Quick explanation: I tweeted “What if this Pew Research GIF was played on a loop in Times Square?” and my friend Mike Lee made it happen (in our Photoshopped dreams).
What if every conference displayed it on a screen, so that every public conversation in every industry was framed by the context of the coming age boom?
What if we look at this data and ask, as Ai-jen Poo urges us to do:
What joys could getting older and caring for one another bring?
How else might we prepare?
Study up:
- The Next America, by Paul Taylor and the Pew Research Center
- The Age of Dignity, by Ai-jen Poo of Caring Across Generations and the National Domestic Workers Alliance
- Valuing the Invaluable: The Growing Contributions and Costs of Family Caregiving, by Lynn Feinberg, Susan C. Reinhard, Ari Houser, and Rita Choula of the AARP Public Policy Institute
Join the discussion:
- White House Council on Aging (hosting regional forums across the U.S. and on Twitter: #whcoa)
Neat idea. If you and your partners added facial features (mixed ethnicities) that morphed in tandem expression with the animated bar graph (young to old to aged) you would boost the message power and catch even more eyes in busy Times Square. (The gold color fits right into the bling as-is!)
Amazing to think of the social capital the 85+ group represents. They will have witnessed massive social change; they could be among our best teachers.
Yes! On both ideas.
The New America (the Pew Research-produced book and site I link to) tackles the “we’re getting browner and greyer” demographic trends with survey data. I would love to see more artists’ interpretations of it!
And Ai-jen’s book, which I’m reading now, is once again prompting me to dream about how we might learn from people age 85+.
Lots of people are sharing the latest beautiful essay by Oliver Sacks — the one about facing death. I’m re-reading the essay he wrote on the occasion of his 80th birthday. An excerpt:
“My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.”
To be shallow for a moment: Have you seen the 1961 photo of him that’s going around? Stone cold fox. Would more people pay attention to his wisdom if they saw him as a hot guy on a motorcycle rather than as a white-haired grandpa?
First, Ai-jen’s work is some if the most inspiring stuff I’ve ever encountered.
Second, to your remark/inquiry about listening to a stone cold fox, have you seen Dream Rangers? Here’s a link: http://youtu.be/vksdBSVAM6g
Save it until you can really take a desk break, sit back and relax into the question of what it means to live hot at 80+. Hint: it includes motorcycles and the beach.
What would the women’s version be???
Yes, yes, yes. Too many discussions including the very mundane interpersonal ones all the way to large global policy ones miss this. It is comparable to the climate change conversation. We have a few decades before we collapse in water but we are still discussing secondary dimensions. The demographic shift is also a time bomb. We are still acting as if we were getting younger.
So here’s a question: Is there any industry immune from this massive time bomb?
Most of the readers of this blog are health geeks — we know that health care is going to be hit hard. And lots of speakers at the Tampa forum yesterday focused on the financial impact — one urged women to think of retirement savings as a 35-year pregnancy (i.e., you read up and planned for your pending motherhood, why not do the same for your old age?)
I see it also hitting:
– technology design (phones, wearables, websites, apps…)
– transportation (self-driving cars can’t come quick enough in my opinion)
– city planning
– building design
But again: Are there any industries immune to it?
it changes everything, some EU countries have been restructuring the financing and the practices in healthcare for a while. Strengthening the overall preventive side for instance. But this demographics shift changes or should challenge transport, education, city design, food, transgenerational solidarity assumptions, governance, volunteering, I cannot think of anything that is not challenged and therefore provides opportunities. It changes even how wars are fought… May be we will get more peaceful…
Brilliant, Susannah! This looping graphic is both visually compelling as well as conversation generating. The baby boomers have moved social change for the past 5 decades but often reactively; wouldn’t it be great to consider how we, as this large group, could proactively move change?
Lots of food for thought,
Pam
Go, Boomers, go! Be your best, rabble-rousing selves and demand what we, the generations coming after you, will need.
E-patient Dave upgraded the Pew Research graphic to account for population growth. Check it out in his happy 65th birthday post (and btw, HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAL!)
So, this is what it’s come to – for my 65th birthday I get a wave from your comment stream?? Ha ha ha ha… 🙂 🙂
I really do like the added information that’s conveyed by the stretched-and-squished version of the Next America graphic, so for ready reference I’ve just added an “anchor” tag so you can get at it directly, and gave it a bit.ly URL: http://dave.pt/pewbeehives (same as http://bit.ly/pewbeehives)
See also my notes below that graphic:
— When I was born, 8% of America was 65+. Today it’s 16%. When I turn 100, it’ll be 22%.
— When I was born, for every worker 22-64 we had 0.15 elders.
— Today every worker has twice that.
— In 2050 it’ll be almost triple (0.42 elders – every working age person will have almost half an elder to support!)
