How to survive youth in old age: different stages of each age

We are used to dividing life into ages: childhood, adolescence, youth, maturity, old age. But the very category of age can be understood more broadly. Each age is not only a period of life, it is a whole cycle containing all phases of human development. Each time, entering the next phase, we consistently experience within him both childhood insecurity, and surprise at the world, and adolescent fragility, anxiety … and gradual aging, the elimination of this age.

Repetition of feelings in every age

We move through all ages and their phases: from childhood childhood (from 0 to 1 year) to old age old age (after 80 years). The periodization of the age stages is conditional – the very model of the double age division of life is important.

Within each age there are periods of adolescence, when we experience a sharp break in the worldview, a crisis of trust and confidence, alienation from others, a sense of loss of the meaning of life. The first adolescence occurs already in childhood: the “crisis of three years” is characterized by a tendency to independence and an exacerbated negative, “disobedient” attitude towards adults.

At the age of 35-40, many people have a midlife crisis: divorces, existential and family dramas happen more often, someone gets a feeling of an exhausted life and a new alienation from the world.

As in maturity there is a place for adolescence, so in adolescence there is a time of harmonious flowering, that is, maturity. And old age also repeats itself more than once in life: when we say goodbye to childhood (9–10), adolescence (16), youth (28–30), maturity (55–60), and then we prepare to say goodbye to the very life. Whoever is lucky, but for modern Western societies, it is possible with a bit of generosity to indicate this period as “after 80 years.”

Each phase of ages has a special attitude. A young man under thirty is overwhelmed by the feeling of “the end of youth”, the wear and tear of his age, the need to cross the line and learn the habits of the next age. This feeling makes him related to a ten-year-old child who grows out of his childhood, to a 16-year-old teenager on the threshold of youth and to someone who is under 60 and who already feels the approach of old age.

Main lifecycle event

In each age stage, its correspondence to itself is also observed: the childhood of childhood, the adolescence of adolescence, the youth of youth, the maturity of maturity, the old age of old age. Two of them – the childhood of childhood and the old age of old age – are adjacent to the beginning and end of life, are set by the time of birth and death. And the other three are the central axes around which our existence seems to revolve.

The adolescence of adolescence (13 years) is the time of the awakening of sex, when a person is capable of procreation. This is also the age of awakening self-consciousness, acute and sometimes painful self-reflection – about the external and internal personality, about one’s place and purpose in the world.

The youth of youth, the first half of the 20s, is the age most suitable for marriage and the birth of the first children, as well as the age of professional self-determination, the completion of the apprenticeship cycle, when we become independent, begin to provide for our own lives.

The maturity of maturity, from the mid-40s to the mid-50s, is the age of perfection, the time of the highest professional achievements, when we are already able to determine our place in society and in the memory of future generations.

See the similar in the unlike

It turns out that ages not only replace each other, but also repeat in our lives. If we understand this, it will become easier for us to feel sympathy for people of other ages, and not just for our peers, whose interests we understand and share, we compare their achievements, hopes and failures with our own.

Quite often “these children”, “these young people” or “these old people” are outside the circle of our existential solidarity… But, approaching the threshold of old age, we are able to empathize with a young man on the threshold of maturity, or a teenager on the threshold of youth, or a child entering into adolescence. Thus, we can see new—absolutely real—configurations of age-related communities and sympathies: the young in the old and in the young, the childish in the mature and in the childish.

The flowering of youth in old age

There are many paradoxes in every age. A man of advanced years is more liberated than a young man. The former ages in us not only continue to live, sometimes they really awaken for the first time, when their time, it would seem, has long passed. In adolescence or youth, there is often not enough time to experience them deeply, to get a taste, to experience them to the fullest – we rush forward, we want to get to maturity as soon as possible.

If we have already experienced all the delights of adulthood, then, approaching the turn of 50 years, we can relax a little … and finally just allow ourselves to be young! Looking at a gloomy, repressed 20-year-old, burdened with the task of defining himself, as well as responsibility for the future, a 50-year-old can fully appreciate the reserve of carefree youth that he has accumulated by the labors of previous years.

This castling of ages—maturity in early youth, youth in late adulthood—is characteristic of a time when social responsibility is shifted more and more to the young. But its burden is removed from the shoulders of 50-60-year-olds: inertia or acceleration achieved by the middle of life pushes them further from level to level.

When maturity has been sufficiently tested, we can re-open all the ages and reread them slowly, like books passed in school, no longer in order to pass the “readiness for life” exam, but because this is real life.