true love, the most touching dates and whirlwind romances.
• All loved ones are still nearby.
• Birth of the first child.
• Lots of relationships with interesting people.
• Time for active travel.

30 years and older

• Happiness is seeing children grow up and raising them.
• Meeting true love.
• The ability to appreciate the small joys of life comes.
• Traveling takes on a new flavor.
• The ability to make the right decisions is developed.
• Climbing the career ladder, making good money.
• Meaningful marriage.
• Getting a new job or changing profession.
• Purchasing your own home.
• Moving to a new place of residence.

40 years and older

• Feeling of inner harmony.
• Enjoying family life.
• Meeting your love.
• Improving parenting experience, spending time with older children.
• Once again I have time for myself, hobbies and interests.
• Feeling like a successful person.
• I managed to put aside savings and ensure material well-being.
• Getting married (for many, remarried) or starting life “from scratch” after a divorce.
• Moving to a new, more spacious home.
• Taking care of my health and appearance bore fruit: I managed to lose weight and get in shape.

50 years and older

• Achieving financial and psychological comfort.
• There is less work, and more time for yourself.
• You can travel again.
• The appearance of grandchildren.
• The children began to live independently.
• Getting married.
• Reaching the peak of your career.
• Getting rid of previous illnesses or bad habits.
• Celebrating “round” anniversaries of family life, meetings with family and friends.
• Feeling fit with a combination of life experiences and energy.

60 years and older

• Retirement.
• The ability to travel by choosing your own routes.
• Now is the time to focus on your own hobbies and interests.
• You can work only for your own pleasure.
• The ability to appreciate every moment in life has come.
• Finally, you can relax: you no longer need to prove anything to anyone.
• You can gain new knowledge and look for like-minded people in your hobby.
• The appearance of grandchildren or great-grandchildren.
• There is time to pay due attention to your health.
• Getting married.

What is noteworthy is that one of the key factors of happiness is love and marriage- recalled representatives of all age categories, however, the significance of romantic feelings was assessed differently. Another interesting detail: the majority of respondents noted that although they have a strong feeling of nostalgia for the events of their youth, they still became happier with age.

Those who considered themselves generally unhappy in life, it turned out to be a little - only 10% of the total. Almost half of the respondents rated their lives as happy overall, while another 40% noted that they were only equally happy. And one of the most important secrets of happiness, according to scientists, is the ability to appreciate the joys of every age, do not regret missed opportunities and do not torment yourself with memories of mistakes made...

Alexey LEVINSON worked on the theme of the issue

What is the best age?

This article is devoted to a group of problems associated with aging and the situation of older people in our society.

In the practice of sociological research, especially national surveys, which include the surveys that create the empirical basis of this article, age is considered to be one of the main determinants influencing the opinions and reactions of respondents.

The Levada Center, on whose data we will rely, usually uses the following scale:

Age (full years):

55 years and older.

Where and by whom is the boundary of old age drawn? 18 years is the age of majority; a person acquires the right to participate in elections. As for the 25th and 40th birthdays, research practice has shown: at the first of these milestones, youth, as a rule, ends, and at the second, what should probably be called “second youth.” Forty-year-olds are the youngest of those who underwent primary and secondary socialization in Soviet times, the last “Soviet people” in the demographic sense of the word. The results of our surveys reflect this in this way: at the age of forty, a milestone is passed that divides society into two parts. If there are problems to which the reaction depends on age, then the main difference in these reactions will be between those who are younger and older than 40.

In answers to the question: “At what age does old age begin now?” in Levada Center surveys in 2005 and 2011, it was the forty-year-olds who gave the first bunch of reactions. In relation to earlier ages, almost no one (1%) even thinks about talking about old age. And starting from forty, they already say (9%), more often than others - people without special education (11%), women who have children (11%), but no husband. Their incomes are low, they live in small towns (13%), and their fate seems gloomy to them. And they call a sad fate “old age.”

The researchers drew the boundary of the last, oldest age group at 55 years. The threshold (retirement age for women) is set by the state and accepted by society. In this age group, women, as we know, make up the majority; their discourse is decisive here.

Here is how Russians' answers to the question were distributed in 2005: “What age do you think is the best?”(Fig. 1)

No one named an age younger than 4 years, and no one (for our topic this is significant) was older than 65 years. The average value based on the answers of all respondents falls by twenty-eight and a half years. In the diagram below, which is shaped like a mountain, this age indicates its "top":

Rice. 1 shows that 66% of answers about the best age fall in the period of life from 20 to 40 years. We see that individual responses are clearly influenced by some external factor, due to which they turn out to be similar to each other. The range of opinions regarding the “best age” is small. Apparently, this indicates that society treats completely differently different periods of human life, which different groups of respondents identify more or less similarly, demonstrating agreement in their assessments. Before us is a sequence of “ages” as value-colored ascriptive (attributed by society to the individual) status-role complexes.

There are quite natural deviations: among the youngest, almost a third consider the best age to be under 20, and among the oldest, a quarter attribute the best age to the period from 40 to 50 years, in the manner of the Greek “acme”.

Rice. 2 demonstrates that even these extreme opinions, which may seem eccentric, are distributed in society very “correctly”: the older people are, the more often they transfer their best age into “their” second half of life.

But in general, we can say that the main discussion between generations is on the question: is the best time just before or shortly after 30? (Fig. 3)

It would seem that every generation praises its own age. But no. According to the survey, it turns out that although older generations tend to shift the peak of existence to a later age, they consider the best period to be the period they themselves have already lived through. And the youngest, although they point to a much earlier stage of life than the older ones, in half the cases they expect that the best time is still ahead of them. At the age that society recognized as the best, i.e. Among those aged 25-39, no more than half see their own time as the most wonderful, and at least a third believe that their best years are already in the past.

Observations like these remind us of the nature of the information that opinion polls provide. They show that not all answers have their origin in individual experience. On the contrary, the role of subjective experience and its objective reflection in the answers turns out to be small. The concentration of responses on certain life phases confirms the ascriptiveness of the assessment of times and ages in society. To put it another way, age is the measured social time of an individual's life with a value built into it.

The effect of the norm affects not only the answers during the interview. The very experience of time occurs in relation to the norm. One can point to the constructed nature of the corresponding social patterns. But it is worth remembering that there is no other reality other than the constructed one. She is life.

When does old age begin?

“At what age does old age begin now?” — this question was asked to Russians in 2005 and 2011 during studies conducted by the Levada Center. The survey was conducted using a standard sample representing the entire population of the Russian Federation aged 18 years and older (1600 people). The number of people included in the sample whose age was 55 years or more is proportional to their share in the country’s adult population (29%). This age group is almost the largest (aged 40-54 years - 30%), therefore, in the general results of the public opinion poll, the answers of its representatives color the calculated average result quite strongly.

The average value for all answers for the age of “beginning of old age” is 58 years. Rice. 4 shows the distribution of opinions of all residents of the country on this issue.

But we are more interested not in the opinion of the majority, but in the positions of “extremists”, those who call for people to be registered as old people either unusually early - before 50, or unusually late - after 65. Supporters of such unusual views number about a third in each generation. The ratio between the number of supporters of both extremes in a pointed form shows, so to speak, the direction of the vector of public opinion in each generation (Fig. 5).

Rice. 6 shows what older people think about the best age and the beginning of old age. A small area of ​​intersection between the diagrams means that somewhere between 40 and 55 years old, for some, old age had already set in, but life still seemed wonderful. But in the eyes of the absolute majority of Russians, old age is by no means the best age, and the best age is by no means old age.

Now let’s look at the views of people aged 18-25 years. As we see in Fig. 7, in their minds, the “best years” and the years of old age practically do not overlap: the best years end and old age begins.

Let us state once again: in the minds of our fellow citizens, alas, there is almost no place for the idea of ​​old age as a “good age.”

Old age, social status and rights

Old age in social time. In today's urban culture, each given age is perceived as a community of social characteristics of a person, perceived from the outside. The individuals who form it may be located in different points of social space. However, for most of human history, ages were not communities in themselves, but groups unto themselves. And age was not a sign or reason for belonging to a category. On the contrary, belonging to a (sex-) age, (the same - status) group determined age. It was this affiliation that determined the need to meet certain expectations, incl. own, which developed characteristic psychological attitudes that determine both intimate-internal and externally oriented reactions, and as a result - certain “age-related” behavioral characteristics.

When living compactly in a community regulated by tradition (village, commune, courtyard), age groups were primary groups in the sense of constant personal contact and communication, systems of direct social control, mutual influence, etc., etc. From ethnographic descriptions it is known that in different cultures there were “ at home” for different sex and age communities (in other words, genders). Socialization, i.e. the transformation of an individual into one whose behavior is acceptable to those around him occurs in these monogender groups and is a group process. Then the individual can leave this close group, become “independent”, for example, start his own family, his own home. Then social control at the level of consanguineous or neighboring communities further maintains the norms set in the process of socialization. A change of status occurs in the process of transition from one age group to another. This movement is one of the types of social time; transitions from group to group are the events that form it.

It depends on the specific culture into which groups society is aggregated. One of such groups is the elders.

The existence of our society, in which the memory of the late Soviet era is alive, demonstrates the reconstruction of age groups, primarily in relation to extreme ages, i.e. to those who do not have full social status. The process of socialization is, in this sense, the process of gradually acquiring this status. This aspect of the matter is what the concept of “growing up” refers to. The process of growing up occurs, firstly, under the control of adults and, secondly, within the framework of mutual control and mutual learning in peer groups. Nurseries, kindergartens, schools and the army, collective formations, which in Soviet times included almost all the younger members of society, were built on the principle of age groups - “classes”, as they were called in the nineteenth century, emphasizing the status nature of this education. Today these structures continue to exist, gradually losing their total character.

The transition from grade to grade appears to be caused by age as an “objective” sign or factor. It is not difficult to show that the transition is determined by the rules of existence in the classroom, the dynamics of the socialization process as such, and not by the passage of astronomical time and age as its expression. There are known exception cases (“leave for the second year,” “jump a year of study,” etc.) that prove exactly this.

An individual's upbringing occurs largely within the family. But in our culture there is a concept that the participation of an individual in certain age groups, age groups is mandatory or highly desirable. Those who have not undergone this form of socialization may be treated as socially disadvantaged.

Age classes, peer groups, have two varieties. One is formal groups in institutions of socialization (so-called children's institutions, as well as educational institutions and the army). There, the edification, education and training of socially inferior (“minors”) by “adults” takes place. Another type is informal peer groups, where correction of norms and patterns of behavior received from adults takes place, as well as mutual training in social existence skills. Children's/youth groups that act as informal ones within their formal framework also have such functions - a yard company, a school class, a university course, a “conscription” in the army. In these cases, internal self-government structures are formed there. They are usually built on a hierarchical principle. There are also completely informal groups - companies, gangs, gangs. There, as a rule, the role of “adults” is played by representatives of older ages, who themselves are not yet fully adults.

Age relations in the family and in children's groups are one of the first forms of dominance-subordination, inequality of status. Let us draw your attention to the fact that in modern society the so-called age limit has been established. coming of age. It falls on the ages of 14-16-18 years. Special rituals at this moment include obtaining a matriculation certificate, a passport, and the right to vote. But in reality, full status has not yet been achieved. People in this age state are called “young”, which means they are not adults. (The status of “young” in the army means complete subordination to the “old men”, “grandfathers”). It is characteristic that among teachers of Russian universities there is a widespread manner of calling students - formally adults - “children”. By doing this, they emphasize the inferiority of their subordinates, expanding their rights to control and manage them.

From the moment the family is created, the forms of social control over the individual change. Relatively large and loosely organized groups of peers are being replaced by a narrow and closely regulated group - the family. In the limit, this is a couple, a pair of spouses or a parent-child pair. (A young family is either separated within the family of its parents or begins to live separately.) Individuals who have separated into an independent family are considered as socially full-fledged. They receive the rights to manage other individuals - their own children. Age associations at this stage have a weakened form: this is communication between young mothers and young fathers outside the home, for a limited time.

