Demographic developments and changing social and technological circumstances make growing older a different experience than in all previous centuries. A different experience than current cultural narratives would have us believe. Growing older is not staying ‘young’. Nor is it just loss. What is the truth of growing older? And how can you assign meaning to it?

Philosopher Suzanne Biewinga investigates the possibility of a new formulation of the truth and meaning of growing older, in line with the experiences, insights, concerns and desires of older people themselves. In her philosophy workshop, she enters into dialogue with groups of older people about the truth and meaning of growing older. In interaction with these conversations, she studies the work of contemporary thinkers and scientists on the human experience as desiring, embodied, social and finite beings. Research into the philosophies of the Stoics and Epicureans from the Greco-Roman era offers a point of reference for innovative thinking in the present day. This creates a new semantic space: not an alternative standard story about growing older, but a linguistic, thinking and meeting space in which classical values ​​and virtues are given contemporary and additional formulations. A plea for a social space for action, in which growing old appears as a life that older people can and want to live.

Suzanne Biewinga (1954), trained in guiding emancipation processes, worked professionally as a support worker for national patient organizations and as a coordinator of a hospice. After her working life, she studied philosophy at Radboud University in Nijmegen, specializing in ethical questions about growing older.

In the following years, she developed a methodology in her philosophy workshop to conduct a philosophical dialogue with older people, aimed at finding a suitable way of thinking and speaking about growing older. This resulted in a PhD research project at the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation is written in Dutch. A public edition (also in Dutch) will be published by Boom Publishers by February 2025.