Source: sciencedirect.com
Nearly one-third of home health and personal care workers are 55 or older. Another large category of workers employing a disproportionate share of older workers is maids and housekeeping cleaners, 29% of whom are 55 or older and 54% of whom are working poor. And older workers make up 34% of another hard job: janitorial services, about half of whom are working poor. (For a benchmark, 23% of all workers are 55 and up.)
Source: tomdispatch.com
Old age is something that Christ did not experience on Earth, for he died in his prime, the strength of his young manhood brought to nothing in a single day. Old age, no less than childhood, youth and middle age, has its peculiar trials and its peculiar delights. My business as a Christian, then, is to let Christ grow old in me, to let him sanctify and use whatever my last years involve alike of joy and pain.
Source: plough.com
Getting too old to do a job isn’t a matter of chronological age. It’s a matter of being lucid enough to know when you should exit the stage before you no longer have what it takes to do the job well.
Source: robertreich.substack.com
Born in 1875, Calment had a life that seems to defy our general sense of historical periods. When she was a teenager, she allegedly sold colored pencils to Vincent Van Gogh. And yet somehow she lived long enough to see the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the World Wide Web. She died on August 4, 1997. She was 122 years and 164 days old. As far as we know, no human being has ever enjoyed such a long lifespan.
Source: adjacentpossible.substack.com
As long as you’re not actually dying or having dementia, you just have a lot less to lose. You can color quite a lot further outside the lines, especially compared to young people these days, in an age of anxiety. People are afraid of being beaten up by their peers on social media. They haven’t been hardened in the fire. If you have been hardened, you can just let it rip.
Cato says that aging is in many ways superior to what precedes it because of the quality of the talk it contains. But he doesn’t make good on that promise; Cicero’s letters do. Aging is bound to contain tragedy. It is not, however, bound to contain comedy, or understanding, or love. What supplies all of these is friendship.
Source: antigonejournal.com
It's 2040.
The American President has just been elected for a second term. She won as a third-party candidate as a result of the reforms to the electoral college in the 2030s that finally broke the stranglehold of the two-party system. While her platform for addressing climate change and disaster support for parts of East Coast cities that are now underwater was supported by most Americans, it was her policies around the New Longevity Deal that gave her the landslide win.
Much like landmark policy movements of the past such as the New Deal, The Great Society, and the Inflation Reduction Act, the New Longevity Deal ushered in changes that in this case impacted the rapidly aging American population. Nearly half of the country’s citizens are in their forties or older. One in five Americans, nearly 80 million, are 65 and over. By 2060, it is anticipated that over 90 million Americans will be 65 or over, including the Millennials. Life expectancies are growing, too. There are already several hundred thousand Americans who are 100 years old or older, and that number will grow to more than 3 million by 2100. This expanded voting bloc of the older population has had a profound effect on both elections and federal legislation.
The New Longevity Deal has addressed issues with Social Security and Medicare benefits, leading to new governmental policies to enhance healthcare and a social net for aging citizens. It provides massive re-training programs for people over 50, as well as creating a new Job Corps for those over 65 to allow them to continue to earn an income. There are 44 million people over 75 who both need and want to work, especially as they prepare for longer lives. Federal laws have been put in place to require every employer to provide a 401(k) type program to prepare people for long term economic stability and penalties have been established for any company that has mandatory retirement age policies. Tax incentives have been introduced for older workers staying on longer in the workplace, as well as incentives for employers who hire older workers. In addition, new models of public-private partnerships and nonprofit organizations are in place to enhance ways to support older Americans, particularly those in low-income areas.
The Deal has provided tax credits, incentives, and low interest loans for companies that have a focus on products and services are that targeted to an older population—particularly those focused on technology, mobility, and medical advancements for longer, healthy living. A new Cabinet of Longevity has been created by the Administration to oversee the government’s involvement. Inspired in part by the Singapore government’s policy efforts on “The Future of Aging,” the U.S has now studied the 70 initiatives from that approach to see what can be adapted to American society.