The above remarks are intended to show that age, as a natural and natural attribute of a person, is in fact a complex of social expectations and demands placed on him, rights, privileges granted to him, responsibilities imputed to him. These regulators develop in groups and have a collective nature, although they act as attributes of an individual at the appropriate age or attributes of age as such.

In adulthood, the role of primary groups for socialization and control, as mentioned, decreases. However, beyond a certain point, called “old age,” a partial loss of social usefulness and sanity occurs. And then, in a characteristic way, the mechanisms of age groups can be turned on again. There are nursing homes for the elderly. One of the most common types of organizations officially classified as civil society organizations in our country are various veterans’ organizations. The main reason for joining these organizations is older age - in combination with certain merits. There are also various forms of informal - usually neighborhood - associations of non-working pensioners.

The noted forms of collective existence of peers in older ages play a supporting role in the event that an elderly individual loses his family - his own or the family of his children. These forms of self-organization of the elderly partly relieve younger age categories of the responsibilities dictated by morals to maintain the existence of the elderly. The reciprocal duties of old people towards younger people are becoming weaker. It is known that informal groups “on the bench” are trying to perform - precisely as a collective - the function of informal social control in relation to younger generations, especially young people, but they are less and less successful.

Family roles as statuses. Here it is appropriate to consider in more detail the issue of the relationship between the categories of old age and power/authority. In our society, which has emerged from the traditional one, the issues of age-related power relations in the family and society have not been fully worked out.

The “natural” nature of parents’ power over children is practically not questioned in society. But the idea of ​​a child’s natural rights as a limitation of the rights of his parents, generally elders, is just beginning to gain acceptance and acceptance in our social culture.

The preservation of the status of “children” by adults in the family remains socially undeveloped. During the period of an individual’s stay in younger ages, the status of a child, child, son or daughter means both relational and absolute subordination to all “adults”. With the transition to older age groups, with the acquisition of the status of “adult,” the individual gains independence, recognized by others. But within the framework of the Russian urban family, a mechanism for disabling the status of social inferiority resulting from belonging to the relational category of “children” has not been developed.

The parent continues to consider himself to have authority and power in relation to the individual, who, according to the norms of this society, is now assigned the status of “adult”. This status is the highest in the age hierarchy. It means that its bearer is not subordinate to bearers of other statuses. But in a number of families, the parent of an adult continues to consider himself to have the rights of an adult in relation to someone who belongs to the category of “children,” albeit now not by age, but by relation. In our urban, post-traditional society, there is no norm or ritual for ending these parental powers. Numerous domestic conflicts on this basis are known. The form of solution to these problems is often spatial removal, separation of families, moving “under one’s own roof.” However, sometimes maintaining contact by phone or through periodic visits maintains a relationship in which the parent acts as the authority figure and the son/daughter as the subordinate. In psychology, the corresponding mechanisms have been studied both separately and as a single complex. We want to draw attention to the pre-psychological side of the matter.

The roles/statuses recorded in culture form a social system, which sets the framework for the behavior of the parties. Various factors, from economic to psychological, can lead to the erosion of this system in individual cases. There are cultural patterns that make it possible to replace it with other relationships ranging from zero to cooperative. In the framework of this discussion, we are interested in the fact that the basis for these power relations, resting deep in the structure of culture, is that the participants belong to the same family, which obliges them to comply with the code of family relations, and within this framework they belong to different classes. These classes are unequal as generations. In a tribal society where such relationships were formed, leaving a class/generation was performed collectively and formalized by appropriate rituals. In our society, these classes have remained as age-based, where age is regulated by measures external to a given family, and relational, i.e. governed by the rules of intra-family relations, into which society interferes little. Because of this, relationships in individual families are determined by more specific reasons - subcultures, family traditions, and the characters of the participants. Age measured in years is an external given, a universal natural “norm” with which the family norm on the rights and responsibilities of generational ages comes into conflict.

Old age and status classes. In the same way, old age acts as an institution that belonged to the ancient division of society into status classes. Old age, as already noted, in traditional society was experienced collectively, within the corresponding class. In today's urban life, old age is determined by several parameters that do not act entirely in harmony. The first parameter or criterion that seems obvious is public opinion about when old age begins. Levada Center asked a similar question in all-Russian sample surveys in 2005 and 2011.

Obviously, this was a question of when the stigma of being “old” falls on a person. There is a difference of opinion on this matter between representatives of different social categories. Entrepreneurs set the old age limit at 66 years, the military - 65 years, managers - 62 years, office workers - 61 years, specialists - 59 years, workers - 58 years, unemployed - 57 years, students - 56 years. On average, according to 2011 data, the age of 60 is considered the beginning of old age. But, as for people who were 60 years old at the time of the survey, they postponed the age of onset of old age by 62 years. And only those who were 62 years old recognized that old age begins at this time. (This is the average of their answers; some of them called the age of onset of old age 40 years, some - 80 years). A more detailed analysis shows that women under the age of 55 begin to count old age earlier than 60 years, and after their 55th birthday - later than their 60th birthday. Among men, the opinion that only people who are at least 60 years old can be counted as old people exists already from the age of 45 (and often from the age of 35).

In 2005, the average answer regarding the age at which old age now begins was 58 years. In 2011, the average answer was 60 years. Two years is a difference that lies within the statistical error. However, the evidence that this is not an error is supported by the fact that the shift in estimates towards a later date is systematic. It is observed in the responses of both men and women. Since 2005, men's scores have risen by 2.5 years, women's scores by 8 months. At the same time, there was and remained a certain spread of estimates of the milestone age depending on the gender and age of the respondents. The general rule is that young people set this milestone at an earlier age, and older people - at later years. Thus, in 2005, people in a group where the average age was 20 years old indicated (on average) an age of old age of 56 years, and in a group where the average age was 85 years old, they believed (on average) that old age begins at 63 years old. Approximately the same difference remains in the 2011 estimates. The difference in old age estimates obtained in 2005 and 2011 can presumably be explained by the ongoing process of population aging. We saw in synchronous sections of both 2005 and 2011 that the older people are, the later they push the normative limit of old age. You can try to extend this rule to the entire society as a whole, imagine it as a subject of opinion - public opinion - and assume that the older society sees itself, the later the age of aging it assigns. Comparing data by age group from surveys six years apart shows the following:

In general, according to women’s responses, the estimate increased by 0.7 years. According to men's estimates, it is 2.6 years. The table allows us to see that, in general, it was men who mainly shifted the assessment, with the most significant revision of the old age milestones, as can be seen from the table. 1, is found in the very group that, according to the 2005 version, should have become old people. These people gave themselves almost five more years of existence without the stigma of old age.

Table 1. Change in estimated age at which old age begins, from 2005 to 2011, years

During the same surveys, the question was asked about when childhood ends and adulthood begins. It is significant that this line remained motionless. On average it is 16 years.

Thus, according to the views of members of our society, the mature/adult state now in our country lasts from 16 to 60 years. It seems that these boundaries, in general, coincide with the boundaries of school completion at the beginning, and (male) retirement at the end. These are the boundaries of action for large institutions; it is not for nothing that state authorities surround the crossing of these boundaries with rituals and mark them with the issuance of special certificates: a matriculation certificate and a pension certificate. Let us note that society (if we continue to consider it an independent social subject) is very reluctant to accept attempts to move these boundaries. The proposal on the part of government authorities to introduce 12 years of compulsory schooling at one time, as our research showed, was met with almost universal disagreement and was not implemented. The ideas of shifting the pension period to later years, which are being sounded as a way of feeling out the reaction, are met with even sharper resistance. Thus, according to a survey conducted in September 2011, the attitude towards “legally increasing the retirement age for men - 65 years, as established in many countries of the world” was negative among 83% of the population. The same proposal to increase this age for women up to 60 years old was met negatively by 86% of the population.

Age right to have sex. Our data allow us to make the assumption that what is called adult life is also called so because it is a state in which the sexual activity of individuals is permitted, or rather, to the least extent repressed. The most general framework rule is that the end of childhood/adolescence (i.e., the period of social incomplete sanity) is the entry of a person into sexual intercourse, and the onset of old age is the exit from this. Here's what our data says about it (2011 survey)

As indicated, the majority of our fellow citizens who are 18 years of age or older agree on the age of 16 as the start of adulthood. We don't have data on sexual activity among 16-year-olds, but we can assume that's when most of it begins. By the age of 18-19, and this age is already covered in our surveys, 16% of girls still declare that they “have no sex life,” and by the age of 25 the share of such statements drops to 2%. Sexual life, according to the self-reports of those surveyed, begins to decline in women at the age of 50. In the range of 50-59 years, 16-17% of women say that they are not sexually active. But at age 60, the share of such answers among women doubles.

The picture of the dynamics of men's sexual activity is similar. 60 years is the age when the share of responses about stopping sexual activity almost doubles. Among women 65 years of age and older, the proportion who say they have no sex life rises to 70% or higher. Among men in this age group, 61% give such answers, as can be seen from Fig. 8.

Rice. Figure 9 in conditional form (the inverted level of answers about the lack of sexual life shown in Figure 8) shows at what age the sexual activity of men and women begins to sharply decline.

We see that turning sixty is a significant milestone in this type of social activity. Sexual activity in older ages is not subject to formal regulation, but is to a very large extent dependent on such a regulator as morals. In traditional society, the regulation of sexual activity of members of the clan community is carried out much more strictly than in modern society. For older age groups that do not participate in childbearing, it is, as a rule, simply not provided. Because of this, we have widespread views that “old people don’t get it.” Control over women's sexual activity in traditional society is generally much stricter than control over men's. In this sense, the moral pressure to declare sexual relations inappropriate for women in older age is clearly stronger than for men. (In a post-traditional society, this may take the form of “scientific” or “medical” prohibitions or explanations, for example, that with menopause women should “naturally” lose sexual desire.)

Noting the significance of the sixtieth birthday as a normative boundary for the sexual activity of older people, let us also pay attention to the opposite side of the matter: this activity continues for some of the respondents in the subsequent period, according to their statements. The sexual life of older people, like same-sex sex, is met with a negative assessment in public opinion. But a sign that the norm is beginning to change (more precisely, first soften) is the transition of sanctions for violating such a norm from punishment or boycott to a form of ridicule, turning these phenomena into an object for jokes, anecdotes, and comic elements of public spectacles. The prospect, as the practice of other societies shows, is the removal of the taboo on such relationships, their legitimization, and, accordingly, the loss of their comic potential for an increasing number of social groups. The flip side of this process is the spread of reactions of approval, support, respect for same-sex couples, older people who decide to make their intimate relationships public, registering them officially or demonstrating them in ritual circumstances of receptions, guests, etc.

Young old people

“Young old”, “young old people”, is a paradoxical phrase. This category was introduced several years ago by Western marketers. Their attention was drawn to the category of older people who have two resources: they already have money and they still have strength. These are the youngest or best-preserved of the pensioners. In addition, these are people who have decided that the resources accumulated over a lifetime - money, energy - must now be spent. Life is interesting for them - and therefore they are also interesting to companies that sell them goods and services that help them feel and experience what they didn’t have in previous years or prolong what they had.

There are known broad normative instructions for old people: to be different from young and mature people, but the implementation of these general instructions is left to the discretion of much narrower communities, for example, neighboring communities, friendly companies, families. The process regulators here are not strict, i.e., not norms whose compliance is ensured by sanctions. In their place are either tradition and custom, or taste and tact. Repression for violating them is less formalized and less severe.

