section_path: Perspectives/Old age
section_name: Old age
paragraph_text: Old age
  
  Early old age can be a pleasant time; children are grown, work is over, and there is time to pursue other interests. Many old people are also willing to get involved in community and activist organizations to promote their well-being. In contrast, perceptions of old age by writers 80+ years old tend to be negative.
  
  Georges Minois writes that the first man known to talk about his old age was an Egyptian scribe who lived 4,500 years ago. The scribe addressed God with a prayer of lament:
  
  O Sovereign my Lord! Oldness has come; old age has descended. Feebleness has arrived; dotage is here anew. The heart sleeps wearily every day. The eyes are weak, the ears are deaf, the strength is disappearing because of weariness of the heart and the mouth is silent and cannot speak. The heart is forgetful and cannot recall yesterday. The bone suffers old age. Good is become evil. All taste is gone. What old age does to men is evil in every respect.
  
  Minois comments that the scribe's "cry shows that nothing has changed in the drama of decrepitude between the age of the Pharaoh and the atomic age" and "expresses all the anguish of old people in the past and the present".
  
  Lillian Rubin, active in her 80s as an author, sociologist, and psychotherapist, opens her book 60 on Up: The Truth about Aging in America with "getting old sucks. It always has, it always will." Dr. Rubin contrasts the "real old age" with the "rosy pictures" painted by middle-age writers.
  
  Writing at the age of 87, Mary C. Morrison describes the "heroism" required by old age: to live through the disintegration of one's own body or that of someone you love. Morrison concludes, "old age is not for the fainthearted". In the book Life Beyond 85 Years, the 150 interviewees had to cope with physical and mental debilitation and with losses of loved ones. One interviewee described living in old age as "pure hell".
  
  Research has shown that in high-income countries, on average, one in four people over 60 and one in three over 75 feels lonely.