Loving Projects

Old age is life's parody.

— Simone de Beauvoir  

Bruce Willis' family's announcement that the wisecracking actor has succumbed to aphasia is yet another reminder of old age's cruel sense of humor.

Old age "crushes" people, said existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, turning them into parodies of their younger selves.

"There is only one solution," she wrote in The Coming of Age, the philosopher's sweeping essay on elderhood. "That is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence meaning. 

"In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in upon ourselves."

The specific passions de Beauvoir had in mind were ones that today's emotion scientists would classify as cathected (other-directed); namely, love, friendship, and compassion.

The old can stave off mental, emotional and spiritual decline through "devotion to individuals, to groups or causes, or to creative work," de Beauvoir wrote.

But interests and intentions alone aren't enough. 

The old must have projects: purposeful ventures that "people their world with goals, values and reasons for existence."

Projects, after all, are the things that consume our youth, when we're little more than walking, talking, wage-earning commodities—"human resources." 

Objectified cogs in the global economy.

As soon as we reach adolescence, we're forced to devote all our waking hours to learning, earning, networking and caring—if we're lucky—for a family and a home.

There's barely a second to stop and smell the coffee.

Those projects by default are loving—purposeful and other-directed—even if mandatory.

Purposeful projects in our dotage, on the other hand, are voluntary. They have to be discovered, crafted and tended; otherwise, we acquiesce to sloth and idleness, sleeping the first half the of day, sleepwalking the rest.

De Beauvoir didn't pull any punches when it came to old age.

She described it as surreal, a "double alienation."

We're stigmatized, twice: cut off from youth and from any role in the economy.

Young folks question our worth—and so do we.

A retired newspaper editor told me yesterday that a twenty-something corporate IT trainer once said to him, "You old people are a waste of time." He didn't disagree.

That sums up old age's predicament succinctly: it's decrepit and nonproductive.

"America is the country of young men," Emerson said.

That's truer than true.

The only way out, as de Beauvoir saw things, is to be-for-others, just as we were before we grew old. 

To tackle a passel of loving projects.

If we don't dive into a lot of loving projects, she wrote, we face the very cruelest of fates: "abandonment, segregation, decay, dementia, death.”

We need loving projects—several—just to stay in the game.

Freud, whose influence on de Beauvoir was profound, said it best.

"Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness."

NOTE: Read more about the renewed interest in Simone de Beauvoir's 1970 book The Coming of Age and watch A Walk through the Land of Old Age, a 1974 film featuring the French philosopher.

Above: Priscilla, My Mother by Anne Gifford. Watercolor on paper. Spring Corn by Rose Frantzen. Oil on canvas.