This chapter is important to me because it explains how late adulthood is like and that we’re so close yet so far from it at the same time. Adulthood age changes begins at the age of 20 in regards to health and lifestyle, for example, our metabolism at that age decreases and so it’s harder to lose weight. It’s also necessary to know this so that younger adults, teenagers, and children, do not judge older adults just because of their age. “Ageism is the idea that age determines whom a person is, and therefore, everyone “should act their age,” (Berger, 503). Even if it is common courtesy to help those who are older with physical yet simple tasks, it’s not always the correct thing to do, some of them might get offended or it might come off as rude; to assume that because of one’s age, they have the inability to do a certain task. We should all know that as adults age, their mental and physical strength weakens, that their sustainability decreases, and we play the role for them by taking care of them and prevent them from doing activities that could hurt themselves, despite them being great with it at one point. For example, driving, “with age, reading road signs takes longer, turning the head becomes harder, reaction time slows, and night vision worsens, (Berger, 516). Elder adults might go through cognitive decline and end up having low attention span which may cause them to get into accidents or even memory loss and forgetting how to get to one place from another or even …show more content…
I can relate this part of the chapter to my personal life by attempting to provide the best care and health for myself. I wouldn’t want to grow up and be incapable of taking care of myself or even having more losses than I do of gains and benefits. So, to prevent that, I can try to improve my health habits and general lifestyle so that my secondary aging consequences aren’t as bad as they could be if I don’t start at all. Secondary aging is the “specific physical illnesses or conditions that become more common with aging but are caused by health habits and other influences that vary from person to person,” while primary aging is a universal change that’s inevitable and happens to everyone, (Berger, 518). Charles Darwin’s Evolution theory can be applied here in which each species’ does two things: survive and reproduce, (Berger, 33). With that being said, humans have an internal clock that starts at the time of birth, in which we are already starting to die and have a countdown to the end of our lives. However, the secondary aging process are the factors and attributes that happen in between life and death that can either expand or decrease our timeline, therefore we are responsible for ourselves and can improve or deteriorate our own health and lifespan depending on the factors involved. At some point of late adulthood, adults begin to look back into their lives and try to make sense of it, whether they have been successful or if it was a disappointment, in which Erik