In the case of sexual behavior, which is usually hidden from prying eyes and may not be discussed with anyone, social control is exercised either in dyads or by individuals themselves through internalized norms and patterns. For these reasons, the decrease in sexual activity after old age (see above) does not turn out to be absolute and universal. Like other sources, our research shows that there are still individuals who continue to be sexually active well into their 60s and 70s.

For our public opinion, such behavior will be - today - strange, marginal. Old age in our society, as discussed in this article, has two purposes. Of these, the first is playing the role of a grandfather/grandmother helping their children - the parents of their grandchildren - with the latter's life support. And the second is preparation for death, including through partial death (disability, senile diseases). Meanwhile, in a number of societies, where the nuclearization of families took place earlier than in Russia and the new demographic situation was reflected earlier, new meanings and functions were given to old age, and some old ones were disabled. The role of grandmothers as “sitting with grandchildren” was almost completely removed, i.e. they were relieved of these obligations to younger generations. In turn, families free themselves from the obligation to care for the elderly and relatives who have lost self-sufficiency, transferring it to specialized institutions - shelters, nursing homes, hospices, etc. These institutions themselves are social, i.e. free for residents who are on the state or municipal budget and, due to the fact that, as a rule, eking out a miserable existence, they become those who sell their services to their residents or their families for money, dividing, accordingly, according to the level of service into categories from cheap, where it is low, to the expensive ones, where it is high.

A new morality, and with it a new type of attitude towards old age, is only just coming to us. Together with other attributes of “modernity,” it is only beginning to assert its rights. The fact that old age can be associated not only with hardships and suffering, but also with pleasures is well known to our pensioners, who often see their fellow foreign tourists who have come to us to have fun and get to know another country.

In the second half of the 20th century, in the most economically developed countries, cultural and economic progress led to an even greater slowdown in demographic turnover and an even greater increase in the life span of people with a high guarantee of maintaining their health. An inherently biological change in the population reproduction regime entailed the emergence of a completely different type of morality, a different attitude towards human life. The main result of the unidirectional action of various factors was the establishment of a system of values ​​and norms opposite to those to which we are accustomed. This system assumes that the center of the family’s concerns is the personality, its existence, its life.

Economic development has created conditions for workers, and indeed residents of the country in general, to actively consume. High labor productivity has made it possible to reduce working hours and dramatically expand leisure time, when consumption is most active - including leisure after the end of working life, in retirement.

The retirement of a large cohort of people with certain means has once again changed ideas about old age. The understanding of old age as a loss of meaning and purpose in life is being replaced by the idea of ​​old age as an analogue of youth. This is a time of learning—knowing life, learning joy. The wave of affirmation of the joys of sex after 60, 70, 80 has passed (we are talking about developed countries). Courses for studying crafts and languages ​​are multiplying, in which pensioners in their circle or next to young people indulge in knowledge and study. Traveling as a form of leisure and learning for retirees has already been discussed above.

Does the question arise about the purpose of such knowledge, and if so, how is it resolved? There is an answer in the European cultural tradition. According to legend, on the eve of his execution, Socrates took a lesson in playing the flute. To the perplexed - why? - he answered: when else will I have time to learn this?

Some of the very first Russian “soon rich”, who managed to both survive and preserve their wealth despite all its repeated redistributions, are now approaching the age of early old age. There are not yet enough of them to form a generation with its own manners, style, and forms of communication. But soon, apparently, they will appear - and this will be the Russian part of the previously described young old.

The development of demographic and economic processes in our society poses two problems simultaneously. One is the problem of the need to remove working people of retirement age from their jobs in order to give young people the opportunity to advance. The economic aspect of this problem is that the creation of new jobs that could be offered to young workers has been slower in recent years than the entry of young people into the labor market. Feature of the so-called economic revival after the crises of the 1990s was that instead of creating new jobs, old ones were most often re-opened, restoring production at enterprises that had fallen down during the past crises. In such cases, employers preferred or were forced to recruit those who had previously worked in them to the newly opened jobs. There were few vacancies for new/young people.

But, as the experience of countries that are ahead of Russia in the development of new economic and demographic trends shows, a threshold is approaching, beyond which an absolute reduction in the number of working-age members of society begins. The problem of lack of vacancies for young workers will be solved or become less acute. There will also be an economic, and behind it, a social need to extend the standard working age of the older part of workers. Raising the retirement age as a measure taken by the state and employers in response to such a need, as far as we know, is met with protest of varying intensity everywhere. Such protests should be expected here too; We have already indicated that as of 2011, about 85% of the population opposed such a measure.

But there is another side to the matter. This is a change in public views on how those considered elderly and old should behave in response to new realities. We have already talked about changing norms or mores regarding leisure time and sex among older people. Let us now turn our attention to the labor and production side of their lives. In the most resource-rich groups of society, changes in the norms under consideration have clearly taken place over the past decades. While there are strict formal age restrictions for holding certain positions (for example, professors, managers, etc.), the same environments informally encourage the continuation of significant and valued types of social activity, such as scientific, creative, and social activities. In our society, as we noted, in past decades such an approach - by way of exception - existed only for a few narrow elites: academics and members of senior governing bodies. Now it applies to groups of lower status, to the scientific community as a whole, to engineering and technical personnel of many enterprises, teaching staff of many universities, etc.

In this dynamic it is customary to see only the negative side: “we are getting old”, “only the old people are left”, “the young are not coming”, etc. Such an assessment is legitimate as long as and to the extent that social mores are associated with old age, indispensable conservatism, rigidity, etc. .P. traits. These traits are considered to be naturally given, physiologically determined. The experience of individual creative personalities, who now make up an absolutely exclusive and narrow segment within the older generation, shows that there is no immutability in this correlation. Changing social requirements for the role of those who are now considered “elderly” can, as the experience of other countries shows, significantly change the above-mentioned “natural” restrictions and framework for older age. Of course, we are not talking about the social equivalent of the elixir of youth or the abolition of the immutability of death and old age as a social form of preparation for it. This refers to the emergence of a new age category before old age itself, before the transition to the category of socially inferior members of society. For lack of anything better, this period was designated as the “fourth age.”

Our society has virtually no experience in this area. We have active older people, but there are no grounds yet for uniting them into a special social category. Their fates still look like “lucky exceptions.” When such a category takes shape, one can expect that it will unite people whose activity will lie in the public sphere. (For many pensioners, as we noted, today the field of communication is either family or an extremely narrow circle of neighbors and peers). The “fourth age” will serve not only the own interests of the elderly - which is mainly done by veterans' councils, pensioners' councils and similar organizations. This category of people will also not act as a prominent conservative force in society, which is the role most often taken by these associations. From this category, society has the right to expect a unique product, one that is born on the basis of understanding experience in its relation to the present.

Demography, anthropology and sociology of age

The problems of age, fertility, mortality and other processes called population movements have long been isolated in the subject of such social science as demography. It is worth remembering that while studying the so-called. moral statistics (which this discipline later took up), the most important observations and discoveries were made that formed the basis for ideas about society as a subject of sociology. We are talking, first of all, about the objective, that is, immutable and independent of human will, the nature of these social processes. In their objectivity they are quite similar to natural processes. But it is also known about them that they consist of mass acts of voluntary human behavior controlled by culture.

The study of public opinion by means of mass surveys has something in common with demography, which reveals the process and result of mass aspirations, moods, dispositions as objective and external to society. One of the differences between this type of social research and that which is demography is that the possibilities for feedback, public reflection and, as a result of society’s influence on its own attitudes, here, albeit weak and meager, are still greater than in demographic research. process.

Combining entities from both research areas in one sociological research subject, which we practice in this article, is a rather cumbersome undertaking. There are two reasons for doing this. One is the severity of the upcoming crisis in the reproduction of the existing social structure, the second is that, although very weak, there are signs of awareness of this crisis in society, and hopes for automatic correction of mass behavior are not completely in vain.

Parts of Russian society, together with other societies on Earth, are moving along the so-called trajectory. demographic transition and find themselves at its different stages. This is a transition from one mode of reproduction to another. Demographers usually describe those aspects that relate to the population movement mentioned above. Then they talk about a transition from a regime combining high birth rates and low life expectancy to a regime with opposite characteristics. The trajectory of this transition is likened to the letter S, emphasizing that at different stages of the process the parameters of fertility, mortality, life expectancy, and children are in different combinations. Different phases of this process correspond to different states of culture, social mores and norms, as well as other forms of social self-regulation. For further presentation, we will especially emphasize such regulations as the value and purpose of human life, prescribed by each society to its members. The described S-transition from this point of view appears as the evolution of a cultural system, in particular, its critical node for many societies, including ours, as a problem of the individual’s independence, his responsibility for himself and society.

During these transformations, different relationships can be established between the modes of maintaining life and its termination, between the processes of fertility and mortality, which leads to the emergence of completely different social situations and configurations in societies and social groups. These social situations appear as forms and phases of the state of societies, as periods of their history, as forms of their culture, and finally, as civilization. The coexistence of societies finding themselves at different stages of the demographic transition, from other points of view, appears as an episode in the history of civilizations, their clash and conflict.

It may very well be that behind the clashes of ethnic groups, religions, and civilizations, which is considered the main drama of our time, one should see a clash of parts of humanity that are at different phases of the S-transition. What makes this conflict acute is that the cultural complexes inherent in these different phases are indeed based on different - and incompatible - anthropological assumptions, values ​​and norms of social behavior. Phase differences, even within the same culture, in this sense are deeper than the differences between cultures. One should not think that the anthropological and social premises of Islam and Christianity “as such” are opposite. Christianity itself arose in the demographic circumstances in which the Mohammedans now live, and it nurtured societies in a different mode of reproduction than that which is now practiced by, say, the peoples of central and northwestern Europe. Suffice it to say that the maxim to give one’s life for one’s friends comes from this creed, but no longer from this phase of its existence in the indicated part of the world. Individualism in this sense really is the fall of morals - old morals - and the formation of new ones. A self-responsible individual, when the hour comes, also gives his life for the sake of higher values, but these values ​​are different, for example, a worthy life for humanity, freedom as such, etc.

Individualism (the primacy of the value of the life of an individual and the priority of the rights of an individual) is known as one of the constitutive features of civilization, which is called Christian on a confessional basis, bourgeois on a political economic basis, and Western on a geocultural basis. As a system of cultural regulators, it corresponds to the situation when the reproduction of the social whole is carried out through social production and maintenance of individual lives, acting as individual/unique carriers of the social and cultural capital of society. We are talking, in other words, about a society that reproduces itself through its only children, who are supposed to live a long life, first accumulating for a long time, and then transmitting for a long time the content of the culture of this society. (Here we return to the topic of old age and immediately see its embeddedness in the most dramatic conflicts of our time).

Russian social thought has made a lot of efforts to designate Russia’s place on the cultural map with the poles “West” and “East”. Adopting the “Western” point of view, they discovered in Russian culture and social practice many signs of its “non-Western” nature, “Asianness”. These signs were mainly associated with the primacy of collective (“conciliar”) principles in “national life.” Since the central government in Russia legitimized itself through communication with the “people,” the primacy of the people’s principle received an interpretation of the unconditional primacy of power - autocratic power. The concept of such power took shape under the circumstances of a combination of rising birth rates, which began to outpace mortality, and large territorial acquisitions, and therefore was formed as the unlimited power of the sovereign over a kingdom unlimited in size: it had as many people and as much land as it wanted.

New reality and old approaches

Whoever became the supreme ruler in Russia understood himself this way. And for the local, small ruler, the human resource and the ability to dispose of it remained unlimited. From Peter to Stalin, Russia won by superiority in manpower. The famous formula “women give birth to new ones” is the position of generals and marshals, who justify their right to spend “the people”, those whom they gave birth to. Even in peacetime, “losses in manpower” to a certain level were considered the norm in the Soviet and are considered the norm in the Russian armed forces, and do not entail the responsibility of the command that, for example, industrial accidents imply for its leaders.

