Living With Loss: On Samuel Scheffler’s “Aging and theThreat of Normative Poverty”

In Chap. 5 of One Life to Lead, Samuel Scheffler introduces the concept of “normative poverty”—the predicament of older people whose important relationships are mostly “archived” (ended by death). Scheffler argues that such people face a scarcity of relationship-based reasons for action and a tension between honoring past relationships and engaging with the present world. I raise several difficulties for his analysis of loss and argue there is a further aspect of loss, a way in which loss can make us come undone, which Scheffler’s treatment does not account for.