I was invited to intro a film about retirement villages for the DADo Film Society at the Robin Boyd Foundation, so I wrote some thoughts about building buffers against precarity.

When I started my research almost a decade ago I wanted to study how the housing industry (my industry) was responding to the big demographic and social changes known as the ageing population.

I knew housing, I knew nothing about ageing. Suddenly it was everywhere in my life, in everything I read - research papers, but also fiction, news, algorithmically generated click bait, wrapped up in my own experience of leaving the elastic end of elder millennial youth.

This is frequency bias  - the sudden reveal of a previously invisible form once you first sense its edges. But my instinct when I began the research was that ageing was in fact largely invisible until forced to look it in the face. Although humans have given a lot of thought over the ages to questions of life and death, ageing is thinly theorised; existing as either economic policy problem or private personal experience.

We are lacking useful philosophies of old age.

Despite this lack, preparation for old age is a dominant practical driver throughout our lives whether we like it or not. Woven into the structures and patterns of working and family life. Knotted into our housing system, underpinning the idealised home-ownership pathway that is now wobbling and fracturing as more people rent for longer. Old age is a motivator and anchor for financial, family, social and geographical life decisions. A lifetime of building the buffers of a good old age. If I have a job, buy a house, save for retirement, have a family, nurture friendships, look after my health… I’ll be ok, right? Well yes, but maybe no.

In this passage a falsehood that the author unravels: That the first half of life is all possibility and agency, and that ageing ends the same way for everyone. That the second part of life no longer has surprises.

Preparing for an unknown future is the grip and release of control, embracing intention and chance, an act of both hope and fear. It requires us to, directly or subconsciously, imagine our own old age without guarantees: What we want, how we desire the texture of our daily lives, what we feel compelled to seize now and risk paying double later, what we are prepared to sacrifice now, and what we fear may happen to us beyond our control. Because regardless of the buffers built, the trajectory of old age, like life but amplified, is both hopeful and precarious.

Studying retirement housing

When you do a PhD the trick is to have a big topic, and then to find the smallest possible kernel to pin it down and contain it to 200 pages. And that is why my interests in housing and ageing found overlap in Victoria’s retirement villages.

Retirement housing has a big cultural footprint. Retirement villages are a vivid subject of human and social stories like the film that is tonight’s feature. Why is the retirement village so fascinating to writers and film-makers?

• Because it’s interior is somewhat secret, guarded by gated entry permitting only a certain guest-list, and we fill the unknown vessel with our own personal fantasy and phantoms?

• Because phrases like ‘God’s waiting room’ are an unnerving framing of human existence?

• Because we want to scratch the vivid vision presented - of smiles and group activities, maybe because we sense that this manicured image of retirement papers over other realities of old age, and because the distance between these brightened and shadowed perceptions is a disconcerting uncanny valley?

• Because we are holding our breath, worried that any minute the tissue paper hiding the creases of life is going to tear?

• Because with a jolt we experience our own judgements about the lives of old age, judgement of our future selves: that will be me / that will never be me.

Regardless of this ripe ground for imagination and story, retirement villages are a marginal housing choice in Australia, even as our local industry has worked hard to replicate the growth they saw in places like Florida.

It is a physical and social infrastructure that is a direct response to the identified ‘problems’ of old age. Retirement housing is a pathway to downsizing to low-maintenance ease, a curated community and buffer against loneliness, the efficient delivery of support. It is an urban form specifically developed to support a good old age.

I talked to and interviewed the folk who were building, operating, marketing, selling and designing retirement housing around Melbourne. This is an unexpectedly diverse industry, with small family-run businesses, big stock exchange listed property developers, and the not-for-profit sector. They are building different physical forms; single-storey units in the suburbs, luxury apartments in the city, mobile units in fringe suburban and regional areas. In this industry there are healthcare providers building housing, and housing providers getting involved in the delivery of care. And all of them are, through practical actions, shaping what is possible or expected of a ‘good old age’.