For the time being, the culture of the most large and numerous people did not prohibit such disposal of their lives. There was no need to feel sorry for ourselves and others like ourselves - there are millions of us. Death in battle or in a fight, from wine or from a noose in such a culture is preferable to death from old age. With such an attitude towards the lives of young men, old men simply should not have remained in any significant numbers.

Today's Russia is at a different stage of demographic transition. The birth rate among the urbanized (and most of the rural) population is consistently low; the population reproduces itself primarily through only children, which is a narrowed and narrowing reproduction. The majority of the Russian population, in terms of low birth rates (but not in terms of high mortality rates), is in the same demographic situation as the population of Western Europe, the Western world in the broad sense of the word. In the latter, being in a state where the society consists of only children had a significant impact on the value system. The principles that are widely known to us (in absentia and from the outside) that make the individual, the personality, the main value, had their prerequisites in the cultural tradition of Western European society, but became widespread and constitutive for the social organization of society precisely in this demographic situation. Society reproduces itself through people, each of whom is unique for his family, and further for society, for its institutions.

The value of human life, at least as the physical existence of an individual, becomes very high. Advances in medicine and healthcare in general create the opportunity to live, to be living human beings, who in previous eras were considered and were not viable and did not participate in life. At the stage of formation of the current culture of a society with few children, there were attempts by government measures to increase the number or proportion of healthy people and get rid of unhealthy people. We are referring to eugenic ideology and practice in Nazi Germany. As for practice, we lack it, but the idea and ideology are attractive to part of our population. This was shown to us by our own research, and then by discussion in the media.

For most ordinary people, as well as for many professionals, this position is typical: human beings whose psychophysiological state differs from that which is perceived in the public consciousness as the norm should be removed from public life, but their very existence should be supported. For this purpose, there are special institutions supported by state and municipal budgets. Freaks and disabled people are doomed to social death, but to physical survival. They must be kept in special closed institutions or, if they live in families, then remain locked up as the grief and curse of this family, which is obliged to protect such an individual from society, and society from him. This ideology and practice of exclusion is purposefully (primarily through the efforts of civil society institutions) eradicated in the mentioned Western societies. We are also celebrating the beginning of such a process. Here is the data obtained in the course of research by VTsIOM and the Levada Center. We asked a series of questions about how we should deal with categories of people who are “other” (or literally “whose behavior differs from the norm”). The most characteristic transformations were experienced by the attitude towards those whom we called “born defective” during the first study.

As can be seen from Fig. 10, over the period 1989-2008, society has come a significant distance in changing the norm for attitude towards one of the categories of “others”. Those who are ready to give the answer “liquidate” the so-called. There were much fewer people born with disabilities; they almost entirely moved into the number of people ready to give an answer about helping them.

At the same time, Fig. 11 with data from 2006 on attitudes towards “problem” groups of the population - “if they turned out to be your neighbors” - shows that physical and mental disabilities and illnesses continue to “scare off” up to half of ordinary people, but a tolerant attitude - or at least recognition of such relationship as a model - characterizes the other half.

Other data from the same survey indicate the spread of sympathy, willingness to help such people, as well as negative feelings towards them (Fig. 12).

Attitudes towards people with disabilities, especially those with disabilities from birth or childhood, and even more so, towards those whose mental abilities differ from the statistically average, have undergone dramatic transformations in Western culture. We associate them specifically with the processes of “demographic transition,” although their actual political context turned out to be the development of civil institutions as part of the processes of modern development. For this reason, the difference between morals in our country and these trends has been interpreted within the framework of the tradition of “catch-up modernization.” The corresponding guidelines began to come to us - first as avant-garde practices of elite groups of society, and then, which is very typical, as directive guidelines of governing authorities. The topic of attitude towards “others”, “not like everyone else”, has moved from being deeply marginal to the forefront of politics.

Experience shows that changing the attitude towards lives that themselves are not able to justify their existence either economically or morally, and are not able to provide it themselves, is systemic. If general value bases are sought for such lives to be saved not only by specially designated public/state institutions (clinics, shelters, boarding schools, etc.), not only by families for whom these are the lives of relatives, but by society as a whole, this affects the fate of not only babies, but also old people.

Let us remember that efforts for inclusion, the return of these outcasts to society, are only one of the manifestations of a culture centered on the individual. With the destruction of state socialist collectivist forms of social existence, individualism of a kind comes to us. The attitude towards the value of the individual is changing - first of all - among women, in their capacity as mothers. The Euro-oriented part of the elite, the so-called. the middle class, in its educational practices, is also gradually moving towards individualistic models, towards an understanding of individual individual rights. But the institutions of Russian society in this part transformed very slowly. But such a paradigmatic and exemplary institution for the Russian social system as the army has not changed at all, and is structured in the same way as it was when human lives were produced by families en masse and were, as was said, consumables, a reproducible resource for the armed forces .

The question of what kind of army we have and what is the attitude towards it is, in this sense, a question about the modal age of individual groups in our society. Surveys regarding the readiness to send your child (son, brother, grandson) to active service gave the following picture: Russian society appears split in two regarding what kind of army the country needs - a contract army or a conscripted one, as well as on the issue of attitudes towards conscription: whether or not a young man wants to go to military service.

But if we talk only about older people, then they are the least informed about the situation in the army; their positions are determined to the greatest extent not by their current life experience and current situation, but by certain past experiences and ideological attitudes. For them, the army appears not so much as an institution of direct socialization (education and re-education) of young people who came there upon conscription, but rather as an institution of indirect educational influence on society as a whole. For these people, the army is one of the pillars of statehood and the state. They do not mean the real army (which they either do not know about or do not mean), but the army as a symbol. As a result, in the informal sphere, in “society,” the militaristic nature of the Russian state is supported and reproduced not only and not so much at the expense of the “military,” but at the expense of old men and women. This reveals the conservative social function of old age, which will have to be discussed later when considering it as an institution.

Old age in the archaic

Shifts in the age structure of society, changes in intergenerational relationships, in particular, the already mentioned process of “demographic transition,” affect attitudes towards life and death. It is transformed, but not immediately and not in all social groups at the same time. Therefore, in the consciousness of society, deposits of different eras, ideas of different social groups coexist, and traces of views that have very different cultural and historical origins can be traced.

From ancient times until the beginning of the demographic transition, humanity reproduced itself in the same way as most animal species: through rapid succession of generations and maintaining a relatively large population size. In traditional agrarian civilizations, people usually lived as long as they participated in reproduction - giving birth to children and providing them with everything necessary for life. This included not only what was grown in the fields, but also what was stored in memory: songs, legends, fairy tales, etc.

Old age did not last long, and during this period members of society, no longer participating in material production, played and completed their roles in cultural and social production. The elders are famous - bearers of family tradition, storytellers and sages. To one degree or another, this role was assigned to every aged person. Let us emphasize that a person became a bearer of wisdom not due to his talents, but due to the fact that he passed into a special age.

Looking ahead, let's say that new European thinking has turned these relations upside down. As Shakespeare says, only those who have achieved wisdom have the right to old age. But initially, wisdom, the ability to know and remember what others do not remember, came to people over the years. There is modern evidence of this: according to folklorists, in Russian villages some songs are known and sung only by old people. People who have not reached old age “do not know” these texts, but unexpectedly for themselves they “remember” them when they reach the age of “old people,” that is, people with grandchildren.

Let us repeat, for the roles/statuses of grandmothers and grandfathers in archaic-type societies, a number of functions are provided, primarily related to the primary socialization of grandchildren. This function was carried out within the (extended) family. Within the community as a whole, they carried out the distributed function of transmitting tradition, legend, and myth. In some societies, old people are generally entrusted with important functions of social management in the community: making important decisions, resolving disputes, ending conflicts. Sometimes such functions were concentrated in the hands of individual representatives of the older generation. The Russian words “elder” and “elder” associate old age, old age with seniority, i.e., with a special status implying power or command. In modern Russian society, the intra-family role of the elderly has been preserved to a certain extent, and their role in relation to the community - with the disappearance of both the clan and neighboring communities - has been reduced to the well-known role of grandmothers on a bench, discussing and condemning the behavior of young people, but having little means of turning their condemnations into prohibitions, that is, to exercise regulatory control. Grandmothers, as representatives of the generation of old people, do not apply really valid norms to the behavior of their younger neighbors, but only morals, norms that have lost sanctions. Sometimes, as was also discussed, old people unite in organizations (the so-called veterans’ councils) and gain some influence on the life of neighborhoods and small towns. But the more urbanized the environment, the weaker this residual function of social control, recognized for older age.

Against this background of the weakening of the indicated leadership role of elders and elders in Russian society itself, his interest in cases of preservation of this role among other peoples, which performs the function of symbolic compensation for what was lost, is indicative. In the Russian environment, it is customary to positively evaluate the customs of those neighboring peoples who have retained “respect” for the elderly and elders. Respect for the elderly in societies that are otherwise regarded as more “backward” is usually spoken of with intonations of respect and nostalgic regret.

Returning to the reconstruction of the social status of old people in archaic societies, we note that there were sometimes quite strict limits for the function of social memory they carried out. The community protected itself from excessive archaization. The social role of the elderly - if it did not end in a “natural” way, by their dying of old age as a physical weakness - was interrupted artificially. Sometimes this function was assigned to the family, sometimes it was carried out by the community as a whole. Many agrarian societies have developed traditions of such artificial termination of the lives of old people. One should not think that this was done only under the influence of rational calculation in order to get rid of “extra mouths.” A much more complex mechanism was at work, the purpose of which was to maintain the balance of tradition and innovation, life and death, the relations of this and that world. Killing had nothing to do with a crime for personal gain or killing an enemy. Reliably protected by ritual and its mythological interpretations, the resettlement of old people to the country of their ancestors among the Slavs, for example, was placed in the context of the holiday of the spring renewal of nature. Not sorrow, but joy and revelry accompanied the rides, which ended with the old people descending “on a sled” or “on a matting” down into the ravine.

We do not know how the old people themselves felt about their fate. The ritual was recorded already when the killing was replaced by a theatrical action, the meaning of which was unclear to the participants themselves. Based on the surviving elements of the ritual, it can be judged that the “old man” or “grandfather,” the messenger to the country of his ancestors, during the ritual was endowed with special rights that were not granted to him or anyone else in everyday life. This attitude towards the departed has been preserved by the modern custom of funerals: it is customary to show special signs of respect to the deceased, even if he was not particularly valued during his lifetime. The reconstructed rite, in contrast to the funeral, began before death with the active participation of the “old man,” who only lost his life during the ritual.

Did this practice contradict the feeling of love and affection for those leaving? In general, according to anthropologists, custom, dictating universal and mandatory rules of behavior, acts imperatively and unconditionally. Therefore, it can be assumed that even when performing ritual killing, the custom was able to block, turn off individual feelings, affective connections, and therefore relieve people from feelings of grief, guilt and loss.

From those archaic times, the idea remains in our minds that life must be completed at its own hour, when the living must leave. And even more than that: that an old man who has raised grandchildren has no other social responsibilities than to free the world from his presence. Traces of these views are easy to detect in people's reactions to the news of someone's death. Death at a young age is perceived as unnatural, the death of an old person as a natural event. Behind the word “natural” is the recognition of a certain proper order of things. The old people themselves agree with him, saying about themselves: “It’s healed,” “It’s time for me,” etc., even if at the same time they hope that those around them will object to them. It happens that someone expresses the opinion that a sick grandmother “needs help,” without considering such “help” as murder. Especially if this outcome benefits younger family members, for example, freeing up a room for them in an apartment. It is clear that modern criminal law qualifies such actions as a crime, the same as any other murder. But if we talk about morals, about everyday morality, then depending on the social group, the advanced age and infirmity of the victim can be a mitigating or, conversely, an aggravating circumstance.

