Image by Erik McLean on Unsplash

I’ve been on many long, cross-country drives. Sometimes you’re so tired you have to force yourself to stay awake. All you can think of is finding your exit and finding your motel in the dark, and you hope like hell they didn’t lose your reservation.

And sometimes you see signs, “Last exit in Nowheresville.” If you miss that exit, you’ll be driving for a while.

When you’re in a hospital or “care facility,” you could reach a point when you’re ready to stop. There’s no point in going on. You won’t make it to the next town. You want to grab that last exit. Of course, the kindly medical people want to keep you on the road, half-zonked and wholly miserable. You’re ready to take that exit and never get back on the road again.

That’s how I envision the end-of-life experience. You’re tired. You’ve been driving for a long time. You’re ready to crash somewhere and rest.

You don’t need someone to say, “But don’t you want to keep going? Get a few more miles before you call it a night.”

Those next few miles will be sheer misery. And if you don’t stop now, the ending might be a lot more ugly.

The best book on the subject comes from Susan Jacoby (Never Say Die). People who have no way to enjoy a meaningful life on their own terms should be allowed to leave on their own terms.

Jacoby tells the story of a man who was forced to replace “living alone” with “living with a caretaker.” One day the man stole the caretaker’s car keys, drove to the nearest bridge, and jumped.

It’s not suicide, says Jacoby. It’s a rational choice. He shouldn’t have been forced to jump off a bridge. Some people would have been happy with his life, but he wasn’t. He was ready to go. No amount of therapy or medications could change him.

In today’s world, you aren’t always protected by a DNR or advance directive.

ER doctors have been known to follow procedures first and ask questions later. Nobody knows how many of those “give me everything!” people were responding to exaggerated promises: “A few days and you’ll be back to normal.”

Somebody’s got to be there advocating for you — and in some cases, advocating pretty aggressively. It’s not enough to have that paper in your file. Your designated medical proxy is on vacation in Bali and you’re in New York? Too bad for you.

Here’s my proposal for achieving a comfortable End of Life.

First, you get to record your DNR as a tattoo or bracelet. Why should you need an in-person proxy when someone can link to your digital records? The IRS already has records of our past lives: you’ll be asked to remember where you lived twenty years ago when you’re claiming your refund. A tattoo could be a URL or a QR code linked to your living will.

Then, as mentioned earlier, the day you become eligible for Medicare and Social Security, you would be allowed to request your very own cyanide pill, to use as you like, whenever you like, no questions asked.

You would also be offered a gift certificate to a hitman in the nearest Mafia enclave. It’s quick and final. And for a little extra cash, your death will get written up as an accident or unsolved murder. For those who worry about their family’s guilt, this solution works perfectly.

As a marketing pro, I’d argue that giving out cyanide pills could end up making the elderly life worth living. If we could choose to die before we got to the nursing home, the homes would be empty. And the “care managers would be motivated to find a way to fill them up again.

Imagine the ad: “No need to take your cyanide pill! Come to Magnificent Manor.”

Of course, some of us would take the pill anyway. But I bet a lot of things would get a lot better.

NOTE: This is taken directly from my book on aging.

The post When it’s time to leave the party, send up a limo, not a bus. appeared first on .

Image by Ylanite Koppens from Pixabay

When I think of “sage” I tend to think of spice you use on poultry. You can also sage your home to drive off the bad spirits.

When you think about it, assuming people over, say, sixty are “sages” can be just as stereotypical and destructive as assuming they’re technological idiots.

Where else do we ascribe good things to a demographic group, universally?

Hopefully we’re beyond saying:
“Black people have rhythm.”
“Asians are natural mathematicians and engineers.”
“Gay men are fashion experts.”

The last one cracks me up (even though Joan Rivers used to joke about it). I once had a gay neighbor who wore plumbers-crack jeans and oversize sleeveless t-shirts with holes.

So why do we say, “Older people …say, over sixty … are filled with wisdom?

(1) It’s just not true.

Not all people over a certain age are wise. Just take a look at some politicians around the world.

A sixty-plus woman can deny climate change, insist that abstinence is the cure for teen sex, and believe fervently that anyone who doesn’t share her beliefs will go straight to hell - literally.

Another sixty-plus woman can believe that we’re too puritanical, teens should be initiated into sex and there’s no such thing as hell.

(2) Giving people pseudo-respect comes across as patronizing.

“You’ve got experience. You have so much to offer!” resembles the way people speak to the five-year-old who stumbles across the stage in an ill-fitting ballet costume: “Wow - you’re such a good dancer, honey!”

(3) Who wants a sage in an ordinary workplace?

Not everyone over 60 will be qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice or Minority Leader of the US House of Representative or a professional basketball coach.

But millions of “older” people will seek opportunities to hold jobs or get clients for their own business. They want to be compensated based on the value they can deliver.

