At the same time, the culture of active ageing shifted the responsibility to stay young and fit on to the elderly. Old age was no longer destiny. It was an individual lifestyle choice, even an obligation. The new-found freedom simultaneously made ageing more fun and more painful; brilliantly mocked by Federico Fellini in his 1986 film Ginger and Fred, when an elderly TV-gym instructor announces ‘old age has ceased to exist’ and instructs viewers to eliminate their wrinkles with bizarre face-stretching exercises, grimacing and frowning.91 Immortality has been a dream of humans ever since the Babylonian legend of Gilgamesh. In the late twentieth century, the quest for eternal youth reached new heights. Consumer culture was not the only stimulus – there was also the medicalization of age – but it certainly helped give unprecedented credence to the belief that age could and ought to be arrested altogether. According to one estimate, the anti-ageing market was worth $43 billion in the United States in 2002. A year earlier, the AARP reported that every second American baby-boomer was depressed about getting old. Every third woman admitted using anti-ageing cosmetics, and one in ten was contemplating surgery. In Brazil, plastic surgery is considered natural, with 360,000 interventions in 2000. Nor is it just women who try to halt the inevitable sagging of the chin. The number of Brazilian men turning to the scalpel shot up exponentially in the 1990s.92
While on the rise globally, active ageing has taken a variety of forms, depending on long-standing traditions and understandings of old age. In Japan, individuals are seen to have some power to stem the tide of boke – the disintegration of the self – or at least to slow it down. To be idle is to encourage boke and let the community down as well as oneself. The elderly (rojin) are expected to demonstrate their value to themselves and to society. They are pushed to develop an ikigai, or personal hobby. Health and active leisure are treated not as a matter of personal choice but as part of a social contract between the elderly and the community, This contract was formally recognized by the Law for the Welfare of the Aged in 1963 and followed by the birth of Old People Clubs, elder colleges and government support for sports and recreation for the over-sixty-fives. In rural Japan, old persons’ clubs are crucial. In the hamlet of Jonai, for example, every fifth resident belongs to the local rojin kurabu. Being active, of course, does not automatically entail being an active consumer. Some leisure activities come cheap, such as the boardgame Go and singing in a choir. Others, however, carry a larger price tag. One of the most popular pastimes among Japanese seniors is Gateball (geeto booru), a fast-paced type of croquet. A decent stick easily costs Y40,000, or $500.93
Since the 1960s, Japanese elderly have been subject to two competing pressures. On the one hand, the flight of the young from the countryside to the city and the rise of single elderly households have widened the generation gap, leaving a feeling of isolation and worthlessness. In rural areas, suicides have shot up dramatically. Neglect and abuse were widespread, and community care was minimal prior to the introduction of long-term care insurance in 2000. On the other hand, the value of the elderly as consumers has received unprecedented attention in attempts to capture the ‘silver market’; in 2002, only 4 per cent of households headed by a pensioner were low-income. In the shops arrived electrical goods that talked, internet software designed for seniors, specialized mattresses and insurance packages. Shiseido, the cosmetics firm, has run beauty sessions in homes for the elderly since 1975; they are popular with men as well as women. In the 1990s, Itôchû, a large trading company, began sending photographers to visit seniors in their homes for market research. Other companies introduced phones with large buttons and stylish light-weight walking sticks. The Elderly Service Providers Association launched a ‘silver mark’ for products that met its welfare and comfort standard. By 1999, 1,000 firms carried the label. Age-appropriate hotels carried silver stars. Ageing Europe turned to Japan for inspiration.94
None of these commercial overtures should be surprising. What is remarkable, given how much spending the elderly control, is how limited they have been. In contrast to their fascination with teenagers, advertisers and companies all but ignored their grandparents’ new affluence. The elderly were virtually absent from billboards and TV screens; in the United States and Japan, elderly actors appeared in a mere 2 per cent of prime-time television and commercials in the 1970s.95 In the 1960s, some marketers urged companies to wake up to the unique $40 billion market made up of ‘old folks’. Their call fell on deaf ears.96 The first proper study of the ‘mature market’ did not appear until 1980, in the Harvard Business Review. It was only in the following decade, with the help of US census data, that marketing experts began to break down the ageing consumer into smaller cohorts and distinguish the lifestyles and spending power of the GI generation born before 1930 from that of the war babies and post-war baby boomers. Early attempts to capture that market often backfired; Kellogg’s had to recall their ‘forty-plus’ cereal after six months in 1989 in the face of complaints about ageism and charges by the Iowa attorney-general that it was deceptive advertising to suggest that people over forty had special dietary needs. Marketing to the over-sixties continues to be the Cinderella of the business world. According to the Center for Mature Consumer Studies, many companies still do not grasp why they should reach out to older consumers. When they do, they often treat them as homogeneous, whereas, in reality, they are more diverse than their juniors.97 With the exception of Viagra and stairlifts, older consumers continue to be largely invisible.