A change in views on the value of human life is, we repeat, a consequence of a change in population reproduction regimes. Let us now note the speed of these changes. Over the course of some decades, a significant (and especially significant for us) part of humanity has radically changed the way it adapts to the environment and maintains population size. The rapid turnover of generations with a large number of individuals composing them has been replaced by a reduction in the number of new generations with an increase in average life expectancy. Our society has not yet had time to adapt to this new state. The problem of old age found itself at the very center of yet unresolved contradictions.

Over the two or three generations that separate our society from patriarchal village life, it has not completely outlived the traditional attitude towards old age. In the public consciousness there remain traces of the idea that old people are bearers of some special knowledge that they must pass on to the youngest. The idea that old people must leave remains. Old people think the same about themselves. Actually, they are forced to think about their experience and knowledge as something absolutely valuable - regardless of the specific content of the latter, and to think about their existence as absolutely superfluous, regardless of its real content and the circumstances of life. This is the internal problem of old age. That is why old people pester everyone with their thoughts and memories and at the same time suffer from the fact that they “get in the way.”

The traces of the described layer of ideas about old age are all the clearer the weaker the inclusion of social subjects in what is called normative culture, the lower their equipment with its inherent symbolic capital and, above all, book/school knowledge. In the consciousness of the educated part of society, these archaic motives are presented in a weakened form. They are suppressed by another belief system. The starting point in this public and everyday philosophy is the affirmation of the absolute value of human life, regardless of whose life it is - a baby or an old man, a man or a woman. Such views, universalistic and secular in nature, are the distant results of the ethics of the Renaissance.

Retirement as a symbolic death

The idea that has developed among humanists about life as a value and about the inalienable right of every person to life has become the basis of many institutions of our time - both formal, belonging to the societal level, and informal, located at the level of primary communities. The declared goal of these institutions is to preserve and ensure the lives of members of society, which in the language of the state is called social security, health care, safety, etc. The goal of small communities is exactly the same, but it is called love for your loved ones.

Death, as a constant threat, averted by the efforts of institutions at both levels, is a negative regulator of these life-sustaining processes. The idea of ​​death is loaded with the most important regulatory functions in our culture. Once life is declared to be the highest value, then the means to affirm it in this quality is to point out its opposite - death. Death, accordingly, appears in most discourses as the worst or absolute evil. This makes death the most important multifunctional social tool. The institution of power, the institution of war, law enforcement institutions and the institution of security, and many others, rest on the fear of death. Failure to recognize that death is the ultimate evil devalues ​​these institutions of modern society. Thus, there are no effective measures to prevent domestic or ritual suicides, much less political suicides or threats of suicide, in particular, the practice of hunger strikes, self-mutilation and other methods of destroying one’s life in places of detention. A person who is not afraid of death, who knows worse evil than death, is uncontrollable.

Having a collectivist nature (the primacy of the value of the clan over the value of the life of an individual), the ethical system, which received the name “Soviet humanism,” nevertheless, also already proceeded from the value of life as such. The old, “tribal” logic led to the fact that millions of lives were paid for victories and industrial successes or simply for maintaining power. But the new logic demanded the creation of institutions to save the lives of babies and mothers, old women and the elderly. Pension provision was introduced first for urban workers, then for rural workers.

The ideological support for these measures was based on the opposition between archaic morality, which prevailed until the first decades of the 20th century, and the “new morality”. Our current attitude towards old age and its symbol, pensions, is a mixture of these opposing interpretations.

Without going into the history of the issue of introducing pensions, we note that for our country, the assumption by the state of pension obligations was one of the most significant options for the social contract. Social exclusion of the elderly was sanctioned by the state. With the introduction of a mandatory retirement age for everyone, the experience accumulated by older people was declared to have lost significance. The legislator provided for the removal of this experience from circulation... The social death of old people became similar to their physical death in archaic societies. It is not for nothing that modern rituals of farewell to retirement are more than similar to the rituals of farewell to the deceased. And the person himself sometimes perceives retirement as a “black mark” sent to him on behalf of society, as a sign “it’s time to leave” - and therefore it can cause him sadness or indignation.

But at the same time, pension carries life-affirming symbolism. She extends the predicates of life to old age. First of all, this is recognition of the social need of man. Society seems to be abolishing the requirement of “care.” Although the pension is assigned with some consideration of merit, status, and earnings at the so-called working age, it is perceived by older people as recognition of their social need by virtue of reaching old age. Old age pensions redefine late life. It never ceases to be a time of preparation to make it convenient for both society and loved ones to part with a person. But on top of the archaic layer of meanings another layer is superimposed, resemantizing the same reality. And Russian pensioners have perceived a new signal from society: they are demonstrating political and civic activity that has no parallels in other status and age groups.

The public, declared approach to death by modern Russian society is this: the death of a person is evil and grief, the dream of humanity is immortality. But along with it there is another, also public, “scientific” discourse, which originates in European modern history. In it, based on the social necessity of death, life is recognized as the highest, but limited good for each person, which he cannot use indefinitely. A person must give way to others. It is clear that in such conditions death loses the qualities of evil - if not publicly, then in silence.

There is also a “practical” discourse, which proceeds from the fact that the life of a pensioner should not be too long, otherwise the pensioners will not be fed. Ideas to shorten this period, if not “from the back”, then “from the front”, due to a later retirement age, regularly become the subject of discussion in government authorities and the press.

Old age is a mediator. No culture, no social consciousness can approve mutually exclusive approaches to the same symbolic object if there are no socially sanctioned means of mediation, means of transition from one to another. In the dialectic of life and death, old age is such a mediator. She is the main, although not the only, mediator between the social necessity of life and the social necessity of death. In addition to old age, this role is played by execution, war, illness, disaster and a number of other social institutions. They make death, unthinkable and impossible, understandable and acceptable.

In our secular society, old age serves as a time-extended ritual of preparing all participants in this ritual for the death of one of them.

The time of old age is marked by the fact that the individual loses the essential attributes of life. He loses physical strength and the ability to communicate, understood as the ability for speech, force, sexual interaction, visual, olfactory contact, etc. During this period, other significant social signs should disappear, of which the most important is the consciousness of oneself and one’s identity. It is convenient for the modern community to think that this happens in an “objective” way, due to the development of senile disorders - senile dementia, marasmus, Alzheimer’s disease, etc. We are embarrassed to admit that old people’s inadequacy, whether it has “objective” reasons or not, is primarily imputed . It is set as a norm for all participants in the situation, including the elderly themselves, so that they apply it to themselves.

After desocialization has occurred, a society or small community can consider itself free from obligations to its members. Death as a legitimate cessation of his existence is made possible.

Preparation for death (a task facing not so much an aging person as his environment) is a social program, but each individual perceives it as an objective, in this sense, a natural law. You can obey it or resist it, you can grow old before your time or be surprisingly vigorous for your age, you can play the role of the old or impose it on those who are older (for example, by being overly protective or removing household responsibilities from them).

Forced old age

Who makes people old. In late Soviet society, there was a fairly strong convention that determined the moment of old age, at least for ordinary people. For the rank and file, it had no power—that’s what set them apart. There were conventions about other stages of life, for example, about the onset of maturity. It is known that in the mentioned period this stage turned out to be very late. Research by VTsIOM conducted at the very beginning of the 1990s showed that youth in many social groups extended to almost 40 years.

The rapid changes of the 1990s broke the system of status and age and allowed people, sometimes not yet of age, to take positions as entrepreneurs with incomes many times greater than their parents. The situation was reminiscent of the Civil War era, when at the age of 16 you could become a regiment commander. This revolutionary period is already behind us. Such early socialization is no longer characteristic of our lives. But the new socio-economic environment led to unusually early desocialization.

People who have reached the age of forty, for the most part, cannot apply for a “good” job, with a salary that in modern language is called “decent.” We are not talking about highly qualified work, where the issue of hiring is decided individually, but about activities, say, in the service sector. In advertisements for such vacancies, the ability to work and professional suitability of people over 40 is questioned or denied not as a result of checks, but in advance, a priori. An analogy arises with retirement age. Since the 1990s, employers have often written in job advertisements: “Attention to persons under 35/40 years of age...” It is interesting to note that the main argument of those who express indignation at such a policy is the opposition to the self-imposed barrier of 35-40 by entrepreneurs years to the “state” barrier - retirement age. Moreover, the first is perceived by offended job seekers as arbitrary, invented by arrogant owners, and the second as natural.

The described age discrimination in hiring is typical, first of all, for cases of hiring that are paid relatively high, and where there is therefore competition among applicants. As a result of this selection mechanism operating on a mass scale, the tendency that emerged in the nineties to redistribute social wealth along the age pyramid from older to younger has worsened. As a result, within the working-age population, places with the highest earnings are occupied by younger people, and places with low wages are occupied by older people. There are many exceptions to this rule, the most important being the situation with the youngest workers just entering the labor market. They apply for relatively high-paying jobs, because the situation described above has become the norm, that young people should earn good money. But the employer, in the conditions of the continued excess supply of labor, prefers to hire young people, but with experience in this specialty, which forces the youngest to look for special means of employment (acquaintance) or agree to low pay for their work. In low-paid jobs, they find themselves in competition not with their peers, but with older workers who are near retirement or retirement age. Until the demographic situation changes - and it will soon - the presence of such old people turns out to be an obstacle to the advancement of the young and gives rise to the conflicts characteristic of such circumstances.

The Soviet man is like an old man. A Soviet person, as follows from the predicate “Soviet” itself, is defined as a person of the state (the Soviet state). This means that it is handed over to state institutions. “Free”, that is, state systems of social (in a broad sense, including, in particular, medical) support, which were especially active at the borders of life, serving childhood and old age, as Levada Center experts emphasize, took away a person’s subjectivity. In conditions of such provision, a person did not receive responsibility either for the lives of those who gave birth to him and to whom he gave birth, or for his own. Let us note, developing this idea, that the so-called that existed in Soviet times. The wage system was not actually wages, but was an extremely widely developed system for the distribution of benefits. The maxim regarding work as a duty (and not a way to earn a living) emphasized this ideologically. Widely developed forced labor in the zone and in the army, where life support was not connected with the work of the Soviet man and was not his responsibility, showed this practically.

Our research allows us to see that a significant part of the working population, not only in the public sector, but also in the non-state sector, still works in enterprises that have largely retained the institutional structure of Soviet enterprises. Even in enterprises that have undergone privatization, i.e. those who experienced transformation in the form of transformation into the so-called. joint-stock companies, institutional changes affected only the upper layers, located where profits are distributed, where issues of interaction with other institutions are resolved. Technologies and material working conditions have not changed, and the social structure of the enterprise has not changed. And now almost the entire working population who works at former Soviet enterprises continues to largely receive not wages, but benefits.

Having experienced only limited institutional changes (“reforms”), the Soviet economy oscillates from a state capitalist to a private capitalist regime depending on market conditions. The extremely high conditions created by high oil prices, as well as the low ones caused by crises of various kinds, act in the same way. As soon as the situation sharply improves/worsens, the enterprises that form it move on to distributing benefits. In the case of excess profits, these are also benefits, but they take the form of bonuses, unearned “gifts” in addition to wages; in the case of losses, payment of “advances” instead of wages. Only in the average mode, intermediate between dips and booms, does what the working people receive comes close to the true wage - earned wages.

The expression “we do not live, but survive”, which has retained its widest popularity since the nineties, reflects precisely this circumstance. In a relatively small proportion of cases, it means that people are on the verge of biological survival. More often it is a metaphor that indicates that they are not in the mode of living as a self-responsible enterprise, but in a state of passive existence of which they themselves are not masters. (The formula “nothing depends on us” is most often used in connection with elections, but it applies to all of existence as a whole).

This is, in fact, the case with all pensioners. The dynamics of the size of the pensions once assigned to them depends not on their efforts, but on the economic and political situation.

