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Paper short abstract:

Loneliness was a prevalent issue amongst residents at Hollenbeck Palms. However, its regular ritual of bingo acted as a salve for resident loneliness, connecting residents to one another. This paper will explore the joy of bingo's electric rhythm as the result of its players' effortful letting go.

Paper long abstract:

Loneliness was a prevalent issue amongst retired older adults at Hollenbeck Palms, a Continuing Care Retirement Community in Los Angeles. Loneliness for these residents was less about the quality and quantity of their relationships and more about lacking a social purpose. Growing older and retiring in the United States, and especially in urban, youth-oriented Los Angeles, had already thrust these residents into the experience of ‘being unneeded,’ living in ‘asocial time,’ and feeling disaggregated from social meaning, but moving into Hollenbeck was the ‘final nail in the coffin’ and was experienced as being ‘dumped into a zone of irrelevance.’ Hollenbeck tried to solve the problem of resident loneliness by creating its own internal world of sociality and conviviality. Though separate from the larger social world, Hollenbeck nevertheless was rich with its own narratives, rituals, and roles. The most successful ritual to connect residents to Hollenbeck’s social world and to one another was the regular game of bingo. The structure of bingo provided ripe conditions for the experience of deep connection and joy, but in order for those to be achieved through its play, bingo had to be played well. In this paper, I will suggest that bingo’s connection and joy, experienced through its shared, electric rhythm, was the result of players’ effortful letting go. I will end by suggesting that bingo at Hollenbeck is not a trivial distraction from residents’ crisis of sociality, but is instead an important practice that addresses the dilemmas of growing old in the United States.