I no longer have any interest in lending my mind to serving the blight on this planet that is known as the American way of life. I have lived that way of life and, believe me, it really sucks. From Monday through Friday you go to some shitty job that you hate, spending the best part of your day with people you would never socialize with otherwise. \nThen you get home around seven o'clock. Exhausted. You have some fast food for dinner and veg out in front of the TV until you fall asleep. Then you go to bed and get up and do it again, and again...day after day after endless fucking day. And if you have kids, it's even less of a life because you've got to spend a little of your precious time faking interest in their miserable lives at a scholl that also sucks big time. That's really not a life worth living, let alone a way of life worth fighting and dying for. The people of America have been duped. They're rats on a never-ending treadmill, each on thinking he's helping to preserve a culture in which his kid is going to get rich and take care of him in his old age. Instead, the System extracts the maximum amount of work from you in return for the minimum reward you will labor for.

• culture
• old age
• work
• labor
• america
• usa
• society
• capitalism
• existence
• the spectacle

We said at the end of Chapter Six that Freud couldn’t take the step from scientific to religious creatureliness. As Jung understood only too well, that would have meant Freud’s abandoning of his own peculiar passion as a genius. Jung must have understood it from within his own experience: he himself could never bring himself to visit Rome because—as he admitted—Rome raised questions “which were beyond my powers to handle. In my old age—in 1949—I wished to repair this omission, but was stricken with a faint while I was buying tickets. After that, the plans for a trip to Rome were once and for all laid aside.”58 What are we to make of all these giants fainting at the prospect of what to us seems simple tourism? Freud, too, had not been able to visit Rome until later in life and turned back each time he approached the city.

• life
• time
• experience
• jung
• old age
• freud
• passion

Someone is said to be the same person from childhood till old age. Although he is called the same person, he never has the same constituents, but is always being renewed in some respects and experiencing loss in others, for instance, his hair, skin, bone, blood and his whole body. This applies not only to the body but also to the mind: attributes, character-traits, beliefs, desires, pleasures, pains, fears - none of these ever remain the same in each of us, but some are emerging while others are being lost. Still more remarkable is the fact that our knowledge changes too, some items emerging, while others are lost, so we are not the same person as regards our knowledge; indeed, each individual item of knowledge goes through the same process.'

• change
• constancy
• knowledge
• old age
• character
• beliefs
• loss
• body

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.

• aging
• existence
• future
• old age
• past
• time
• relationship
• reality
• fall

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.

• alienation
• capitalism
• humanity
• morality
• old age
• society
• life
• transformation
• civilization

The absence in our culture of rites and institutions designed, like the rites of puberty, to smooth the adolescent's passage into the world is one reason for the incidence of neuroses in youth, common to all of which is the difficulty of facing up to the demands of life and of adapting to the collective and to one's partner.  The absence of rites at the climacteric works in the same way.  Common to the climacteric neuroses of the second half of life is the difficulty of freeing oneself from worldly attachments, as is necessary for a mellow old age and its tasks.  The causes of these neuroses are therefore quite different from, indeed the opposite of, those occurring in the first half of life.

• adaptation
• adolescent psychology
• collective
• culture
• life
• neurosis
• reason
• old age
• rites

Even in its waking state our ego consciousness, which in any case forms only a segment of the total psyche, exhibits varying degrees of animation, ranging from reverie, partial attention, and a diffuse wakefulness to partial concentration upon something, intense concentration, and finally moments of general and extreme alertness.  The conscious system even of a healthy person is charged with libido only during certain periods of his life; in sleep it is practically or completely emptied of libido, and the degree of animation varies with age.  The margin of conscious alertness in modern man is relatively narrow, the intensity of his active performance is limited, and illness, strain, old age, and all psychic disturbances take their toll of this alertness.  It seems that the organ of consciousness is still at an early stage of development and relatively unstable.

• conscious development
• ego consciousness
• the fourth way
• life
• ego
• consciousness
• sleep
• attention
• old age
• psyche

The cure for the scriptless aged is permission but they seldom use it.  There are thousands of older men living in small rooms in every large city, each of them wishing there was someone to cook for him, talk to him, and listen to him.  At the same time, there are thousands of older women living under the same circumstances, wishing they had someone to cook for, talk to, and listen to.  Even if the twain do happen to meet, they rarely take advantage of it, each preferring to remain in his or her familiar drab surroundings hunched over a glass or a TV set, or sitting with folded hands, waiting for a riskless, sinless death.  Those were mother's directives when they were little, and these are the directive they are following seventy or eighty years later.

• old age
• permission
• transactional analysis
• circumstances
• death
• time