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Getting Older and Older
There is a very good chance that people will be able to live longer in the coming decades with many more living to 100 than we have ever seen before. Advances in science can decrease the chances that previous ways that people died, specifically organ failure and disease, can be overcome.
What would a world look like with many people living to 100?
Let’s get out of the way all those people who will live into their 90s and beyond 100 who are really just long-lived physical wrecks, dependent on others to stay alive and spending most of their days watching TV, eating-sleeping-defecating/urinating, and finding ways to pass their days. These people can provide almost no assistance to their relatives in any way in terms of a family unit. They will most likely end up in assisted living of some kind. For these people the impact will be the enormous number of low-paid jobs acting as aides, staffing, and entertainment for these old people.
The next group are the ones who are very vital and their only drawback from getting older will be some diminishment in vision and hearing. They may want to work and keep active to some degree. Workplaces will both gain and lose from having these people present. It may be impossible to fire them due to laws that will become ever more strict concerning ageism. Workplaces will be required to accommodate older workers like a minimum font size of 20 on all documents, noise-level quality checks to minimize background noise that can affect hearing aides, and light quality parameters to make it easier to see when a person has vision limitations.
Old people will also mean less change since it is a well-known paradigm that new ideas are only welcomed when the people who hold old ideas and approaches are removed. In some fields this will not matter much but in fields that change constantly such are the health sciences and engineering that rely on innovation it will only lead to a disparity of opportunities.
More than the physical issues with a workplace, every person who holds a job is filling the place of someone else who could potentially be in the same position, perhaps someone younger. In a word, positions held by elderly but healthy people will lead to a decrease in potential positions that could be held by recent college graduates. These same recent graduates are the ones who start families, buy cars, and pay for vacations among the many other important economic roles that people starting out fulfill.
Many of these healthy elderly will want to stay in their familiar surrounding and not be a burden to their children, who are also getting older. A 100-year old person may have children of 60-80 years old! These ‘kids’ may have problems supporting a parent of that age if the need arises. With this in mind we should anticipate that funding for the health of the elderly will skyrocket. Already we know that one-third of all healthcare dollars go to keeping people alive in the last 3 weeks of life. What will this look like when the time of keeping the barely alive elderly gets stretched to months or years?
How do we handle the issues of people of 70-80 years old who get accused of ‘elder abuse’ by people looking after the welfare of the 100+ year old parents? Often old people need 24-hour care that is physically draining on their near-elderly children and grandchildren.
We need to also understand that fewer people are born in the US today. People with jobs pay taxes to secure the benefits available to everyone in specific circumstances (e.g. WIC, Medicaid, Social Security) and as privilege for reaching certain milestones (e.g. Medicare). Who will pay these large bills if the people who benefit are not working (which we can anticipate will mean most of these healthy old people) or are the young people who can’t get the better jobs held by an increasingly elderly top-tier workforce?
At this time the maximum amount paid out by Social Security occurs when a person doesn’t draw their benefit until they are 72. Some people do not live this long but each year more people will be able to work until this year in their lives which will mean many more people being able to reach this milestone and receive this maximum amount. More than this, there is a good chance that these same people drawing the maximum benefit will live 25-45 more years! Can the US budget handle this many people who are not contributing but actually drawing from this common fund?
We also need to be concerned about security for these older and often frail old people. Will that mean more police patrols near their homes or putting public funds for security for both crime but also as a watch for assisting the elderly with tasks as well as lookouts for evidence of confusion and dementia?
Now we need to discuss the issue of dementia. It is a common occurrence that dementia and Alzheimer’s disease means an end of life within 5 years (what I went through with my mother) but it can also mean a prolonged life of confusion and altered personality which will bring strain to the families of these people. If we can prolong physical life we may also be able to prolong these same people when they are difficult to be around emotionally.
Finally, what will these elderly people do all day? A great deal of money will need to be allocated for their entertainment, whether that is from the families or from the assisted living communities in which they live or even, if these same elderly people vote in a bloc, from the US government. if they have the political power of voting on issues that contribute only to their needs and wants then they will get their way on this.
Let’s face it – we are heading to a future that will be dominated by a graying population that will likely be selfish and expensive!
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