During the transformations carried out by the Soviet government, primarily collectivization and industrialization, mass migrations, the relationship between man and nature became mediated by society represented by state institutions. The collapse of this system was a disaster for Soviet people. He left him unprepared for a face-to-face meeting with nature, including his own. For pensioners, health problems and health care, medical care are consistently at the top of the list of problems. This is the main difference that demonstrates the pensioner class from younger groups of the population (except for young parents who also urgently need pediatric care for their children).

The attempt to replace the Soviet healthcare system with an insurance medicine system can only be considered successful for a relatively small but growing category of people who work “for money”, i.e. see a direct connection between their efforts and the rewards they receive. Only in strictly private enterprises, built entirely on the principles of a market economy, do people feel the size of their contribution in their pockets. Particularly elastic on this basis are the earnings and income of managers, top management, and owners in general.

In this sense, it is possible to propose a division of Russian citizens into those whose property status is determined to a greater extent by their own active participation in the economic process, and those whose position is determined primarily by the general conjuncture. This category, as our research has shown, both in terms of funds and in terms of their attitudes, is ready to take responsibility for their own health or share this responsibility with professionals from private or self-supporting medical institutions, whom they themselves or their company hires for their money.

For the rest, medical care in the insurance medicine mode is simply a worse version of the activities of government health authorities. This is especially true for pensioners (we will have to return to this circumstance).

To summarize, we note that the “Soviet man” is reproduced - incompletely, defectively - by the general social conditions of his existence throughout the entire thickness of Russian society, and for the older generation, pensioners, this is true to the greatest extent. We can say that this part of society, due to its age, turns out to be most closely connected with the Soviet organization of life. Their age, firstly, puts them in conditions of almost complete dependence on the state, thereby reproducing the main characteristics of the Soviet system. Their age, secondly, is such that they have had time to become more familiar with this system in its classical Soviet version and have become socialized towards it. At the end of the 1980s, they experienced the seduction of programs and plans for the complete replacement of this system with self-acting mechanisms of the market and democracy, and then severe frustration at the form in which the institutions of the market and democracy came to them, and what price they took for their arrival.

Pensioners as a social group and political force

Old age is institutionalized, that is, fixed in statuses and roles, in the social category of “pensioners.” As is well known, the name “pensioner” does not simply denote the fact that a person has received a pension (disabled people who have received a pension since childhood are not popularly called by this name). The name means much more - it is a kind of exclusion from the socially active age and inclusion in the category of potentially active social activists, and much more.

The role of pensioners in our society is great, and it will only increase. It is important that in the coming decade this is the only mass category of the population that will grow.

It is well known that this is the most active group in electoral terms. It contains the largest proportion of voters who vote predictably and are loyal to the regime, but this is - until recently - also the category most ready to participate in protest actions: in street demonstrations, rallies, mass (non-violent) actions. This category will inevitably be included in the conflict over raising the retirement age (see above).

Pensioners in our society are the category with the most defined and unchangeable status and with the strongest consciousness of their status. This status is low, but very clearly defined; it is also strong because of its mass appeal. These people are aware that there are many of them, and that they have the same problems and the same views. There is no other such mass homogeneous category in Russian society. It is this group that considers the state to be its main communication partner. This group communicates with the government through three channels. These are communication through money, communication through social services and communication through the media.

Pensioners (if they are not working pensioners) are financially almost entirely dependent on the state, which pays them money in the form of pensions and takes it away through prices for essential goods and housing and communal services tariffs.

For this social category, pensions are the basis of stability, prices and tariffs are the causes of instability. Both, in their discourse, are the responsibility of the state and only the state. They are not recognized Yu t and not recognized A There are no intermediaries. The state will always be to blame for raising prices and tariffs. It is important that the payment of pensions and their indexation and increase will never evoke gratitude towards the state. It only fulfills its duties (duties, not obligations!) to them.

For the next 10 years, the category of pensioners will remain a category without savings. This part of the population does not make large purchases. (We are talking about purchases for oneself; sometimes the savings made by retirees are spent on large purchases for the benefit of younger family members). She often has significant property in the form of apartments by our standards, but given the current state of the real estate market and existing intra-family relations, this property is practically not liquid, it is not traded, and most often it is simply passed on by inheritance. In other words, the size of this property in monetary terms does not appear in their everyday discourse and does not affect their behavior.

The wealth stratification of society is of great concern to pensioners as an ideological and moral circumstance. But this stratification is not in their environment, but one that they learn about from the media. They are ready to oppose themselves as “poor” to all the “rich” whom they only see on TV. Stratification within the environment of pensioners as a factor in their political orientation and activity is practically not felt.

Within their community, pensioners are divided by property into the very poor (“a lonely old woman in the village”) and the rest. Actually, this is a division into single people, on the one hand, and their children/grandchildren living with their family, on the other. The property aspect here is as follows. Single people do not have enough pension until next month and no one can help them at this time. Families do not have these “failures”. At the same time, single people spend their entire pension only on themselves. Family pensioners very often contribute their pension to the family budget in one way or another. During periods of crisis and unemployment, the pension of an older family member may be the only regular monetary income of the family (and potatoes, cucumbers and onions from the garden plot, where he mainly works, may be the only income in kind). Benefits received by the eldest member of the family - a pensioner (free travel, discounts on fares, etc.) sometimes turned out to be a very significant resource for families in crisis situations.

There are no rich retirees. If these are members of a rich family and they participate in its consumption, or if they have large savings, then pensions, current prices and tariffs do not matter to them, they are not dependent on the state, they are not “pensioners”. There are few of them, and they do not participate in public life as pensioners. If they participate, it is as representatives of the wealthy class. Rich older people don't socialize with their peers.

In our society, people have two resources: money and time. An excess of one implies a deficiency of the other. Pensioners are short on money, but have the most available time. Therefore, they can “sit” with their grandchildren, compensating for the insufficiency and shortcomings of child care institutions by wasting their time, and “stand” in queues, compensating for the insufficiency and shortcomings of adult service institutions by wasting their time.

The most important service for them is healthcare, or more precisely medical, social and psychological assistance, de facto provided through healthcare authorities. Pensioners use a form of medical care that they consider to be public and free. As said, they are willing to pay with their time, but not with their money.

Pensioners are crowding clinics. They have an increased demand for hospital beds. Medical assistance for pensioners has significant specifics, including a significant component of psychotherapy, social support, social assistance, i.e. non-core skills and services for the health care system. Geriatric specificity in medical care itself is also great. Meanwhile, the medical institutions through which assistance is provided to this category of the population are not specialized (for example, like pediatric ones). It is difficult for a system that has switched to a paid system to continue providing free services to pensioners. It is aimed at reducing the quality of these services, primarily in their medical component. The reasons often expressed out loud are as follows: pensioners objectively prevent the active working population there from receiving standard medical services.

In institutions that provide other types of services and assistance (legal assistance, utilities, etc.) the same problems exist, expressed with varying degrees of severity.

Let us emphasize once again that from the point of view of pensioners, the state is responsible for all defects in the above-mentioned systems. More precisely, these are special cases, examples of the irresponsibility of the state, that is, the responsibility of the current state for the destruction of the former (Soviet) state, which for them is the standard of “attitude towards people.”

Symbolically, pensioners communicate with the state through television. Only three federal channels are significant. They cover all or almost all of the country's populated territory. This part of the population watches them, and only their programs and programs. There are no alternative sources of information for her on most topics and subjects. Neither the Internet nor central newspapers/magazines are significant channels for them. Local television and radio broadcasters and local periodicals, which are read primarily by pensioners, are important to them, but they treat only local topics.

This audience positively perceived the retro-orientation proposed by the main channels in the field of film exhibition, mass culture, symbolic actions, such as celebrations, anniversaries, etc. She accepted symbolic gestures aimed at restoring Soviet symbols as addressed specifically to her, but it cannot be argued that by these means it was possible to “buy” the loyalty of this audience.

As is the case with service systems, these consumers do not perceive the operation of television and other systems that they consider government as a service, i.e. actions that, in principle, like goods, have value and price. They perceive it as a benefit, i.e. that resource that originally belongs to them by their inalienable right. It is the duty of the state to provide them with this benefit. This, in their opinion, is the order of things.

It is important that pensioners take this relationship with the state for granted. Here, it seems, we could talk about a social contract, the essence of which is this: as long as pensions are paid, the basic social order exists. But a violation of this relationship is unthinkable for both sides. This differs from a contract, which in principle can be terminated under certain conditions. The protest of pensioners when trying to monetize benefits was not caused by the fact that they felt economically disadvantaged or deceived. From their point of view, something much worse happened: the state, by canceling benefits, showed that it no longer has a special relationship with them. The immediate reaction of the authorities, who withdrew their initiatives, shows that this side also recognized the sacredness (and not the conditionality) of these relations.

The political role of pensioners. Pensioners, as all politicians are convinced, are the most loyal, obedient and susceptible to manipulation category of voters. This is indeed the most loyal environment, but it is also the only social group within which there is tangible ideological opposition to the Putin regime. It has almost nothing in common with the liberal opposition (Nemtsov, Kasparov, Limonov, etc.), but it was in this environment that during all the years of Putin’s rule the highest proportion of those who dare to tell Levada Center interviewers that they are not satisfied with the way Putin performs his duties as president or prime minister. (For example, in the summer of 2011, 23% of young people said they did not approve of V. Putin’s activities as prime minister; 36% of older people said they did not approve.

Senile consciousness as a political resource. Before the youth protests on Manezhnaya Square in Moscow and similar demonstrations in other places in December 2010, there was no need to talk about their political activity. The place of youth as obviously the main active political layer in our country was occupied by pensioners. The activity of young people in other countries is usually explained by their relative freedom, non-inclusion in corporate structures with their discipline, etc. The same is true for pensioners. They, paradoxically, behave more freely than all other groups in society.

Today's pensioners met the era of perestroika and glasnost, the era of breaking the totalitarian regime, while being at an active age. They were then the main mass at half a million rallies in Moscow and less crowded ones in other cities. If the lessons of (rally) democracy were perceived, it was precisely by this layer.

There is a certain pattern in the development of ideological attachments, long noted by British observers: those who were socialists in their youth become conservatives in adulthood. This pattern is fulfilled in Russia in its own way: those who were “democrats” in adulthood (in the terminology of the 90s), when reaching retirement age, become supporters of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. In the 1980-1990s, during their “democratic phase”, supporters of the CPSU/CPRF - in this sense, their then political opponents - were people who were half a generation older than them, those who lived most of their lives under the Soviet system . The “Democrats of the 80s-90s” experienced disappointment in the reforms of Gorbachev-Yeltsin (but also many in the actions of Putin) - and switched to the positions of their former opponents, the “Soviet people”, and began to support the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Of course, the current Communist Party of the Russian Federation is not a party of fighters for communism. If we take not her program statements, but the positions of those who support her in the elections, we can see that she unites supporters of the state socialist system in its Soviet version. In relation to the existing regime, they come out with criticism from the conservative-fundamentalist side, but at the same time they also demand compliance with the laws. Thus, in the value basis of the existing image of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation there is something consonant with the position of the older generation as such in modern Russia. In other words, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation turns out to be a political force to the extent that it is a party of older people.

Civic and political activity, which in many countries is usually demonstrated by students, in our country, we repeat, is demonstrated by pensioners, revealing the similarity of social prerequisites for this with students. Both of them are less subject to control and pressure from the main governing bodies in society, since they are not yet or no longer working, i.e. have not yet entered or have already left corporations, which are enterprises and institutions with their diverse control over employees and.

Elderly people play a significant, sometimes decisive role in the country’s domestic and foreign policy, but not as an active, but as a passive party. In the actions of politicians, primarily symbolic and demonstrative actions, older people act as a target group, an addressee. Some programs, actions, and political lines are openly and directly addressed to this segment of society, demonstrating concern for it and understanding of its needs.