It has all been the byproduct of the social movement that started in the mid 2020s, as the Boomers began to challenge how older people were being ignored by government and business and how they’ve been portrayed in entertainment and marketing. As they continue to vote at the polls and with their dollars, they reject candidates and brands that ignore the needs of older Americans and have outdated images of over-50 people in their advertising. Instead, they support new brands that have been created to attract the new wave of older Americans who remain fit, tech-savvy, vital, and involved. The Baby Boomers were the original activists that embraced civil rights, the women's movement, Earth Day, and more. In the 2020s, they took up their next cause—challenging all notions of aging, not just for them but for the following generations.
Source: esquire.com
So no, age is not a number. It is a marking of our time here on earth and a sign that, unlike our dreams of youth, we will not be here forever. Yet seeing what we can do now and with our faculties can be rewarding. The opportunity awaits us.
Source: forbes.com
The Saudi royal family has started a not-for-profit organization called the Hevolution Foundation that plans to spend up to $1 billion a year of its oil wealth supporting basic research on the biology of aging and finding ways to extend the number of years people live in good health, a concept known as “health span.”
Source: technologyreview.com
In a book called “Aging Well,” Vaillant wrote that six factors predicted healthy aging for the Harvard men: physical activity, absence of alcohol abuse and smoking, having mature mechanisms to cope with life’s ups and downs, and enjoying both a healthy weight and a stable marriage. For the inner-city men, education was an additional factor. “The more education the inner city men obtained,” wrote Vaillant, “the more likely they were to stop smoking, eat sensibly, and use alcohol in moderation.”
Source: news.harvard.edu
If you look at C. elegans, a little worm, the world record for extending the life span of that animal is 10-fold. For humans that would be unbelievable, right? A thousand years. But if you go up the evolutionary scale just a little bit, to the fruit fly Drosophila, it’s maybe twofold. And then if you go to a mouse, most of the really high-profile papers extend its life span maybe 20%, sometimes 30%. So think about the difference between a mouse and a human. We’re something like 97% genetically identical, meaning we have the same genes. And yet there’s a 30-fold difference in our life span.
Source: technologyreview.com
Do not think that thoughtful design is just for the elderly, or the sick, or the disabled. In the field of design, this is called “inclusive design” for a reason: It helps everyone. Curb cuts were meant to help people who had trouble walking, but it helps anyone wheeling things: carts, baby carriages, suitcases. Closed captions are used in noisy bars. As Kat Holmes points out in her book Mismatch, all of us are disabled now and then. Some of us have permanent disabilities, but all of us have suffered from situational and temporary problems. When outside in the sun, the text message that just arrived is unreadable: wouldn’t it be nice if the display, whether cellphone, watch, or tablet, could switch to large, higher contrast lettering? Are elderly people handicapped? Maybe, but so is a young, athletic parent while carrying a baby on one arm and a bag of groceries in the other (and perhaps trying to open their car door). Ride-share bicycles and scooters cannot be used by people who need to carry bulky packages. Everyone has difficulty hearing people in noisy environments. Noise-canceling headphones are for everyone, not just the elderly. Almost anything that will help the elderly population will end up helping everyone.
Source: Fast Company
Time spent in solitude is critical for getting in touch with fears and hang-ups that hold you back. Set the stage by starting with a favorite spiritual passage or Mary Oliver poem. Read something that stirs you, put it aside and allow your mind to rest until some new thoughts or images surface. If you follow this practice a few times a week you should feel clearer and calmer.
Source: wowblog.me
I thought the odds of ending up in some evil nursing home were pretty good if I lived long enough. It turns out that when I started this project a decade ago, the percentage of Americans over 65 in nursing homes was only 4 percent. I would have guessed 20 or 30 percent. It’s now 2.5 percent and dropping. Even for people 85 and up, it’s only 9 percent. And Alzheimer’s is not typical of aging. One in ten people 65 and up develop the condition, which means 90 percent don’t. Alzheimer’s is a terrifying disease and a massive public health challenge—mainly because we don’t support caregivers—but what most people don’t know is that the rates are declining. So, our fears are out of proportion, which itself is harmful because stress and anxiety are bad for our health.
Source: celadonbooks.com
The US Food and Drug Administration issued an alert Tuesday, February 19, warning older consumers against seeking infusions of blood plasma harvested from younger people. Despite being peddled as anti-aging treatments and cures for a range of conditions, the transfusions are unproven and potentially harmful.
Source: Ars Technica