Older Adulthood

Essay by tgalvinUniversity, Master'sA+, May 2005

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Older Adulthood

Old age is a time for reflecting upon one's own life and its role in the big scheme of things, and seeing it filled with pleasure and satisfaction or disappointments and failures. Older adulthood is a period between 60 years of age and death and is the time to enjoy the successes of life with integrity or despair over the failures of life and fear death. In order to get a better grasp on this period in one's life I interviewed my 62 year old neighbor Jim. Jim is retired and has been for about 3 years, but still continues to work on the side for his old company because it keeps him busy and makes him money. I interviewed Jim for about an hour and asked him a couple of detailed questions regarding what he thought about his life and where it was going. Throughout this paper I am going to discuss my interview with Jim and compare his answers and views to what we have covered in class so far this semester.

More specifically I am going to discuss Jim's responses to questions I had about what he thought major issues in his life were, physical and cognitive changes he has noticed since turning 60 and compare them to Erikson's normative challenge of Integrity vs. Despair.

Retirement brings many changes and if most that retire are lucky, they will be able to go on doing the kind of things they have done successfully in the past. If not, they must find other things that they like to do. This leads me into my first question I had for Jim and his responses. I asked Jim if he could tell me about what he thought were major issues in his life were now that...