Abstract

Generation or relative age is a common way humans define social difference. In Europe and North America, old age is frequently perceived as a period of decline and loss, a condition “successful aging” paradigms exhort individuals to avoid for as long as possible. Explicit and implicit ageist beliefs, discourses, and practices marginalize later life, portraying it as undesirable and inferior. This essay explores how imagined generational relationships with time—younger people as future facing, older people as out of time—enrol linear, future-oriented temporal perspectives in reproducing ageism. The aftermath of the Brexit referendum, followed closely by the COVID-19 pandemic, serve as my ethnographic examples. These two extraordinary events permit me to highlight how chronocracy (Kirtsoglou and Simpson 2020)—that is, the denial of coevalness or coexistence in time through everyday temporal regimes—reinforces unequal power dynamics, and to explore how generational groups are differently valued in contemporary England.

Keywords

older age; generations; ageism; temporality; England; chronocracy; temporal relations

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2026 Cathrine Degnen

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.