In the second half of the 1980-1990s, representatives of the current older generation first supported M. Gorbachev and the changes he proposed, then B. Yeltsin with his tempting promises. But this led to results they did not expect. For most old people, these events meant the loss of social savings made during their lives, regardless of whether they were expressed in money, in scientific, professional and everyday experience, in the right to authority, respect, and self-esteem.

As we said, the concept of aging, tacitly accepted in our country, implies both a priori respect for the experience of elders and, in due course, its loss. The changes that shook Russia led to the fact that an entire generation was deprived of this social capital at once. The popular expression “robbery of the people” was so widespread precisely because even those who did not lose money experienced symbolic deprivation, not individually, but collectively. The latter created the feeling that they were “the people.”

Another part of society, the young, for the first time in a long time had the opportunity to extremely quickly accumulate material and various symbolic benefits. As we noted above, an inverted pyramid of wealth, unknown to other societies, has emerged. Instead of the usual pattern (the older a person is, the more savings he has), the opposite law has been in effect for almost a decade in a row. The main assets then ended up in the hands of the younger part of society.

The main instruments of political influence and control also passed to new or significantly updated groups. A situation arose in which the country could make a breakthrough comparable to the breakthrough of the 1920-1930s, when the government of the country was also in the hands of young elites, relying on the young part of society. But, as it turned out, the “young” elites of the current wave did not have a sufficient supply of ideas for reforming society. The disappointed older generation turned again to those symbols that they had learned in their “past life.” “Communism”, “socialism”, “Soviet power”, “Soviet Union” - all of this refers to the same general symbolic whole. It has very important qualities: it is equally accessible to everyone (in memories) and is certainly lost by everyone, along with everyone’s own lost material and/or symbolic resources.

Under the banners of nostalgia and revenge were people who were united by a common feature - old age, with the feeling that they have invaluable experience, and the premonition that this experience is not in demand, and its bearers are being forced out of life. Let us emphasize: under normal conditions, this social program of old age is implemented for everyone on an individual basis. Here it is carried out on a society-wide scale. United by a common grievance, a common fate and a common ideology, the older generation could become a formidable force. There were political leaders who wanted to take advantage of it.

In cases where political steps of a conservative and preservative nature have been and are being taken, such as the return of Soviet symbols, a return to the political guidelines of the Soviet era, the implied justification is an orientation towards the (imaginary) position of the “older generation”, “veterans”. These are, so to speak, our “good old values”, dear to us because of our respect for veterans. Meanwhile, over the years, real veterans, the original bearers of such an ideology, are no longer among active political forces. There are people who, due to their approach to old age, accept these “veteran” symbols and the due respect. But, most importantly, there are politicians - no matter how young - who have an interest in imposing an senile conservative discourse on society as a whole, in order to maintain their role as rulers and not give way to politicians who propose newer models.

This method is one of the most widely used in Russian politics as a tactical means. It should be noted that such a technique is not harmless for the purposes of national development. Repeatedly using these tactics turns them into strategies. Russia as a country is becoming, both in its own eyes and in the eyes of the surrounding world, a conservative force. Such a reputation as a stigma, in turn, receives its own inertia, driving the country even deeper into the corresponding niche.

The retroorientation of Russian social life, when all ideals are sought in the historical day before yesterday or an even more distant past, is one of the elements of the strategy described above. It is combined with the blocking of the future in the mass consciousness that arose back in the 90s - as a result of the consistent collapse of both the communist and democratic perspectives. This blocking, or, in the successful formulation of L. Gudkov, “abortion of the future,” consists of a refusal to see and discuss the future of one’s country as a positive state. Public consciousness agrees to consider only the prospects of a physical or political “end of the world.” The latter exists under the name “third world war”, or “civil war” and “collapse of Russia”. No one's existence beyond this limit is considered.

The senile type of discourse turns out to be dominant in society. Let us note again and again that it is not related to the age of the elite. This did not happen in the era of Brezhnev and post-Brezhnev gerontocracy. Nowadays, when the ruling elite consists of relatively young people and its main symbolic figures emphasize signs of youth in their image - skiing, showing a naked torso, etc. - their rhetoric and discursive practice in temporal terms remain senile, not including the future.

In this sense, they reproduce a structure that is inherent in the consciousness of ordinary people. In it, discourses are sharply divided into public and private. Within the framework of the latter, there is a future, it has practically been mastered. People make various types of investments, enter into futures contracts in relation to various types of capital, primarily social capital in the form of educational capital, plan the future of their children for decades, etc. It is typical for the elderly to rely on the “young”, and in general “youth” is the main thing here futuro-oriented state. But this, we repeat, is in the private life of every person, his family, his loved ones.

When moving into public space, people stop seeing the future. It is not for nothing that politicians only recently decided to propose strategies and plans for the decade ahead. Typically, these plans do not receive public outcry. The social consciousness of a senile type has only its own imminent end as a prospect, which it forbids itself to think about. Struggling with the consciousness of the inevitability of this end, it begins to attribute its end, its defeat to the machinations and malicious intent of its enemies, and actively generates various phobias and suspicions about everyone who surrounds it.

Even during the time of M. Gorbachev, social demagoguery aimed at the “disadvantaged”, i.e., began to be added to the “perestroika” rhetoric. first of all, old people. Further, there was not a single politician who did not at least once try to win over the elderly electorate. Gradually, a new norm for representing social reality emerged. It absorbed the discourse of old people based on nostalgia and resentment.

At the same time, real economic and social measures of the government and the activity of entrepreneurs take into account the interests of the older generation only insofar as it is beneficial to them from the point of view of their interests and goals. Economic policy is largely “liberal”, providing people, incl. for older people, take care of themselves. But the symbolic coverage of all reality through the media is now carried out as the deployment of the ideology of the “elders”, and it is left-socialist, “Soviet” native to the “Soviet person”. By analogy with the mechanisms of senile/archaic consciousness described above, forgotten songs and other semantic structures of the canceled past emerge in public memory, which now works as senile memory. Young people can build their ideas about the world, about the country only as particular ones, not having the properties of normativity, universal obligatoryness. As a result, Russia sees itself as poorer and more ruined than it actually is, but develops claims and ambitions that it cannot provide with its real potential.

Afterword

The main work on this text was completed when a series of significant events followed in the country's public life in December 2011-February 2012. At the time of writing this afterword - on the eve of the presidential elections - the following can be stated. During this short period, part of Russian society (primarily among the educated public of the capitals) in its understanding of itself, its relations with the country, with the authorities, with the past and future, made a huge leap forward. The public discourse that has developed in this environment can in no way be called senile; rather, it has the features of a young one - although demographically the composition of its speakers includes all ages with a dominance of the middle age (25-40 years). Within the framework of this discourse, various projects for the future, various options for radical changes in the social system began to be actively discussed. But even in this discourse (at the moment), significant traces of the state of public consciousness described in this section continued to remain: the gaping space of the future acquired two forms recorded by our research.

The first is characteristic of the most avant-garde mental constructions. Drawing, for example, the future system as a variant of a parliamentary republic, she leaves without explanation how the transition to it from the current presidential system could take place. Revolution in the form of an uprising, rebellion, violent overthrow of power is categorically rejected by this consciousness - this option is considered both very probable and definitely catastrophic. It is equated to the end of the world, because, according to prevailing views, it will lead to the unacceptable ending mentioned above - a civil war, which Russia will not survive and in which it will end its existence as a country and as a nation.

This gap retains another residual form in the consciousness of that part of the public that is affected by the above-mentioned processes of express transformation, but does not dare to completely surrender to them - and in this sense occupies an intermediate position between the avant-garde and the masses that have not yet responded to this impulse. This consciousness is aware of the inevitability of change, but has a kind of “blind spot” that does not allow it to see or imagine what these changes will consist of. And, like the avant-garde described above, it does not know how a transition from the current stagnant state to that new one can occur. As a result, this consciousness narrows its vision of the future to the conviction that “at first everything will be as before (the same government, the same regime), but then something will probably change.”

The consciousness of the rest, that is, in quantitative terms, the bulk of the population, is also gradually beginning to reveal the future. There are no features of eschatologism in it; in their place there is rather a return to an amalgam of two utopias - Soviet and post-Soviet (“democratic”). In the language of generations discussed above, this can be expressed as follows: the elderly majority mentally transfers to the young minority the best that it had in the past, wanting this to become its future.

Links on the topic of the issue

1. Andreev E., Vishnevsky A., Kvasha E., Kharkova T. Russian gender and age pyramid http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2005/0215/tema01.php
2. Vasin S. Farewell to the demographic dividend http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2008/0317/tema01.php
3. Vasin S. Russia is aging worse than other countries http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2008/0357/tema01.php From red to gray: the third “transition period” of aging populations in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2008/0357 /analit01.php

   The results for 2011 are almost no different from those presented. The significant differences found are discussed below.

   In the claims of the older generation, one of the most important places is occupied by the thesis about the “destruction of the Soviet education system,” the “Soviet school.” In this regard, the question of the volume and nature of the power over minor children that “adults” had in the role of educators and teachers in educational institutions built on the Soviet model deserves special attention. This power, in its mode of administration, can easily become and often becomes authoritarian, unlimited and totalitarian, i.e. extending to all aspects of the lives of subordinates - children. It is especially important that almost the entire population of the country goes through the school of such a government. In schools of the pre-Soviet and Soviet eras, the limitation of this power was the organized resistance of children's groups. In modern schools, as our research has shown, a conflict has become typical in which the status (authority) of the teacher is undermined by his lack of financial security. In addition, some parents no longer see the teacher as a civil servant, endowed with authority due to this status, and interpret his role as that of an employee providing their children with a service for which the parents pay him, i.e. ignore the teacher's claims to authority over their children. The teacher's power disappears and what remains - if it remains - is only authority. This is one of the grounds for the mentioned old people’s accusations of “collapse of the school.”

   The presence of a power-status component in age definitions is especially clearly manifested when they are used to designate ranks and ranks in the army and in industry. “Junior” or “senior” lieutenant, “junior” or “senior” researcher, “senior” inspector, etc. are ageless definitions of status. The practice of demotions emphasizes that the remaining temporal characteristic (normally, the eldest becomes, as in growing up, after the youngest) can be ignored - which is unimaginable for the age-related process. Age as time itself is considered natural and therefore “in reality” irreversible or reversible only in the imagination.

   This problem, as one of the problems of nuclearization of the family, is discussed in detail in: Borusyak L.F. Statistical study of the nuclearization of families in the USSR. Diss. ...cand. eq. Sciences, M.: MESI, 1983.

   The data presented should not be considered estimates of the actual sexual activity of the population. The taboo on discussing such topics is quite strong, especially in the situation of a personal interview. On average, a quarter of respondents refused to answer this question. Within this group of those who refused, we can assume that there are both those who are embarrassed to report their sexual activity, and those who are embarrassed to report their absence. We are not able to find out from this survey what proportions these categories of respondents are in different sex and age groups.

   Characteristically, the share of those refusing to answer decreases to 16%. It can be assumed that the proportion of those who have a sexual life at this age is very small (only 3% openly declare satisfaction with their sex life). The norm prescribes not to have sexual intercourse at this age. But the life circumstances of old people are also not conducive to this, so they have nothing to hide from the interviewer. Among these circumstances, we note such a well-known fact as gender asymmetry, which is stronger the older the age group. In the oldest groups there are vanishingly few men.

   In any case, these institutions are a means of pushing the elderly out of life. In addition, these institutions themselves are being squeezed out of social space. They are not only located on the social periphery, but are also quite actively destroyed by “random” fires, the frequency and regularity of which cannot but attract attention, as well as the public indifference with which news of these fires is met.

