Personalizing the Gray Revolution
We are in the midst of a transformation. Though we cannot see it, just as our eye fails to observe the movement of the hour hand, the signs are everywhere. A city council may decide to build a senior center rather than a tee ball field. Newly constructed stairways may have more gradual inclines. Ads promote longevity, not merely the old warhorse, sex. (Some prescription drugs apparently offer both.)
The aging of the global human population is unprecedented. Today Japan alone has more than 30% of its population over age 60. In 2050, 42 nations will have 30% or more over 60, with 10 countries having 40% or more of its population over age 60.
In the United States, workers are skeptical whether Social Security benefits will be available to them at retirement. Given the fall in the number of workers per retiree (from 42-to-1 in 1945 to 3-to-1 today), systemic collapse is a possibility. Health care is likely to be overwhelmed. Massive numbers of individuals with ever increasing life spans may have no meaningful work opportunities. Affluent seniors will experience outliving their money.
On a cultural basis, there is a troubling lack of warmth and empathy in the United States toward the elderly. Even though we may like to believe we are impartial, tests created and administered by Project Implicit (implicit.harvard.edu) reveal unconscious discrimination against seniors. According to Professor Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard University, a most surprising result has been the strength of the prejudice against seniors. "It's the largest bias we see. People don't openly discuss ageism much, like they do racism or sexism, yet its strong presence makes it much more insidious.”
Kofi Annan, former U.N. Secretary General, said that “with age, human beings gain immeasurable depth and breadth of experience and wisdom. That is why older people should be not only respected and revered; they should be utilized as the rich resource to society that they are.” But Mr. Annan’s declaration of hope is far from many seniors’ reality.
Certainly, the elderly should be respected. They represent triumph, humor, tragedy and experience, as well as your future and mine. But when many of us observe the elderly, perhaps as they walk cautiously into a store or theatre, our reaction is often far from positive. Do the elderly simply fail to represent the pleasing aesthetic of our skin-deep society or is the vague negativity their reflection of our own mortality?
Seniors should also be utilized. But companies put productive employees out to pasture. The Big 4 accounting firms, for instance, retire their partners at 62. Remaining employees promise to keep in touch but, after one or two somewhat forced lunches, the retired employee is forgotten. Many retirees feel discarded.
To help ensure that older adults are respected and utilized, we should first strive to achieve greater harmony between the young and old. For example, a program could pair service-minded students and seniors. They could, for instance, attend a ballgame together to facilitate conversation on common ground, or an opera where the senior’s knowledge of the art form may open the student’s mind to its beauty.
We should provide seniors with job counseling and opportunity. Our nation has developed several successful service programs for youths (e.g., Teach for America). We could create a similar blueprint to promote seniors’ talents, following on nonprofits such as ReServe that put older adults to work at a modest wage, for example, as school guidance counselors, music teachers and newsletter editors. Also, seniors also tend to be outsiders in the technological world. Technology training could help reconnect seniors with their communities.
On a broader level, each of us must unlearn our implicit bias against older adults (people significant older than we are). Once the bias is acknowledged, we can use the power of our conscious brain to resist, perhaps by visualizing the present as a dot in time and fast forwarding to the dot where we are that person. Only by recognizing the bias and adopting counterstrategies can each of us stay vigilantly aware, thereby starting us down the road toward a productive co-existence between who we are today and who we will become tomorrow.