"We do not know who we are if we ignore what we will become."

"Let us cease cheating, the meaning of our life is in question in the future that awaits us; we do not know who we are if we ignore what we will become. Let us recognize ourselves in this old man, in this old woman. We must do so if we want to take up our human condition in its totality." 

Simone de Beauvoir

As Sonia Kruks points out, most people seek to flee this "other within us", do not recognise themselves in the old but view them as a "different species". It is "their bad faith flight from their own incipient old age that accounts for much of denigration and mal-treatment they inflict on the old".

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image (Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Luc Goddard) via