Paper short abstract:

Living with physical and cognitive changes is a major challenge for many older adults. Focusing on the lived experiences of ageing in Brazil, I discuss alienation as a social and psychological process, characterized by changing social ties and internalized struggles of how to relate to the world.

Paper long abstract:

The continuation of everyday life in the face of physical and cognitive changes is a major challenge for many older adults. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among older adults in Brazil, I explore in this paper how moments that cause a rupture in the everyday become points of reference from which my interlocutors reconfigure their lives and orientations to the future. I show that this often involves a process of withdrawal and alienation; of letting go of specific aspects of life, and of making their worlds smaller. Many of my interlocutors feel they no longer fully belong in this world and expressed a sense of disconnection. At the same time, they keep the future open by emphasizing the possibility to, once again, take up the activities they have suspended. Focusing on these lived experiences, I discuss alienation as a social and psychological process, characterized by changing social ties and internalized struggles of how to relate to the world. In this process, people may lose the ability to participate in everyday life as they become unable to conform to normative notions of what would be a meaningful life. Yet, in analyzing how my interlocutors refuse to foreclose the future by narrating possibility and aspiration, I show how older adults may both embody and resist a scenario of frailty and withdrawal. In so doing, I highlight the theoretical implications of the politics of aging as a particular site of alienation.