The culture of aging in the focus of everyday practices of representatives of the “third age”

The article reconsiders the cultural meaning of old age and the aging process. The article is based on the results of a survey of people of retirement age in the Rostov region, conducted in 2023 using time diaries. It has been revealed that modern Russians aged 60+ demonstrate fundamentally different personal experiences of aging, which is statistically expressed in the gap between the average indicators for each type of activity and individual time allocation models. This forced the construction of not one, but two polar chronometric models of the everyday life of Russians over 60 years old, to which the majority of them may gravitate. The concept of “culture of aging” was introduced, defined as a system of the best examples and methods of activity of people aged 60+, aimed at their adaptation to changes determined not only by age, but also by health, place and living conditions. An analysis of the time diaries of people of retirement age in the Rostov region collected in 2023 made it possible to identify and describe significant features and transformations in their aging culture. It has been recorded that general satisfaction with the skills of distributing one’s time between various activities is accompanied by the need for more active ways of spending time of their life, which cannot be realized for a number of reasons. The author comes to the conclusion that the culture of aging does not develop in isolation from the general culture of the population, from the culture of other age communities. The culture of aging is the most important system-forming element of the culture of society as a whole, largely representing and at the same time determining its qualitative characteristics.