And, talking to the industry reps, it was often extremely uncertain exactly what they thought their product was, and exactly who they were selling it to.

There were conflicting images conjured up as they talked about their residents. Retirement villages are defined and marketed as “over-55s” but the average age of residents in Australia is over 80.

The third age and the shadow of the fourth age

As a society we define the collective social imaginaries of old age. These are the images, stories and beliefs that mould assumptions about what old age is, or what it should be. And they underpin the development of practices, products and policy.

We make imaginaries of the third age. This is a time of retirement, comfort, fulfilment. A continued independence. Ideas of ‘active ageing’, ‘successful ageing’, and ‘positive ageing’ are third age concepts and self-help book titles; concepts that put agency and responsibility into the hands of the empowered individual. The evolution of the definition of the ‘third age’ is tied to historically-bound narratives of the baby boomers as a uniquely wealthy and powerful cohort, and to governments’ retreat from care and promotion of market solutions instead.

While the third age is seen as the powerful continuation of independent life, the fourth age which follows it is the opposite. A time of dependence and frailty.

The problem is that these social imaginaries translate ambiguity and diversity into fixed, communicable, singular, simplified, one-dimensional caricatures of the third age, and opposing images of the fourth age. It tends to positive and negative extremes while ignoring the uneven experiences that are the reality.

Another problem: Expectations and veneration of personal agency transfer responsibility for the costs and choices of old age onto the empowered individual. So, what is successful ageing, what is positive ageing, and what is agency in the fourth age of dependence, when third age independence has been so firmly outlined as the singular image of a good old age? The status granted to this particular understanding of agency has consequences for how the needs and desires of the fourth age are realised in narratives, systems and care.

Another problem: The transition between independence and dependence is complex and unique, it can be gradual, layered, messy or very quick and shocking. Not a clear demarcation, nor the ‘smooth transition’ from one to the other – not the myth of the third ager incrementally adding more and more services to buffer their independence and somehow, through their own self-vigilance, dodge the dependency of the fourth age entirely.

Defying negative stereotypes about ageing is empowering. But a third age / fourth age binary is harmful as a philosophy of old age.

Philosophies of old age

Philosophy can tend to edit out the everyday things that matter, becoming fixed wisdom or untethered introspection, rather than a practical way of understanding the world we collectively and continuously shape.

The idea that ageing is a personal and individualised experience that is left unmentioned or detached from our real selves, is damaging. Old age and the meanings and experiences of ageing are shaped by material and social conditions; they are anything but purely personal. Positive ageing does not exist independently of the vectors of wealth, society, and housing. Housing - its design, form, ownership, geography - can help enable diverse choices in old age, or it can lead to unbearably narrow options.

In a practical philosophy of ageing, housing is brought tightly in as an essential infrastructure of care.

Before I started researching housing and ageing, I was certain that old age, especially for women, existed in a philosophical void. It was something that happened in private, hidden. But researching ageing reveals powerful and useful concepts about identity, need, choice, agency, care, human relations, economics, justice, loss, equity, self and society – as necessary in the study of housing as the study of old age. A philosophy of old age holds a mirror to questions of how we are in the world and how we interact and depend on each other.

Housing into ageing, and ageing into housing.

Back to precarity.

The logical response to fears of a precarious situation is the construction of a rigid anchor to secure against it. But security is a false aim in this world. Brief lives crinkle on connected axes outside of our control. What would it mean for philosophies of old age and infrastructures of care to accept fragility in life’s buffers? Challenging the life-long pursuit of an intergenerational chain of property accumulation. Daylighting practices of dependence in family and medical models. Centring care in urban forms, streets, public transit. Acknowledging that individualised security is the wrong method for safeguarding positive ageing. The wafer-thin boundary that protects (natural) fragility from (dangerous) precarity is not constructed of individual security but of social networks and interdependencies that hold us flexibly and adapt through change and crisis.