Ageing In Contemporary Society

Ageing is one natural part of our life cycle, a regular passage of time that everyone will go through. “Human beings are embodied persons with a finite life-span. We are born, we live , we die.” (Featherstone & Wernick, 1995, p.1) Ageing is about changes and transition, our hair turn white, unsightly wrinkles and under represent organism living. “Along the way in our journey through life, we usually become accredited persons who are accorded adult status. In later life there is the threat of the loss of this status through the bodily decline w e usually, often confusingly, refer to as ageing” (Featherstone & Wernick, 1995, p.1). Ageing is not only a process of physically and genetically, but also physiologically and even economic and social changes. ‘Age is both a verb and a noun: it stands for both a process and a set of

The problem of ageing in contemporary society have various impacts in particular on economics and others social problems. The rapid rise in ageing population will lead to increase in dependency ratio of older people, in other word the increase ratio of population aged 65 who are not working that are continuously supported by the working population. The increasing dependency ratio of the old age will affect negatively on social and economic growth in the society. Rising life expectancy, while the retirement age remain unchanged, there are more old people claiming pension benefit and less people participate in workforce therefore less likely to pay for income taxes. In some case, the ageing population also brings large pressure to the younger generation. As many young people will have to care and look after the elderly, they therefore spend less time in labour work, impact negatively on a country’s competitiveness and more importantly economic