How to Be Authentic by Skye C. Cleary

Author:Skye C. Cleary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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The barriers that older people face, such as employment discrimination, are part of what Beauvoir called the “practico-inert,” a second inescapable factor of elderhood.13 “Practico-inert” is a Sartrean term Beauvoir used to describe situations in which human choices harden into a type of facticity. The practico-inert is the outcome of past human activities that shape the ways we are able to exercise our freedom in the present. The practico-inert is praxis (practical activities) that creates inertia in our lives.

There are internal and external dimensions to the practico-inert. Externally, the practico-inert is the legal, political, cultural, environmental, and social systems in which we live. These systems are necessary for human flourishing and expand freedoms for many, but they also operate in discriminatory ways that frustrate many people’s well-being.

Climate change is an example of the external practico-inert. The greenhouse effect is the result of human choices to burn fossil fuels and is now melting icecaps, increasing the average temperature of our environment, and creating volatile weather patterns such as severe storms, heatwaves, and wildfires. Climate change creates inertia in many people’s lives because it impedes our movements, our plans, and our access to power, food, and water.

Internally, the practico-inert is the sum of our past choices, such as skills, knowledge, relationships, duties, tastes, interests, and activities. These features, or facticities, define a person’s situation and provide a basis from which they project themselves into the world. The practico-inert represents the existential notion that a person is the sum of their actions, the culmination of their past, the image of what they have become, and how they appear to others.

If we consider the metaphor that our lives are like a poem, the paper and the table underneath the sheet are the political, legal, and other systems of our lives. Our activities are like scribing inky words on paper. As our ink dries on the page, the words leave imprints which form the ever-evolving foundation of our lives. If we are struck with inertia, if we stop sketching words (designing our essence), the poetry of our lives stops too.

The practico-inert weighs particularly heavily on elderly people because the older they grow, the vaster their past, the narrower their future, the more solidly defined they appear to others, and the more limited their possibilities. All of this hems older people in, slowing down their becoming, often to a grinding halt. There is a stigma attached to older people as being unwilling and incapable of change, as in the familiar saying, “An old dog can’t learn new tricks.” The practico-inert is that aspect of our being that hardens behind us, like inky words on a page.

This phenomenon is one of the reasons, Beauvoir suggested, that older people tend toward conservatism: having less time to live means they are less interested in new and uncertain situations.14 Old habits become one of the internal dimensions of the practico-inert. Routines can be reassuring, providing a kind of security. Patterns in life give people a sense of who they are.

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