In sum: the more positive image of the elderly, of active leisure and the third age have made seniors an integral part of affluent consumer societies. But this shift was driven by gerontology, civic culture and better pensions and welfare provision, not by corporations. It has yet to conquer Madison Avenue. At least in the commercial world, the elderly are prisoners of youth.
So far, we have dealt with affluent seniors in affluent countries but, of course, from a global perspective, these are the minority. Only a third of the world’s elderly live in Europe and North America. In 1999, over half were in Asia, where the ageing of societies has been at least as dramatic. Japan made the transition to affluence in the 1960s and has already been discussed. In the rest of Asia, it was in the late twentieth century that development and urbanization brought about a sharp decline in fertility. In Singapore, for example, seven births per woman were typical in the 1950s. Twenty years later, the two-child family was the norm. Korea makes the European story of ageing look like it happened in slow motion – in 1990, for every Korean over the age of sixty-five, there were five children under fifteen; by 2020, the ratio will be 4:5, close to equal.
To what degree has old age in Asian societies also become a more intensive consumer experience mirroring the Western trend towards more independent, leisurely elders? The answer is complicated by historically different living arrangements between the generations that impinge on the resources and opportunities to spend time and money – living alone is a world apart from living under one’s children’s roof. In Thailand in the late 1980s, only one in ten elderly people lived apart from their children. In the United States, it was three out of four.98 This divergence is not the result of some unchanging cultural DNA, however. In Taiwan, the number of elderly living with their kids dropped from two thirds to one half in the 1980s. Rather, a main difference between East and West is that in Europe the extended family had long ceased to exist by the time department stores opened their doors, whereas in Asia consumer culture encountered multi-generational families intact when it took off in the late twentieth century.99
This encounter has taken various shapes. In more affluent Singapore, the state has put its resources and authority behind the three-generation family, with tax breaks and laws on filial piety. Almost 85 per cent of seniors continue to live together with their children. The family remains the first line of support. At the same time, the government has discovered its seniors as a ‘valuable resource’ and supports ‘active lifestyles’, with Gateball courts and spaces for
taiji quan martial-art exercises.100
In India, by contrast, a national survey in 1995–6 revealed that over two thirds of the aged depended on others for their day-to-day existence. Almost every second old person was still working. Most lived with their spouse, a third with their children, mostly by necessity rather than choice. Only 5 per cent lived alone, though many more would have liked to. A mere 1 per cent received institutional care, and while some homes had TVs and radios, there was little interest in activities.101 Most elderly were poor and spent their twilight years as dependent consumers, preoccupied with shelter, food, medicine and clothing. Compared to their German and Japanese cousins, their spending on entertainment and leisure was tiny.
The economic life of the household remains complex. It tends to be assumed that in South Asia the old move in with their married son, but often it is the other way around. Money, similarly, flows in both directions. Many elderly support their unmarried children, while others are at the mercy of their married sons. What is clear is that the rising demands of the conjugal family have made filial support less forthcoming. ‘They don’t need it, and I can’t give it’ is a common refrain by sons today. That pleasure is the preserve of the young is an old Indian notion, but the advance of consumer culture and rising aspirations since the 1980s have reinforced it. More than ever, the young are the natural consumers. Here is a major difference with the affluent West. While the elderly in the West have seen their needs expand, the elderly poor in India have seen theirs contract. Old age marks the end of the right to consume and enjoy goods. In the South Indian state Tamil Nadu, there is a saying that the elderly have had their life (vaalkai mudinchi pochu). Why waste money and goods on those who are finished? Old people are expected to have little appetite and no need for comfort and convenience. Consequently, they receive little food and medicine – far too little. Instead of a colourful sari, dull cast-off cloth will do. Since being old is not defined by biological age but by a decline of activity and sensual appetite, the very idea of fun-packed active golden years is an oxymoron.102
Old age looks different for the Indian middle class, however. Here, as among their Western peers, consumer goods have been on the rise. In the 1990s in the middle-class district of Deccan Gymkhana in Pune, over a third of women over sixty had a mixer, grinder and oven; one in nine boasted a washing machine. Along with their remittances, successful migrants have also brought back with them from America new ideas of ageing. The first retirement communities have sprung up. On the whole, however, old age for affluent Indians, too, remains a far cry from the Western pursuit of independent living and active leisure. In 2000, over half lived with their children. In Rana Pratap Bagh, an upper-middle-class neighbourhood in north-west Delhi, one in five elderly people kept contributing to the family income, working as accountants or shop owners. The lives of the retired were not untouched by commercial leisure – many went to the movies or watched TV – but they were not defined by it either. Most free time was devoted to visiting shrines and relatives. Only one in eight had an active hobby.103
SOLIDARITY
Today’s world is sometimes said to be ‘liquid’, to use the image of the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. People no longer form ‘real’ solid bonds but pass from one ‘virtual’ momentary engagement to another like restless eels.104 In this view, consumer culture, with its dream worlds, its material temptations and its licence for the pursuit of personal desire, is the chief – if the not only – solvent of solid human relationships.