   Here it is necessary to point out that supporters of such a movement as transhumanism offer significantly different views on the issues of life, aging, and death than those developed by us. The direction is too broad to discuss within the scope of our work. It also contains internal currents of a very different nature. With some of them, such as libertarian transhumanism, our views have a lot in common in premises (but not conclusions), with others they diverge to the point of complete opposites. Let us only note the fact that the anthropological and sociological problems of aging and death that we have touched on are complemented in this direction by philosophical and natural philosophical efforts based on modern bio-, nano- and other technologies to confront both old age and death. In relation to these efforts, we are close to the positions expressed in the article: Yudin B.G. The creation of a transhuman (link to Analytics) // Bulletin of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2007, volume 77, no. 6, p. 520—527

   “The starting point of the demographic transition is an unprecedented decrease in mortality... For thousands of years, high mortality was one of the cornerstones on which the entire edifice of cultural norms, religious and moral precepts that regulated people’s behavior in the demographic sphere was built. ...A large number of children was seen as an absolute good. ...The sharp decrease in mortality led to the fact that many of these norms lost their meaning, their erosion began, the search for forms of organizing the private life of people and their cultural shell ... The decrease in the birth rate became a quantitative response to the decrease in mortality, but it entailed qualitative changes, often combined the concept of “second demographic transition” and affecting norms of reproductive behavior, forms of marriage and family, intrafamily relationships, sexual and family morality, etc.” Vishnevsky A.G. Demographic transition and cultural diversity // http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2009/0395/nauka01.php.

   “Greater love has no one than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

   (Gospel of John, 15.13, Synodal translation).

   “Why do so many Russian men die at such a relatively young age? Cardiovascular diseases top the list of causes, followed by “external influences.” The latter, which include, among other things, murders, suicides and accidents, are four times more common in Russia per population than in EU countries. Alcohol abuse is responsible for 72 percent of homicides and 42 percent of suicides. Cardiovascular diseases also appear to be associated with excessive alcohol consumption... Today, Russians over 14 years of age drink an average of 15 to 18 liters of pure alcohol per year... In typical Russian industrial cities, 31 to 52 percent of deaths among men are related to alcohol.” See: Sievert S., Zakharov S., Klingholz R. Vanishing world power. The demographic future of Russia and other former allied states. Translation from German by J. Strauch // Berlin, Berlin Institute for Population and Development, 2011, 1, p. 24.

   See Nikonov A. Do it so you don’t suffer // AIDS-info, 2009 No. 25.

   Koroleva S., Levinson A. Organizations of non-civil society. // Pro & Contra. 2010, No. 1-2 (48) (January-April), p.47 ff.

   In his Presidential Address in 2006, the head of state touched upon the fate of children with disabilities and indicated ways to change public and state attitudes towards their fate - one that would put Russia on the same civilizational plane as modern Western societies. See Putin V.V. Message to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation // Rossiyskaya Gazeta, 2006, May 11.

   See the result confirmed many times in surveys. To the question “Who can you count on when needed?” the most common answer is “Only to yourself.” However, those who give this answer do not indicate the norm, but a deviation from it. The norm, in their understanding, is mutual assistance between people and assistance from the state.

   About this see: Levinson A. Experience of Sociography. M., 2004, p. 580, 591.

   From the very beginning in the late Soviet years, our surveys consistently showed a pronounced reluctance to send sons to the army, although since the beginning of the 2000s. began to show high respect for the army as a symbolic entity.

   Yu.M. Lotman pointed out that in addition to the mechanisms of social memory, one should also take into account the mechanisms of social forgetting. Perhaps the mechanisms described are one of these. See Lotman Yu.M. On the semiotic mechanism of culture. // Lotman Yu.M. Selected articles. T.3. Tallinn, 1993, p. 330

   Veletskaya N.N. Pagan symbolism of Slavic archaic rituals. M., 1978, p. 116-121.

   Let us note in passing that euthanasia, as a relatively avant-garde practice that hardly gains the right to exist in Western societies, is met with relatively little protest in our country. Namely: 42% of respondents in 2009 considered it acceptable (versus 45%). It is worth noting that, for example, our society imposes a much stricter ban on animal cloning (70%).

   See Krasilnikova M.D. Culture of poverty. Post-Soviet commentary on Veblen // Bulletin of Public Opinion, 2011, No. 1(107), pp. 37-38.

   Often representatives of this category are included in the so-called. "middle class". We discuss the methodological and other difficulties that arise in this case in: Levinson A.G. and others. About those who call themselves “middle class” // Bulletin of Public Opinion 2004, No. 5; aka. About the category “middle class” // Spero, 2009, No. 10, p. 115 et seq.

   Having stated this fact, we note that the situation in Russian society does not end there. A segment of society that did not exist in Soviet times (or did not exist as legal) has emerged and lives on its own responsibility.

   An important exception is personal subsidiary plot (“garden plot”, “dacha”, “vegetable garden”)

   Loneliness in this age group forms one of the most acute problems that have their own economic, existential, humanistic, psychiatric and other projections. J. Moreno once pointed out the fundamental unsolvability of this problem.

   In circumstances of conflict between certain population groups and local authorities, the leader often turns out to be a pensioner. Depending on local conditions, the pressure of the authorities on such an activist, i.e. repression can take quite severe forms, including threats to health and life. However, what distinguishes a pensioner from other citizens is that local authorities are not able to deprive them of a pension - the basis of their social status.

   If you wish, you can look for an explanation for this in the general Russian culture, which declares care for the elderly and veterans as a value for everyone. It is believed that the authorities that show such concern can count on the gratitude of both the elderly themselves and the rest of the younger residents of the country. Here we will not discuss how thorough this calculation is, how emotional or rational are the authorities’ aspirations to do something in the interests of the older generation.

Incredible facts

Aging seems like a daunting prospect, but a number of studies have shown that we reach the peak of our capabilities in middle and old age.

Although we are full of energy as teenagers, older people tend to be more psychologically stable.

And this applies to many aspects of life.

Therefore, you should never think that at some age your life becomes less eventful or joyful.

This is the age at which, according to scientists, you reach the peak of your capabilities.

Learning a second language: 7-8 years

Linguists and psychologists still debate this issue, but most agree that it is easiest to learn a second language at a young age, usually before adolescence.

Mental Ability: 18 years old

One of the best ways to test the power of our intelligence is to do it with a digital symbolic code test. When conducting a test, a certain number is equated to a symbol, and then given a series of numbers that need to be translated into the correct symbols.

Experiments showed that 18-year-olds performed this task best.

Ability to remember names: 22 years

You are probably familiar with the situation when you met a new person, he told you his name, and it almost immediately flew out of your head. According to a 2010 study, this is unlikely when you're 22 years old.

Women are most attractive to men: 23 years old

Men's attractiveness to women increases over the years

One of the founders of the dating site OKCupid analyzed the site's data and found that men consider women in their 20s to be the most attractive. Even as men got older, their preferences for 20-year-old women did not change.

Young women, in turn, preferred men slightly older than them, and women 30 years and older chose men several years younger than them.

Life satisfaction: 23 years

A survey of 23,000 people in Germany found that 23-year-olds were the most satisfied with their lives, all things considered.

Muscle strength: 25 years

Your muscles are at their strongest when you're 25, and they remain just as strong for the next 10 to 15 years. This is one of those features that can be easily corrected with training.

Marriage: 26 years

Statistics show that by the age of 26, we have usually met enough people to make a solid choice. However, one recent study found that the divorce rate is much lower if you got married between 28 and 32 years old.

Run a marathon: 28 years

According to a 50-year analysis of marathons, the average age people have run a marathon is 28 years old.

Bone mass: 30 years

Your bones are strongest and densest when you are 30 years old. Again, you can watch your calcium and vitamin D intake to prolong the health of your bones, but over time they will weaken.

Playing chess: 31 years old

Scientists decided to look at how mental and physical abilities change with age and studied grandmasters. After analyzing the number of points scored by 96 grandmasters during their careers, scientists determined that on average they showed their maximum abilities at 31 years old.

Remembering faces: 32 years

Laboratory studies have shown that people's ability to quickly and accurately recognize strangers' faces is best developed at age 32. But after nine years, you may have to ask them to introduce themselves again.

Win a Nobel Prize: 40 years

According to the study, the average age of the scientist who conducted the Nobel Prize-winning research was 40 years.

The same applies to other great achievements. People tend to do something remarkable in middle age.

Women's salary: 39 years

Salary for men: 48 years

The study found that women earn the most at age 39, and their salaries begin to rise slowly from around age 30. Men's wages peak at 48-49 years old.

Understanding other people's emotions: 40-50 years

Scientists gathered about 10,000 people and showed them images in which only their eyes were visible, and asked them to describe what emotions the person was experiencing. They found that people in their 40s and 50s were most accurate at identifying emotions by looking only at their eyes.

Mathematical ability: 50 years

Of course, we studied the multiplication tables in elementary school, but as it turned out, 50-year-old people were best at answering arithmetic questions straight away.

Satisfaction with life again: 69 years old

As already mentioned, life satisfaction is highest at 23 years old. However, after satisfaction declines in middle age, it increases again at around age 69. Moreover, people who were over 60 felt more satisfied with life than those who were 55 years old.

Vocabulary: 60-70 years

Vocabulary test scores are highest among people over 60-70 years of age.

Satisfaction with your body: after 70 years

People over 65 are most satisfied with the way they look. Self-image is at its peak for men over 80, with 75 percent of them agreeing with the statement “I am always happy with my appearance.” Most women, 70 percent, agree with this statement when they are around 74 years old.

Psychological well-being: 82 years

Scientists asked people to imagine a ladder of 10 steps, with the best life on the top step and the worst life on the bottom, and asked them to say which step they were on. The oldest group of people (82-85 years old) gave the highest assessment of their lives, putting them on average at level 7 on this test.

Important decisions: ages ending in 9

Studies have shown that we are more likely to make dramatic changes in our lives, whether for good or bad, when our age ends in 9, that is, at 29, 39, 49 and 59 years old.

A year before the big date, we most often try to reconsider our lives and are ready for changes. It is at this age that people most often cheat, run their first marathon, or are even ready to give up their lives.

People get wiser with age

Our life is truly the best lesson. In one experiment, a group of psychologists asked people to read about a conflict and asked a series of questions. Experts analyzed the answers based on characteristics such as the ability to look from another person’s point of view, anticipation of change, search for compromises, and others.

They found that older people (60 to 90 years old) performed best in all aspects.

41% of residents of the Russian Federation are confident that old age already sets in between the ages of 50 and 59. 25% are ready to delay the arrival of this time until they are 60–64 years old.

The best age for a man is...

25% 20 years. Youth is youth
22% The best age is my age!
8% 40 years old. Wisdom comes with age
43% 30 years old. A man in his prime

Source: survey on the website, 2544 respondents

26–34 years old is the time to get the most out of fitness. The elasticity of your muscles remains at its peak, but the response to loads and subsequent growth is much higher than when you were 20. So load yourself to the fullest. In addition, now you can put a full load on your heart, without fear of a sudden attack, like after 40. And if you train your heart, there will be no attacks either now or decades later.

Gary O'Donnell, Doctor of Sports Medicine, University of Exeter (UK)

The average man has sex most actively at the age of 25–29 - about three times a week. By the age of 50, this figure, as they now say, “dramatically decreases” - to once a week on average.

Journal of Sexual Medicine

In 2014, Samsung launched a large study to find out at what age people feel the happiest. It turned out that this is not 20, not 30 or 40 years (at 35, the majority of respondents generally feel the most exhausted - with family, work and the need to combine one with the other). The result was slightly unexpected: 58 years is the age at which a person is most often ready to exhale and declare that he is more satisfied with everything than ever and has no special problems.

HuffingtonPost.com

In 2013, Russians were asked the question: if given the opportunity to return to their past and change something there, would they do it? 55% of men would not return anywhere, but 36% would take such a chance. Among the latter, half would like to be aged 11–20 again. The second most popular age is between 21 and 30 years old.