The social patterning of time, which originates in the inability to conceptualize a continuous flow of change, may take various forms. Cultural codes breaking up time into symbolically recognizable units serve to make sense of experience. When these codes lose their social validity or cease to reflect experience, temporal construction collapses. Ageing is commonly measured in terms of chronological indices, as a continuum of events over a period of time. In fact, however, the concept of linear progression which underlies the world of the non-aged is irrelevant and inapplicable to the reality of old age and is therefore replaced by the aged themselves with more suitable temporal orientations. The central problem confronted by elderly persons is not role relinquishment, functioning, social others, or the stereotypes and social images in which they find themselves entrapped, but disordered time.

The time universe of the aged is shot through with paradox. We have seen that ageing is commonly perceived as a static condition with the aged as its unchanging inhabitants. This perception expresses itself in the various solutions proposed for the socially ascribed problems of the aged; though the needs of the aged are provided for, there is no mechanism allowing for their development. Among the non-aged, moving from one stage of life to another, the opportunity for socially approved transformations is a culturally cherished privilege. The old, however, are not supposed to change as others do and, accordingly, are denied such opportunity.