ABSTRACT
Documented are aging experiences shared in common by those between fifty and sixty years old. The fifties is a relatively neglected decade in the life course. Although this chapter is about the common experiences and perceptions of people in their fifties, it departs conceptually from developmental aging theories positing uniform, invariant, and universal stages to adult life. Adult development is tied less to chronological age per se than to the timing of events within the contexts of work and family. Perhaps the argument is best put by saying that different features of life become more or less relevant at different points in the life course. Although numerous discrete aging messages are characteristic of the fifties, they may be seen as falling into four general classes of reminders: body, generational, contextual, and mortality reminders. These reminders help to interpret the findings of earlier studies in which have been documented a universal sense of finiteness of time in the middle years.
