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The ways in which we refer to ages in life, which stem from social constructs, point to shifting boundaries that are effectively socio-cultural demarcations. The nature of boundaries is inherently dual: they are objective and subjective, external and internal, and they are continually erected and reconstructed with shifting socio-historical and cultural contexts and interactions. They are barriers but also gateways. A series of interviews with young unemployed people in training and with elderly people trying to cope with urban transformations shows that one’s age can either be experienced as a dynamic process of change in one’s relationships with oneself, with others and with one’s environment, or as a process of exclusion and social death.