Toward a discourse shift in social gerontology: From successful aging to harmonious aging
The current North American successful aging movement offers a particular normative model of
how to age well, one tied to specific notions of individualist personhood especially valued in North
America emphasizing independence, productivity, self-maintenance, and the individual self as
project. This successful aging paradigm, with its various incarnations as active, healthy and
productive aging, has received little scrutiny as to its cultural assumptions. Drawing on fieldwork
data with elders from both India and the United States, this article offers an analysis of cultural
assumptions underlying the North American successful aging paradigm as represented in
prevailing popular and scientific discourse on how to age well. Four key themes in this public
successful aging discourse are examined: individual agency and control; maintaining productive
activity; the value of independence and importance of avoiding dependence; and permanent
personhood, a vision of the ideal person as not really aging at all in late life, but rather maintaining
the self of one's earlier years. Although the majority of the (Boston-area, well-educated,
financially privileged) US elders making up this study, and some of the most cosmopolitan
Indians, embrace and are inspired by the ideals of the successful aging movement, others critique
the prevailing successful aging model for insufficiently incorporating attention to and acceptance
of the human realities of mortality and decline. Ultimately, the article argues that the vision
offered by the dominant successful aging paradigm is not only a particular cultural and
biopolitical model but, despite its inspirational elements, in some ways a counterproductive one.
Successful aging discourse might do well to come to better terms with conditions of human
transience and decline, so that not all situations of dependence, debility and even mortality in late
life will be viewed and experienced as “failures” in living well.