Look seriously at the 2050 graphic. The right half of those is women, the left half is men. In 2015, 3% of the US population will be women over age 85.
Then there’s the ever-popular 2013 post by surgeon Jon White, more than half the humans who’ve ever been 65 are alive today.
Can you spell “unprecedented”? I knew that you could.
btw, re “any industry unaffected” – one change I’ve already observed is the shift to ordinary helpful things getting de-hospital-ugly-ized and normal-person-nice-ized. Example: walkers and canes. The first elder I lived with, in the 1980s, had devices that were just plain ugly; I wondered out loud why some consumer company didn’t get into the biz. Then Rubbermaid did (!) and made colorful or even playful canes, sold on stands in ordinary stores. Watch for more of this.
What I’m secretly looking for is for ALL of medicine to be undercut and embarrassed by invaders who look at all parts of medicine and say “Does this have to be so annoying, embarrassing and ugly??” and answer “I bet not – here, try this.”
And as you say, as we self-centered(? idealistic?) boomers become an unmissable demographic (who no longer need to get a rat’s patoot what anyone thinks), I do bet we’ll vote with our voices.
Yes! Entrepreneurs solving their own problems. I’ve been reading more articles recently about “older” women (50+) in Silicon Valley, like Cindy Gallop and Lisa Maki, and how they are bringing new perspective to the problems we face.
For more, see:
http://connectedsocialmedia.com/12451/tech-tonics-lisa-maki-and-the-power-of-empathy-to-develop-health-care-solutions/
http://www.inc.com/welcome.html?destination=http://www.inc.com/kimberly-weisul/why-the-next-mark-zuckerberg-is-female.html
And also:
http://www.rwjf.org/en/about-rwjf/newsroom/features-and-articles/what-s-next-health/Whats-Next-Health-nate-garvis.html
Side note:
I published a similar post on Medium and the traffic to it has been building over the last few days. “Prepare” has, as of right now, been viewed over 6,200 times and 46 people have recommended it (which boosts it into their followers’ feeds). Fun!
One challenge of the Medium platform is that there is not a lot of space for comments — just 100 characters in the side bar — but you can post a “response” that is like a separate essay attached to the original. It’s an interesting model, very different from a blog like this one, which encourages conversation.
So here’s the thing: someone posted a response that simply reads:
…What?
What’s the point of this article? There are lots of Baby Boomers? Is there anything beyond that?
How would YOU respond?
Midair, short flight – I’m just place-holding my initial gut “hoo BOY!” reaction to THAT question.
I bet that question didn’t come from someone who’s studying healthcare. If so, it reinforces that a spreading conversation creates an eternal need for primers.
Here’s where memorable short URLs come in handy – http://dave.pt/pewbeehives … ask ’em to think about who’ll pay for what and for whom. (I hope to go do that tomorrow – just can’t now)
Yes.
You taught me — and the Pew Research Center — that lesson when you suggested we create a “fact sheet” about our health/tech research. Now the fact sheets — on many topics — are a separate product line and often more popular than any of the reports week to week — and certainly in cumulative traffic.
Spreading the conversation is what I’m all about, so I welcome the chance to address an honest question, which I’m going to believe that this is.
Continuing on this side note – I’ll repeat the usefulness of memorable URLs. bit.ly lets you customize a shortened URL – the Pew one I made (for my own benefit!) is bit.ly/pewhealthtips
I wrote a response:
https://medium.com/@SusannahFox/welcome-e02a0f1a975d
Welcome
We need to include people like you in this conversation.
“What’s the point of this article?” has a wonderful edge to it, a challenge, like I wasted a minute of your time by drawing your attention to the coming age boom.
I’ll answer it by telling you why I care.
I have seen the projections for health care costs for the coming decades and wondered, “Who is going to pay for that?”
My heart was broken by the financial crisis and the way it wiped out millions of people’s hopes for a comfortable retirement.
I have followed the debates over the Social Security system and pension reform with a growing sense of dread.
I have had the privilege of being a caregiver to loved ones in their 80s and 90s and seen, up close, how beautiful and difficult that time of life can be.
I have watched, with empathy, as people navigate life on crutches, using a wheelchair, or with low vision.
I have been flummoxed by new technology and have had to ask my sons for help (and I work in the tech industry).
The original article took me about 10 minutes to write and Medium says it takes 1 minute to read. What I hope is that it’s an appetizer for you and anyone else who isn’t as steeped in the debate as I am.
Please dig in further. Explore the links. Talk to your parents and grandparents about their hopes and dreams for the years ahead. Think about your own vision for your “golden years.” How might we prepare now to make those dreams come true?
That’s the point. And again: Welcome.
Great post! This is the first time that I’ve seen that GIF, and it really gets the point across.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen this before, but it’s got similar data for the US and the rest of the world: http://populationpyramid.net
I’ll keep a lookout for the billboard the next time I’m in Times Square 😉