The hard truth about getting old
Sixty isn’t the new 40, and 80 isn’t the new 60. I know it. You know it. So why do we buy into it?
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/08/03/lillian_rubin_on_ageism/index.html
I have read several articles about the idea of people having at a minimum 2-3 careers over their lifespan. It used to be that the retirement age (65) was greater than the average lifespan (62 if I recall correctly), but now people are expected to live into their 80s and instead of a negative average spent in retirement now you can expect to spend a full 20 year career in retirement. While I am sure that there are people who would like nothing better than doing nothing, I expect the majority want to have something to occupy their days so they are not just counting down the days until they finally die. One general upside to being ‘retired’ is you are expected to have some level of income, ideally enough to pay all your basic bills. Therefore, it should be trivial to take on any job that is interesting, but pays poorly, so I would expect an infrastructure to build up that would cater to the interests of us old people to engage in some sort of economic activity. What form it will take is hard for me to imagine, particularly with the blatant age discrimination that goes on, but if we can make it socially acceptable for ‘people of age’ to take entry level jobs at entry level wages (though that does confound the problems with unemployment with young people, but according to demographics we are going to start running out of young people (compared to old people) shortly), perhaps we can see a way to dramatically reduce the ‘burden’ of old people on society while simultaneously giving them something to do besides cross off the days until death.
