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Reader Alert: I’m going to be signing copies of my book The AfterWork: Finding Fulfilling Alternatives to Retirement at Browseabout Books in Rehoboth Beach, DE on Saturday, May 23 from 11 am to 1 pm. So if you’re going to be danny ocean (as we say in Balmer) drop in! The book is also on sale at Amazon.
The fact that there are so many of us chronologically gifted adults is being framed as a perplexing problem for society. (And what could be more thrilling than being told your existence is a social problem!)
Yes, there are millions of us in the U.S. who are over 65 years of age. Some of us refuse to stop working. Some of us refuse to leave our mortgage-free houses. Some of us require extensive and expensive medical attention. Some of us refuse to die in a timely fashion.
To hear some people talk, you might think that older lives don’t matter, or at least, are worth less than other people’s lives. Some might go one step farther and suggest that our lives are worthless.
The most egregious example is an essay in the New York Times by Samuel Moyn entitled “Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential.” Moyn, a 54-year-old professor of law and history at Yale University, argues that it is terribly unfair for older adults to control so much power and wealth. They hold some of the best jobs and refuse to budge, and they own “much of the most desirable Real Estate in the country’s best cities,” he claims. Because a higher percentage of older adults vote regularly, they have a disproportionate impact on elections. While older people do deserve Health care, he writes, “they also need incentives to give up accumulated housing, jobs, and wealth.”
Moyn, by the way, has a book coming out next month called Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth – and What to Do About It.
If Moyn’s purpose was to stir up controversy, he succeeded. Janine Vanderburg, CEO of Encore Roadmap, led the charge with a fiery rebuttal. “You read that right. A professor of law and history at an elite university is arguing that older people participate too much in democracy,” she wrote. “Let me be very clear about something: This is ageism.” Vanderburg argued that the wealth inequality isn’t about age, but about class. “The real concentration of wealth in this country sits with the top 1%.” She summed up the article as “a book promotion dressed up as policy analysis.”
“The real conversation we should be having,” adds podcaster and pro-Aging advocate Ande Lyons, “is about why we’ve designed systems that pit generations against each other instead of asking who actually benefits from that narrative.”
Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, economists contend that because of a shortage of younger workers, older adults must stay longer in the job market to keep the Economy humming. To them, we have worth – as long as we’re economically productive.
“There is nothing wrong with supporting people who want or need to work later in life,” writes psychologist Denise Taylor. “The problem arises when employability becomes the dominant lens through which ageing is understood.”
Jane Barratt, a globally recognized advisor and advocate on aging and social policy, also objects to policies that tie aging to usefulness. “Longer life is welcomed because it can still perform,” she writes. While this view opens opportunity for those who in good health who have the “right” work experience, “it has far less to say about those whose lives do not fit that script.” Many older adults contribute by caring for partners and holding families together on reduced income, “yet our redesign efforts continue to center on capacity…. Longer life is supported, so long as it looks purposeful in the right ways.”
And it’s not just economics. On the health care front, the Journal of the American Medical Association published in April a study concluding that there’s no point in screening adults aged 75 or older for colorectal Cancer, as there’s a higher risk that they’ll die from some other disease first. Another study in the same issue looked at whether adults aged 60 and older could discontinue treatment for thyroid disease.
There’s nothing quite like the feeling of being on the losing end of a cost-benefit analysis, when all you’ve done to deserve it is live longer.
Ageism is a common thread in all these intellectual cross currents, certainly. But there is something else going on. Each of these examples is evidence that our longer lives don’t fit neatly into the systems and structures of contemporary society. In short, we are here today, and the systems that were built decades ago have no idea what to do with us. Our existence does not compute.
(Is it just me, or does this remind you of growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s and not fitting neatly into 1950s-era structures of school, work, Family, and Dating?)
We have a few choices. We can roll with systems as they are. We can rant about the inadequacies of those systems. Or we can replace those systems with new ones more appropriate to the longer lives that we are experiencing now, today.
Having tried rolling and ranting, to no avail, I’m ready now to work on replacing. How about you?
