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Normative transitions and uncertainties tend to keep people on an anxious footing.
Again, the basic phenomenon here is one that can be experienced by people of any age. We tend to feel most secure (least anxious) in familiar and stable situations, and when we can predict future
developments and outcomes with a sense of confidence.
The anxieties of adolescence have often been interpreted within the context of the transitions and uncertainties that tend to become salient as one attempts to establish an individual and adult identity.
Although the particulars differ markedly, elderly adults also tend to find themselves in a transitional situation which, in this case, challenges the identity and security that had previously been achieved.
For example, people in their sixties face such normative transitions as:
• From career to retirement
• From relatively high to relatively low empowerment
• From marriage to widowhood
• From independent to assisted living.
Each of these transitions involves a set of more specific challenges and decisions. Anxiety may be even higher when these transitions are in prospect than when one is facing them directly.
For example, the wife of a “workaholic” public agency administrator feared that her husband would go “looney-tunes and take me with him” when forced to retire. In her own words, “I made myself a nervous wreck worrying about becoming a nervous wreck!” As it turned out, however, the workaholic “sobered up” spontaneously after he drew his final paycheck and did not seem to miss either his previous busywork or authority.
The couple felt less anxious “when retirement actually struck” than the wife had when anticipating the dreaded day.
Uncertainty tends to intensify apprehensions regarding health, independence, and survival. One cannot predict when significant problems will arise in these spheres.
For example, people entering their seventh decades in good health could be continuing to enjoy independent living a decade later, or develop a serious ailment or impairment within a short time.
Some people respond to this normative situational uncertainty with a perpetual bubbling of anxiety. Others, however, just stop scanning the future and take life day-by-day.
An interesting study by Kulys and Tobin (1980) found that intellectually competent elderly adults who did not project their thoughts forward into the remote future were adapting this strategy of not burdening themselves with uncertainties.
Those with low future concern were also less anxious and less hostile than those who were inclined to scan the temporal horizon for the disasters that might lie ahead.
To some extent, then, anxiety in later adult years can be conceptualized as part of a lifespan developmental story that has always featured developmental challenge, hazard, and opportunity. When society as well as the individual is changing, the sense of instability and unpredictability is exacerbated.
For example, a middle-aged adult who expected this to be a settled and prosperous time of life may be more anxious than ever because his or her job is jeopardized by corporate failure or downsizing.
This person now must cope not only with sources of anxiety that are more or less normative in middle adulthood but also with dislocations and dangers introduced by socioeconomic forces.
Similarly, elderly adults today must cope not only with the universal sources of concern associated with advancing age, but also with technological change and the destabilizing effects of postmodernism on those who grew up with more traditional views of self and society (Kastenbaum, 1993).
The ailing old woman who is being asked to complete baffling bureaucratic forms by a stranger at the admissions desk of a hospital is not just experiencing her own idiosyncratic anxiety, but the anxiety of a generation.