But who wants to hire a sage? Who wants to work alongside a sage?

Some writers are so committed to the “age and wisdom” connection, they invent definitions of wisdom. The New York Times published an article by John Leland, The Wisdom of the Aged.

The article quotes Monika Ardelt, a scholar who writes on aging: “Older people still have a lot to offer to us, even if only how to die and age gracefully.”

Sounds nice…but it’s yet another way to isolate and disparage “older people.”

For most of our lives, we aren’t interested in learning how to die and age gracefully. Businesses want to hire competent people who can pull their own weight and become good colleagues. They want someone who will be just another person…someone who will get along with others and contribute value to the organization.
Very few sustainable businesses offer to help people “die and age gracefully.” Most business owners aren’t interested.

Sadly, the stereotypes suggest it’s impossible for anyone over sixty to be “just another person.”
The stereotypes say, “Can’t learn tech.”

The less obvious stereotypes say, “Older people will be sages who will sit on their cushions on top of the mountain and utter sage words about the meaning of life.”

Assuming wisdom comes with age is just as stereotypical as assuming people automatically get mentally and physically weak as they age. The variance gets wider as people get older.

Next time you hear someone talk the value of the “wisdom” of an older person, stop and correct them. Some older people are wise. Some are, frankly, just the opposite.

And many just want an opportunity to be recognized for what they can contribute - their skills and expertise.

Age? Irrelevant.

The post “You’re so wise…” is not a compliment appeared first on .

The article quotes Janet Baseman, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington and presumably an expert:

“I think the risk is not super high for relatively healthy and boosted people in their 70s,” Janet Baseman, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, told me. “I think it’s moderate at most.”

So what more do we need to know? This response echoes other comments from doctors about Covid-19. which I reported in this article. But if we stopped there, we’d have no story to fill the Times column-inches.

Baseman goes on to say “that if she were in her 70s, her primary worry would be getting moderately ill, needing standard medical care and not being able to get it at an overwhelmed hospital.”

Wait….being moderately ill isn’t the same as having moderate risk. Moderately ill patients are defined as needing hospital care but not “organ support..”

It’s not clear what’s meant by “moderate risk.” The only definition I could find refers to long-term health conditions that aren’t immediately life-threatening but could cause problems later, such as pre-diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.

Regardless, we’ve got some muddy thinking here.

Even worse, the article lumps all 75-year-old women together. The author seems to have listened to “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” a few too many times. Many 75-year-old women have comorbidities. Many live in some form of assisted living or even nursing homes. Without controlling for those factors, the numbers are meaningless…and of no particular relevance to any 75-year-old reading this article. You have “older” people like Willie Murphy, the body-builder who attacked a burglar in her home. You have people like the late Olga Kotelko, who died at 93 a few weeks after competing in track and field events. You have thousands of men and women competing in senior games…and even more who are healthy and trying to stay that way, despite the best efforts of their doctors.

The 75-year-old women I know are less concerned of dying from Covid than of living long enough to end up in nursing homes, where 25-40% of the residents are abused. Every time an article gets published about the horrors of these homes, hundreds of readers write comments to express their wish for easier access to assisted dying.

They’re frustrated with doctors who treat them like children, catastrophize minor problems or dismissively ask, “What do you expect, at your age?” They’re tired of doctors who lack understanding of the physiology of people over 50 and who impose meaningless tests, such as EKG’s with an 80% false positive rate that were never intended for screening healthy people.

At a certain point in life people stop fearing death. They’re more concerned with how they will die and how to avoid. the tortures conceived by the medical industrial complex. After all, spies in World War II got cyanide pills they could use to avoid torture; nobody suggested they see a psychiatrist first. They knew torture when they saw it, and so do older people today.

Articles like this portray older people as uniformly weak and unhealthy. They make it difficult (if not impossible) for anyone over 6o to be taken seriously. I shudder to think how many well-meaning adult children will insist that their healthy parents take precautions that will do little to affect their health and well-being, but do more to take away meaning and happiness from the time they have left.

The post “Older People” And Covid appeared first on .

Mary Pipher writes, “In America, ageism is a bigger problem for women than aging… we are denigrated by mother-in-law jokes…” Mother-in-law jokes are mild. What about those grandma and geezer jokes?

There’s no place for a woman who wants to keep working, who’s up to date with tech and social media, who’s lucky enough to be going to zumba class instead of medical appointments. She’s still treated as “cute” and subjected to patronizing, insensitive remarks on a daily basis. Potential employers look at her face — not her fitness levels — and the stereotypes surrounding age. They point to movies that reinforce stereotypes, such as The Intern.

