The human being is immersed in a river in which everything passes and changes, in which nothing is ever the same.
Evolution is the conception of man in a dynamic system, and cultural evolution is characterized by receptivity. The receptivity of culture facilitates continuity, which in turn plays the stabilizing role for culture. Continuity refers to the totality of culture being a continuum in time and space.
Culture is imposed on nature, and human nature is subdued by cultural systems and shaped in various directions. All people develop with a particular set of cultural rules passed down from generation to generation. Culture is made up of economic activities, dominant social patterns, values, configurations, and worldviews.
From Social Psychology it is proposed that the individual comes from the moment he is born into a group, so that the members of the group share certain beliefs, values, habits, customs and norms. People identify with other people, have different learning experiences, and have more than one group identity. In modern and complex societies, individuals have different social identities, we all present ourselves in different roles, eg: professional, father, mother, son, teacher, bricklayer, student, etc.
The term role or status can be used to refer to any position one occupies in society. There are acquired roles that are obtained through deals, talent, actions, efforts, activities and achievements, and others that are assigned: people have little or no ability to obtain them, age is an assigned status, people cannot choose not to age.
Age is not just the number of years since a person was born, it implies a set of social definitions regarding what is required and appropriate.
All cultures include a set of norms that refer to the appropriate and expected behavior of people at every stage of life.
These standards help define what it means to be a certain age.
As a cultural construction that carries certain expectations, age is the channel for people to assume and abandon social status, and the rights and responsibilities that go with them.
All societies establish their calendars to define the main life events such as getting married, having children, grandchildren and retiring (this calendar may vary with time and various socio-economic circumstances).
Age helps to accommodate people in status and also helps to organize the distribution of the valuable resources of a society.
Since age is an assigned status, but of a transitory nature, it implies a social perception of the aging process to which people are subjected.
Social perception is the process by which we assign meanings to objects and social events that we have in our environment. It includes our social identity or the idea that we have of ourselves in our environment, and also the idea that we have of other people and socio-cultural groups.
What does social identity mean? Well, it is the self-concept that a person has of himself; it is formed, because the subject is recognized as a member of some specific groups, this is how we also perceive other people. Social identity is made up of several elements: the demographic characteristics of the person, the formal and informal organizations of which it is part, groups to which it belongs and its characteristics such as: social status, skin color, age, sex, nationality, ethnicity, company where you have a job, political, economic, professional groups, etc.
In the Western world, one of the strongest identity concepts of the person is the work activity carried out and the place where it is carried out, therefore employment occupies a place of identity for the person: Production Manager, boss in a company Consultant, employee in a first-line Service Company, etc., there is a social appreciation to belong to the staff of an organization, the greater the prestige of the company, the greater that of the person.
This is because the paradigm of postmodernity presents us with work and employment with the same entity.
It is important to know that work is the very existence of man, it is the force that is applied physically and mentally to the execution of something or to achieve something. It is a process that begins the moment we come into the world and ends when we start from it.
On the other hand, structural employment, as we know it today, is a cultural construction of man from an economic situation, in fact this employment model arose in the Industrial Revolution. It undergoes modifications over time according to the needs of the prevailing market, which sets up different requirements for employability and completion of what is known as the economically active life of people.
It is important to incorporate the difference between work and employment. It is necessary to understand that we never stop working, until the last moment of life we work, but in the period where people's intellectual and physical capacities are the most optimal, the economic-social world organizes a time of employment for us, which allows confusing at the time of retirement, the end of employment with the end of work.
It is also the culture that determines through the political, social and economic organizations the productive times of each person. What does this mean? that each of us has culturally established the retirement age of economic organizations, this responds to a social order, which allows the renewal of older adults by young people in the production of wealth and the acquisition of a new status; retired.
If we experience retirement or retirement as an exclusion and not as a process from which no one can escape, we are not going to allow ourselves to plan a new activity. Activity in which the acquired experience can be dumped or simply start a venture. The ability to generate creation is given by the person himself and not by how old he is, an example was Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
Accepting the work life cycle as a stage within a work process allows reflection: what has been done in the past and what will the future be like? The past is unchangeable, the future is ours and we build it on a daily basis.
