The Dialectic of Aging
America is facing rapid population aging along with most western nations. Increasing longevity can either be a demographic crisis or an unprecedented opportunity for social engagement.
The alarm goes off at 5:30. You blink your eyes with a sense of … call it joy. You get dressed in a hurry and join your friends at the golf course, with everyone boisterous and teasing. After taking a sip of your mocha latte, and just as the sun peeks over the high desert floor, you address the ball, hitting a perfect drive. You feel a sense of enthusiasm about the day ahead: after golf, there will be a healthy afternoon brunch to celebrate a friend’s 80th birthday. Then in the evening, your beloved and you will have a sushi dinner and dance into late evening.
The alarm goes off at 5:30. You struggle to get out of bed, feeling your age, and wishing this were Wednesday, your free day. You get dressed and in the mirror, you see someone out of character. The uniform fits … but it doesn’t. You hurry to get there on time. As the sun peeks through tinted glass windows, a rough-looking trucker sidles up to the counter. He growls, “Egg McMuffin…coffee.” Feeling demeaned as always, you manage a cautious smile and say, “Sir, you can get two McMuffins for the price of one today.” Instead of camaraderie with this stranger, you feel an overwhelming sense of irrelevance.
Two very different views of retirement. Which works best for you? The first or the second scenario?
Most of us select the first: an idealized view of retirement as a weekend that never ends. Golf, friends, plenty of resources for travel, sumptuous meals at will…plenty of money, plenty of time.
The future is not promising the first scenario for many in my generation … the Baby Boomers. Somewhere between one-third to one-half of us will not be able to afford the luxuries implied in the first scenario. This group will barely have enough to pay the basic costs of living, and many will need to work at least part-time to supplement meager entitlements and skimpy savings.
America is facing a demographic crisis. An unprecedented number of people have entered the retirement stage of life. Half of all the people who have ever managed to live to 65 in all of human history are alive today. One in five people will be over 65 in 20 years.
What will America be like? Some have compared America in twenty years to Florida today, a vast sea of gray and stooped-over citizens. This is called the “Floridization of America.” But this understates what we can expect.
Suffice it to say that there will be an abundance of senior citizens and an insufficient traditional tax base to support the high costs of Social Security and Medicare.
Retirement as leisure entrepreneurs, most notably Del Webb and Arizona’s Sun City development, gave us an idealized view of retirement: segregation, disengagement, and leisure — a never-ending holiday. The first scenario I described, while initially attractive to overworked men and women in late middle age, is a twentieth-century phenomenon … and in my opinion a disastrous view of the end of life.
Society has forgotten much. Older Americans were once a central part of the social fabric, and old age was viewed with reverence. Older adults played an economic, educational, and social role that the young embraced with respect.
Today, the attitude is more often expressed this way: “We have met the enemy, and he is the elderly us.” Today’s elderly could be described as a growing majority of people with unprecedented health, resources, and time in a society that has no place for them. One cynic observed: “Retirement is the absence of ideas about what to do with oneself.”
How many of you are familiar with the Hegelian Dialectic? It’s not a common construct, but it presents a comprehensible context for understanding social evolution. The Dialectic suggests that, on the one hand, we have a thesis: in this case retirement as segregation, leisure, and disengagement. On the other, we have an antithesis: nonexistent retirement. We labor until we drop; we’re too poor to stop working during the final years of life.
When these two forces collide — in politics, social policies, or whatever — eventually we achieve a synthesis. This would be retirement as an integration of leisure and work, suited to the needs of an older person. But here is the most important quality of this evolution: work and leisure become the same.
It’s a new view of traditional leisure retirement as a time of vital engagement where our oldest citizens make their greatest contributions.
It’s the view we have of President Jimmy Carter who has achieved his finest hours since leaving the presidency. A goodwill ambassador to the world, Mr. Carter has devoted much of his post-retirement life to Habitat for Humanity, sweating both as a hammer-wielding carpenter and a visionary of greater social justice. Jimmy Carter accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for all his accomplishments since he was the nation’s chief executive.
This is a vision of the future we Boomers must embrace. Not only must we discard the outdated view of retirement as the golden years — which for many of us because of economic shortcomings will never become a realized dream anyway — we must change the way society looks at this traditional time of disengagement and irrelevance. We must change what it means to grow old in America: that the final third age of life is the greatest time of relevance, social value, and contributions to our nation’s long-term welfare.
Those here who are younger must eventually embrace the same ideals so that when your old age arrives in the middle of this century, you too will find meaning, value, and third-age lives built on purpose — you will be enjoying relationships built on purpose. That’s our potential legacy … the aging of America could become a civic renaissance where the true wealth of the oldest is what they give back in their final years: wisdom, experience, meaningful change, and time.
So instead of the less fortunate of this huge generation ending up as greeters at Wal-Mart or asking you if they can “super size your fries,” the future can bring us a mobilization of opportunities for senior citizens, where those who need an income, receive one for meaningful public service work. Those who don’t need paid work still receive a more valuable currency: service to society and the younger generations.
For this idealistic vision to happen, we must change the way we think about old age. As importantly, society must learn to discard its prejudices: that the elderly are selfish, we can’t afford them, and America is hurling to inevitable generational warfare.
He retired at 62 after years of service to the Federal Housing Administration. True to his generation, initially he looked upon retirement as a time to perfect his golf swing and catch fish. But he quickly became restless, so he volunteered to become a lobbyist for the National Association of Retired Federal Employees. His firebrand nature served him well because legislators have always looked upon this huge retirement fund as a piggy bank from which to make withdrawals to supplement budget deficits. He fought many battles to protect this retirement fund from legislative reallocation and borrowing. He was a lifelong member of Kiwanis and participated vigorously into his eighties in many fundraisers.
But the years passed and he became tired and not so physically vital. A time came when old age prohibited active engagement, and society quickly forgot him and his good works. His buddies at Kiwanis and the state legislature forgot him too. The days and nights were then filled with too much television and not enough purpose.
As my friend observed, my dad simply could not survive a lifestyle void of meaning and value. As Henry said, “He finally let go of the reins.”
This is the time for us not to let go of the reins. We must redefine aging … for the sake of our country and each of us. It’s time to bring back some 19th-century values … that the nation’s elderly are a precious resource. It’s time for us to commit ourselves to a belief that retirement must never become a self-absorbed pursuit of the perfect golf swing, nor should it become imprisonment behind the nation’s fast food counters.
The Hegelian Dialectic promises synthesis: a new stage of life where the successes of our middle years transform into the significance of a mobilized, active, elderly population. This is a future worth pursuing.