We have looked at each generation in turn. Now, in conclusion, it is vital to look briefly at the relations between them. Has the growing number and significance of possessions for lifestyle and age-specific identities blown generations asunder? What difference have goods, tastes and material comfort had for the family as the principal institution through which generations care for each other?
It would be easy to point to physical manifestations of individualism. Most Americans had stopped living with their kids by the 1950s. Even in Japan, the number of three-generational households dropped by half in the 1980s and ’90s while the number of single elderly doubled. Yet, the decline in co-residence does not automatically tell us about the emotional life of families. In the West, it is worth recalling, the multi-generational family was dead long before consumer goods and leisure forged the teenager and the active senior. There is little evidence that living apart has weakened generational bonds. In France in 1992, nine out of ten of the war babies (born 1939–42) provided domestic help for their elderly parents.105 In any case, transport and telecommunication have shrunk space and, with it, softened the effects of physical distance. Most German seniors live less than an hour away from their children; south of the Alps, many stay in the same community, sometimes the same apartment building. Family members got on much better once they started to live around the corner instead of with each other.
Consumption has acted as a glue between generations in three main ways. First, there are the things themselves, the many gifts and possessions that parents collect and take with them into old age as reminders of their children. Second, as markers of personal taste and identity, the diffusion and range of goods and leisure have prompted greater tolerance and respect between children and their parents for their individual lifestyles, teaching them to live with difference. Of course, families today continue to live with tension and violence, though it would be naïve to think they had not also done so before consumer goods crossed the doorstep. Leisure and entertainment have created spaces and experiences shared by old and young. Authority may have been different, but so, in the process, has conflict. A study in London’s East End in the mid-1960s found that most adolescent boys felt their parents to be understanding; in Germany, too, researchers at the time noted that ‘the family today was no longer a typical place for hard and sustained generational conflict’.106 The relationship between sons and fathers is undoubtedly warmer and more understanding at the end of the twentieth century than it was at its beginning. The shift in social values from work to leisure has further eased relations with the elderly. Retirement today no longer carries the same stigma of uselessness. Active leisure reintegrated the elderly into society. Everyone was a consumer now.
Finally, there is the transfer of resources that funds consumption, both within families and within nations. Rather than pulling families apart, consuming and caring work in symbiosis today. In affluent societies, middle-aged women are carers as well as consumers. They look after their elderly parents when the elderly are not picking up the grandchildren from school. Seniors give their children and grandchildren gifts, time and money as well as love. The available data suggests that affluence has strengthened, not weakened, this circulatory system. Significantly, in the United States, gifts and assistance from the elderly to their children and grandchildren rose in the 1960s, the golden decade of consumer society.107 In Germany in 1996, every third senior transferred an average €3,700 to their children or grandchildren, the equivalent of 10 per cent of the public pension.108 How many homes, holidays and appliances would young households have been able to afford without such parental transfers or the free childcare that so many offer? Grandchildren’s wardrobes and bedrooms would be half empty. At national level, states oversee large generational transfers that enable most senior citizens to participate in consumer society. Without pensions, the elderly would drift back into poverty and dependence. At the time of writing, governments may try to raise the pension age and change contributions. Still, even during the worst recession since the Second World War, no one dreams of scrapping the compact between generations altogether. Class war has not been superseded by a war between generations. For this, consumption deserves some credit.
12
Outside the Marketplace
People enter a shop, compare the cost and appeal of the items on offer, check their wallet, then make a choice and pay at the counter. This, in a few words, is a widespread view of how consumption works. For critics and champions alike, consumption
has been synonymous with individual choice in the marketplace. They may disagree about the virtues of choice, but not its centrality.1 There are, of course, good reasons we are so preoccupied with choice. Never before have people had so much of it, at least in the rich world. Americans can pick among three hundred brands of cereal, Europeans from a hundred deodorants, Australians from a thousand mortgages. It sometimes seems as if society has turned into one enormous mall. Students are encouraged to shop around for courses, patients for doctors, and so forth.
The fixation with choice, however, comes at a price. For one, it encourages us to see in the past only what we can recognize as precursors of the present. The supermarket, advertising and the credit card emerge as milestones on the way to the neo-liberal trinity of choice, individualism and markets in the late twentieth century. From this perspective, the historic surge in consumption results from the unabashed triumph of private choice. We have already seen that such a view misses the longer influence of empire, ideology and power and the role of social habits and conventions. By treating consumption as choice’s twin, secondly, it appears as the natural enemy of civic life and collective interests. Contemporary history comes to resemble a seesaw: as consumption went up, social democracy went down. The more private choice, the less shared purpose.
Empire of Things Page 68