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Publisher: Routledge Critical Thinkers (2004)

De Beauvoir argues that aging transforms our relationship to time:\r\n \r\n>For human reality, existing means existing in time: in the present we look towards the future by means of plans that go beyond our past, in which our activities fall lifeless, frozen and loaded with passive demands. Age changes our relationship with time: as the years go by our future shortens, while our past grows heavier.

De Beauvoir envisages freedom as only being realized by actively engaging itself in the world. In other words, we cannot just sit about and passively proclaim our freedom - we have to go out and actively use that freedom in the world and in our relationships with other people.

The task of literature is to render the singularity of individual experience as transparent as possible to other human beings, to safeguard the human dimension of experience from alienation by bureaucracy and technocracy.

Indicating the human wastage incurred by capitalism, Beauvoir argues that 'society cares about the individual only insofar as he is profitable.' This is a moral indictment of society - 'old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization' - and she advocates a radical transformation of the conditions of life to remedy the alienation experienced by young and old alike.