“At what point do we grow old?” I heard this question on Tantos tempos [So many kinds of time] (Pomi, 2026) and found myself wondering how to answer it without immediately turning to a mirror or a calendar. There is something unsettling about realizing that the years have passed while, inwardly, we still recognize ourselves in longstanding desires and preoccupations. Sometimes another person’s gaze makes us aware of our age, and we need time to absorb what seems obvious to them. Between knowing our age and coming to terms with it, there is psychological work that no calendar can do for us.
Our inner lives retain experiences that belong to the distant past yet remain alive in our expectations and ways of loving. Freud’s (1915/2010) account of the timelessness of the unconscious helps explain why the passing years alone cannot transform what we feel. We may grow older while still waiting for recognition that never came, or postpone decisions as though the future remained endlessly available. As that horizon narrows, we also confront the lives we imagined living that may no longer be possible.
This encounter brings grief for who we were and who we hoped to become. The narcissistic injury unsettles the self-image that sustained our sense of worth, particularly when that worth depended on retaining certain abilities or remaining indispensable to someone. Working through these losses means distinguishing what has ended from what no longer meets our ideal. Some possibilities must be relinquished, while others remain obscured by our insistence on being who we once were; recognizing the difference takes time that the rhetoric of reinvention tends to overlook.
This work unfolds within relationships, under a gaze that can ease our estrangement from ourselves or deepen it. Beauvoir (1970) shows how profoundly old age is shaped by the place others allow us to occupy. Someone may need help walking while remaining capable of making their own decisions; when others decide without asking, a physical limitation becomes a loss of authority over their life. The withdrawal that follows may then be attributed to age, even when it also reflects the experience of no longer being heard.
Even compliments can contribute to this exclusion, as when we admire someone for not looking their age. Acceptance becomes conditional on concealing the signs of aging, and the promise of autonomy becomes an obligation to remain young. Debert (1999) exposes the cost of making people individually responsible for how they age, treating dependence as evidence of a poorly managed life. People must face their losses while defending themselves against the suspicion that they failed to do enough to prevent them, as though vulnerability were a character flaw.
Here, our relationship with time directly affects our capacity to work through experience. Han’s (2016) account of temporal fragmentation and Kornbluh’s (2024) critique of the devaluation of mediation help us understand how difficult it is to make sense of change when everything demands immediate presence and response. Someone still searching for words to describe what they are going through is already expected to present a reinvented self. The period when we do not know who we are becoming begins to look like falling behind, though we may need it to recognize a change we have so far only endured.
Amid this disorientation, the past can offer a place where we still know who we are. I understand the temptation to say “in my day,” but I grow wary when the phrase turns someone’s youth into a standard for judging other people’s lives. Perhaps we are trying to recover our former place in the world, confusing a longing for our former selves with the conviction that the world used to be better. This possibility lets us listen to nostalgia without submitting to it, acknowledging loss without dismissing those whose experiences are unfamiliar to us.
As Bosi (1994) shows, older people’s memories depend on ties to people and places, so finding someone to listen can make those memories part of a shared conversation again. Sharing them may invite questions that change our understanding of what we lived through. Morin’s (2025) insistence that progress, regression, and unforeseen events coexist throughout history challenges any claim to superiority in passing on our experience. Our history can inform our understanding of the present without requiring it to reproduce the world in which we came to know ourselves.
This openness, however, must not become another demand to perform, as though growing old were a punishment for losing curiosity. An old person can desire, learn, and change without needing to be called young, just as periods of discouragement need not diminish the value of their life. Psychoanalytic listening attends to each person’s particular relationship with what is lost and what endures, without prescribing what they should feel or turning the work of mourning into an obligation to find new happiness quickly.
Returning to the opening question, I find myself thinking about how acknowledging that we are growing old changes our relationship with the future: some possibilities close, while others emerge when we stop expecting life to confirm the image we have constructed of ourselves. This change can be painful and depends, too, on relationships in which we can speak of what we have lost and discover what still matters. Belonging to the present means being allowed to need others, having a say in our own lives, and finding someone interested in who we are becoming.
References
Beauvoir, S. de. (1970). La vieillesse [Old age]. Gallimard.
Bosi, E. (1994). Memória e sociedade: Lembranças de velhos [Memory and society: Recollections of older people] (3rd ed.). Companhia das Letras.
Debert, G. G. (1999). A reinvenção da velhice: Socialização e processos de reprivatização do envelhecimento [The reinvention of old age: Socialization and processes of reprivatization of aging]. Edusp.
Freud, S. (2010). Introdução ao narcisismo, ensaios de metapsicologia e outros textos (1914–1916) [On narcissism, essays on metapsychology and other writings (1914–1916)]. Companhia das Letras.
Han, B.-C. (2016). O aroma do tempo: Um ensaio filosófico sobre a arte da demora [The scent of time: A philosophical essay on the art of lingering]. Relógio D’Água.
Kornbluh, A. (2024). Immediacy: Or, the style of too late capitalism. Verso.
Morin, E. (2025). Y a-t-il des leçons de l’histoire ? [Are there lessons to be learned from history?]. Denoël.
Pomi, C. (Host). (2026, April 16). Zélia Duncan e Marcello Serpa [Zélia Duncan and Marcello Serpa] (No. 45) [Audio podcast episode]. In Tantos tempos. Orson Podcast.
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