Social Maturity

Ageism is too often an accepted form of bias, even though the facts support the value of aging. Airline pilots forced to retire at the arbitrary age of 65 are usually at the top of their game. Forced retirement in most organizations remove highly skilled performers as well as role models and trainers for newer generations. Instead of revelling in who we are, we begin to try to look younger as soon as possible. People have become inured to "losing" abilities as they age instead of appreciating new abilities that only age can bestow.

First published in 1915, The Voyage Out marked the literary debut of one of the great pioneers of the modern novel. Virginia Woolf's extraordinary narrative follows a group of lively, eccentric British tourists embarking on a sea voyage from London to South America. Among them is Rachel Vinrace, a shy, motherless young woman who has been taken along under the wing of her Aunt Helen, so that she may learn "how to live".

'I pictured myself a wine-dark streak in a TV desert, ears too full of the summer wind to hear that ominous ticking in the sky: the sound of a cultural clock counting me out of youth.' Briohny Doyle turned 30 without a clear idea of what her adult life should look like. The world she lived in, with its global economic uncertainty, political conservatism and precarious employment conditions, didn't match the one her parents grew up in.