No other disadvantaged group is expected to tolerate this degree of disrespect and discrimination, and still come out smiling and praised for being resilient “in spite of…” this treatment. We should be fighting for our rights instead of celebrating our vibrancy (which is, as some readers noted, limited to healthy, financially comfortable women).

The Times regularly runs articles about African-American women who experience prejudice in work and in life. Those articles do not run with the subtitle, “Happiness is a choice.”

And if you’re not healthy, you’ll be treated patronizingly by the medical profession. You’ll be subject to abuse in many institutions. You’ll likely be overmedicated and over-treated. Read Christiane Northrup’s book, Goddesses Never Age. Read anything by Gilbert Welch on overdiagnosis.

Would we tell other groups (such as African-Americans) that “happiness is a choice” and dismiss these very real assaults on their personhood? I think not.

The post The Joy Of Being A Woman In Her 70s — who are we kidding? appeared first on .

For instance Marc says he has three young children and no grandparents close by. “Our silver-haired safety net is located two doors down. Our quirky, engaging eighty-something neighbors …have become quasi-grandparents for our children… “

Freedman notes institutional factors that help older people: social acuity, Medicare and … AARP?! The truth is, many people avoid AARP because of their overly aggressive advertising (I stopped them by sending a public Facebook message) and because it’s not clear how they really help older Americans. In the last election, the two main party candidates differed significantly in their positions on Medicare and Social Security; one clearly would benefit recipients more than the other. Yet AARP remained steadfastly neutral, merely reporting what each side said.

AARP supported the drug “donut hole.” And AARP is, above all, an insurance company, which many people believe is sub-par in both value and customer service. You can just look at the comments under most AARP articles. r

Freedman points to Experience Corps as a model of ways to help both seniors and children. In fact Experience Corps seems to target “vulnerable older adults.” Their web page includes an excerpt from a newspaper article, “Older citizens have time on their hands and skills to share.” Really? Could this be another stereotype.

Freedman praises the movie The Intern as a “great example” of introducing an older person into a Millennial environment. In fact, the notion that older people need to become low-paid (or no-paid) interns seems preposterous. It’s not unusual for companies to hire executives who bring special skills to the table, even if they’re not familiar with all aspects of the organization. DeNiro reinforced many stereotypes — tech-challenged, always wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. Today’s executives of all ages are likely to show up in business casual or even jeans and sneakers. A Pew Trust survey found that 67% of adults ages 65 and older say they go online, in contrast to just 14% in 2000.

Freedman takes a top-down view of aging, talking to people who create services, products or policy for older people. He talks to architects who offer innovative cross-generation housing. He talks to academics and authors. But the “boots on the ground” older people often don’t want any part of that. They want integrated housing but that means they want to live in an ordinary neighborhood or apartment with people of all ages. They want to work in real jobs for market wages and growth opportunities. These days, five years is a long time in any job, so they have time.

The truth is, some people — age 18 to 80 — just naturally enjoy working with children. Some others in the same age group would rather work in a for-profit environment as a contributor, not an intern. Some people are simply not qualified, by temperament or skill, to work with children. And many younger adults can afford to pay a coach or consultant to mentor them.

The workplace is the single biggest area of ageism (closely followed by the medical profession, which tends to pathologize medicate normal aging processes. See Christiane Northup’s excellent book, Goddesses Never Age.)

Finally, many older people aren’t afraid of dying. They’re more afraid of ending up in a nursing home, where many will be abused. They want to die with dignity. The advice to “accept your mortality” seems to apply to a specific segment of the population.

The post Review of Marc Freedman’s new book appeared first on .

Leland’s mother had a DNR.

On p 19, he writes: “Her DNR said to withhold care if she had no reasonable chance of regaining a meaningful life. But this was more like bringing in a hose if the drapes in her room caught fire. Afterward she would return to the life she had in her neat apartment. She had friends and grandchildren she loved; she had matinee concerts at the Philharmonic. People with much less enjoy great lives. It seemed ungrateful to reject that life as not worth living. If she wanted to starve to death she could do it without our help. We approved the tube.”

This is cruel and heartless. Leland seems to be judging his mother and her quality of life. And starving to death isn’t as easy as it seems. One sip of water and it’s over.

He’s able to be more dispassionate with his interview subject, John Sorensen: “None of us really wants immortality on other people’s terms; it’s no kindness to wish a scaled-down version of it on the people who want it least.”

Some quotes:

p 22: “The elders all knew something you can’t get on the Internet, which is how to be old, and how the world looks from the perspective of someone who has lived in it for awhile and who will soon be leaving it.”

And he quotes Monika Ardelt, associate professor of University of Florida … “Older people still have a lot to offer us, even if only how to die and age gracefully.”

How valuable is that information? Most of the time people aren’t preparing to die. They want ordinary conversation about ordinary tings.

p 29: His interviewee Fred describes happiness as “a view from old age — taking satisfaction in what was available right now, not hitching it to the future.” Sounds more like prison than happiness to me!

