Sarah Lamb Department of Anthropology Brandeis University (E-mail: lamb@brandeis.edu) On Being (Not) Old: Agency, Self-care, and Life-course Aspirations in the United States This article examines U.S. endeavors to eradicate old age. Drawing on research with older, mostly white, Americans across social classes, I probe how older peo- ple engage in “healthy,” “successful” aging as a moral project, health identity, and way of approaching the life course. Moving beyond influential literature on biopolitics and biomedicine that tends to treat medicine, science, and biopolitical governance as overdetermined causal forces, I explore instead how a confluence of factors—including cultural ideologies of personhood and independence, medical interventions, social hierarchies, and individual experiences—together lead to the stigmatization of oldness. Social inequalities also matter, as an ethos of self-care and individual agency to ward off oldness is most pronounced among the able-bodied and socioeconomic elite. The aim is to illuminate the convergence of factors that stigmatize oldness in contemporary North America, while highlighting the ways that class profoundly figures in people’s varied attempts to not be old. [aging, social class, lifestyle, biopolitics, U.S. society] A retired clerk and jazz percussionist, Stick Fergus at 69 lives in state-subsidized housing for the elderly in a working-class neighborhood of Waltham 15 miles west of Boston. His silver-black hair falls to his shoulders, and he uses forearm crutches to support his lean, pale frame, a ruptured disk and arthritis making movement difficult. During a conversation in Marco’s Pizzeria and Pub on a muggy afternoon in May 2017, Stick remarked that he should be staying active, doing productive things, eating well, and exercising: We live in a culture now where people in their twenties are seriously exercise-conscious, and, uh, . . . now we’re told that it’s probably even more important [in older age] than it is for people in their twenties. ... But I’m not doing it. I’m embarrassed about what I’ve done to myself—physically—and my complete inactivity right now. Unproductivity. Stick continued: “I hate to categorize myself as older,” but he hadn’t succeeded in pushing oldness away. MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Vol. 33, Issue 2, pp. 263–281, ISSN 0745- 5194, online ISSN 1548-1387. C  2018 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/maq.12498 263