Project Vision 21

I must confess that, without seeking it or wishing it, I have found a method that, given enough patience, allows me to become invisible to others. The method simply consists in waiting for that moment in life when—without a precise date—others not only stop looking at us, but stop seeing us altogether. We have then reached the age of invisibility.

This is not an explicit sanction or a formal exclusion, but something more subtle and harder to endure: a form of silent punishment that does not respond to a fault or a crime, but to an ontological condition. It is the punishment for the “crime” of having reached a certain age.

The invisibility associated with old age requires no moral justification. It does not require guilt. It is enough for a society to accept speed, performance, and novelty as its primary values for people of a certain age—regardless of their life trajectories—to be categorized as “surplus subjects”: individuals who are still there, but to whom no meaningful place is assigned.

This logic is not new. Science fiction intuited it with clarity. In the episode The Obsolete Man of The Twilight Zone (1961), a librarian is declared “obsolete” by a regime that recognizes value only in what is functional. He is not condemned for what he does, but for what he is. The question arises: what happens when society decides that certain human beings are no longer necessary?

Contemporary old age does not operate as a legal sentence, but it shares the same symbolic structure. Older adults are not eliminated, but they are progressively stripped of agency. Fragility is presumed before capability, dependence before judgment. No significant contribution is expected of them anymore.

In the best of cases, they are cared for. In the worst, they are ignored. In both, they are displaced into an ambiguous zone: neither fully inside nor completely outside. A surplus. This invisibility is not only social. It is also bodily.

Social neuroscience has shown that sustained exclusion activates the same brain circuits as physical pain. This is not a minor symbolic wound. Not being seen, not being taken into account, hurts. And when that pain extends over years, it does not numb; it becomes part of the inner landscape.

But here a question arises that goes beyond individual experience. What happens to a society that learns to treat an entire stage of life as residual? Perhaps something more serious than a generational injustice. Perhaps it loses its living relationship with time.

When the past embodied in older people is no longer considered, the future becomes fragile. It is no longer continuity or learning, but mere technical projection. Humanity becomes impoverished at the same pace at which it discards those who came before.

That is why the inevitable question is: What will we do when humanity begins to discard itself as obsolete with the passage of time? What kind of future can a society sustain by punishing the ontological condition of being old?