On the other hand, more people need to be aware of this (p 33): “At eighty-five and up, only 11 percent live in a nursing home or similar facility, and almost two-thirds say they don’t have trouble caring for themselves…It’s just that the least healthy get the most attention–no one gets a grant to remedy the happiness of old people.”

Bg problem of cohort effect… selective memory of happiness.

This is simply bizarre (p 42): “Imagine that: to be free of the future, meaning the sum of all things that probably won’t happen, minus the one that will, which is one’s death. Even if just for a minute, the feeling is like that of first flight, weightless and free. Most of us live with this future every day, laboring under its weight. To think like an old person is to journey unencumbered.”

Ardelt’s study — pp 43-44 – doesn’t have a citation. He summarizes, “Those who scored higher for wisdom were more content with their lives [in nursing homes] — as content as people their age living independently.” I’d really like to see that research.

Quotes Ardelt, “Older people are more …afraid of the dying process. Wise people are more accepting of the dying process.” p 44

p 77 – “It is a received wisdom in our time that married people live longer.” He cites research showing that it just applies to oemen; but Bella DePaulo found that this research is generally flawed. Marriage isn’t associated with happiness or other positive outcomes.

p 91: “Loss is one of life’s great instillers of wisdom, including the wisdom that finds compensation for the capacities we think we can’t live without. Only people in California want it to be sunny every day.”

That’s absurd. There often are no compensations. Giving up things that hold meaning — independence, intellectual stimulation, choices — isn’t the same as wanting sun every day. The remark about California is condescending and should have been edited out.

He notes that decline “is more a relationship of negotiation, with some variation and wiggle room, than a fixed path.” p 91
Older people, he says, “now have statins to keep their hearts ticking, cataract surgery to keep the lights on, artificial hips and knees to keep them walking, and swanky scooters to keep them mobile when the new knees go south.”

Sorry, it’s not that simple. Statins have horrific side effects. Cataract surgery doesn’t always turn out well. Artificial hips aren’t always available. And “swanky scooters?” Would anyone choose them voluntarily?

Even over one year he noticed a decline among those he interviewed.

p 114: “If you believe you are in control of your life, steering it in a course of your choosing, then old age is an affront, because it is a destination you didn’t choose. But if you think of life instead as an improvisation in response to the stream of events coming at you — that is, a response to the world as it is– then old age is more another chapter in a long-running story.”

That’s a way to say, “Accept the bad stuff and be humble.” It’s the same advice you’d give to a prisoner of war. Escape is honorable.

The post From John Leland’s Book: Happiness Is A Choice You Make appeared first on .

The post Is this ad offensive or what… appeared first on .

Paul Westhead was 68 years old when he coached the Phoenix Mercury to a WNBA championship.
Marynell Meadors coached the Atlanta Dream while she was 64 to 69 years old (including playoff appearances).
Bernie Sanders runs for president of the United States at 74.
Donald Trump and Hilly Clinton run for president at 69.
Joan Rivers won The Apprentice at 75.

Nobody would hire people of their ages for a corporate management or academic professorial job.

But it’s important to realize that in some ways these people are outliers. They benefit from a combination of genes and opportunities – seeds sown before they reached their sixties.

When looking at age, it’s about the variance, not the mean.

The post Aging By The Numbers appeared first on .

Their takeaway is, “See how silly ageism looks out in the open?”

But the truth is, the response of people in the video sends the opposite message.

Not one person under 40 questioned the ban on over-40 people. Not one said, “This is illegal.” People who were turned away just accepted their fate.

One woman even let her mother be turned away.

Just imagine the sign had said, “White people only.” Or, “We don’t serve gay people.”

The post AARP Food Truck Stunt Shows How AARP Is Clueless appeared first on .

When companies were asked why this was happening, the a”reasons given include worries that they’re not good at technology, that they don’t have computer skills. There’s worries that they’re not active, that they’re slow, that they’re not willing to embrace change. There’s worries that they’re just going to leave…” And these reasons just aren’t true.

And AARP’s recommendations, it turns out, aren’t helpful. Why are we not surprised?

According to this article, AARP told people to write, “I’m willing to embrace change.” People who followed this advice got fewer callbacks.

I’m not surprised. I once told a client to remove the phrase, “Maintain an active lifestyle” from his resume. You’re calling attention to age – and emphasizing that you define yourself by age.

So what can you do?

They suggest, “Volunteer and take classes.”

I’d beg to differ.

I’d say to position yourself away from entry level jobs; you’ll still get discrimination but not as much.

And go back to school to study entrepreneurship. Get the entrepreneurial mindset going earlier rather than later.

The post Age discrimination starts as early as …35?! appeared first on .