The New Old Age Isn’t What You Think

speaker-0 (00:03.554)
Hey folks, welcome back. Today we get to speak with Paula Spann. Paula is a columnist with the New York Times, but that said, it always sounds better coming from the person that I’m talking to. So, Paula, welcome. Why don’t you tell us a bit about who you are and what you do.

speaker-1 (00:23.234)
You know, it’s not complicated because I am a lifelong journalist and I’m proud and happy to be able to say that. I’m 76. I’m always upfront about that. And I’ve been a reporter for more than 50 years. So for the past 16 years, I’ve written a column about aging for the New York Times. It’s called the new old age because it is different from the way aging used to be.

And it is now a co-production with KFF Health News as well. And I have written a couple of books and I’m working on one now about octogenarians. And as part of my purpose, because people of all ages need purpose, I helped train the next generation of journalists at Columbia Journalism School and I’ve done that for 20 years also.

speaker-0 (01:13.454)
So let’s start off with what you just said about the new old age, that being older now is different than previously. How is it different?

speaker-1 (01:24.802)
Well, it is vastly different. So the thing people most often think about is, well, it just lasts longer. Longevity has vastly increased. So for our purposes, what matters is not so much life expectancy at birth, but life expectancy at age 65. Because that was the age set for social security initially and for Medicare. For a lot of things, people over 65 are considered

the older generation. And the reason that we could have social security is that once you reached age 65, you would obligingly die a few years later, and it wouldn’t be hard to fund this public pension. Well, now, if you hit age 65, you are likely to live an average of 20 more years if you’re a woman, 18 plus years if you’re a man, that gap is closing. And also the people who get older,

live to be older still because the people who are more sick, more frail have died. So if you are 75, let’s say, you are going to live to be probably late 80s. If you get to 85, you’re going to live into your 90s. So we have this huge chunk of time that we didn’t used to have. But there’s other things that are different too. For one thing, we are far better educated.

And we know that that correlates with earnings and it also correlates with health. So I’ve been looking at these numbers just because of the book that I’m writing. And if you are, let me say this this way. I was born in 1949, the 1950 census, 90 % of people in their eighties did not have a high school diploma and they were poor. Two thirds of them lived in poverty. So now,

40 % of people in their 80s and higher proportions of people that are younger have gone to college, at least some college. And our income, household income at older ages keeps going up. So even though there’s still a fair amount of poverty among elders, it’s about 11%, it used to be 66%. We’re just healthier, we live longer. We’re not…

speaker-1 (03:49.164)
healthy because most people over 60 have some kind of chronic disease. But we’re better at managing chronic diseases and disabilities. So we’re just light years from the way aging used to be. And yet I don’t think in our heads we have made that transition yet. And we’re still afraid of being old. We hate being old. We don’t like to use the word old. We dance around it with all kinds of evasive language.

And we’re not looking at the reality. You know, a lot of people who are old have quite good lives.

speaker-0 (04:25.164)
That leads then to the book that you’re writing. Correct me if I’m wrong, I think it’s titled The Ninth Decade, and you’re focusing on octogenarians.

speaker-1 (04:35.406)
I’m doing that because we don’t pay a lot of attention to people over 80. When you look at data, and there’s a lot of data about aging, it tends to say 65 plus, like one big group. But people who are 85 are really different from people who are 65. And also, I think many of us, we never thought about what our lives were gonna be like in our 80s, because we didn’t expect to live this long.

And we have this, one of the demographers I’ve talked to for this book calls it manufactured time. We didn’t used to have this time. And now we do have this time. And even though there are big disparities by income, by race, by gender, still there are millions of people in the United States who will live into their eighties with a decent quality of life. And so I’m looking at, well, what do you do with that? know, can we have,

healthy, productive, meaningful years still. And my argument is, yeah, we can, but we have to think about it differently. It’s not gonna be like being young, but it can be good.

speaker-0 (05:45.966)
Yeah, that’s one of the annoying things for me is I’m on YouTube, but the stats on YouTube, they get to that last line, it’s at 65 plus. My dad’s 94. He and I are from completely different generations.

speaker-1 (06:02.816)
It’s true. And the census does that. lot of people over 70 and 75 are actually excluded from medical research, which is a stupid thing to do. But with the help of a very useful graduate student that I’ve hired because I’m not so good at this data scraping, you can, in a lot of cases, go into the tables and find the stats.

for the people that are 70 to 85 to 80, 80 to 85, but you have to work at it. We tend not to think that way or look at it because we’re just kind of ignoring the fact that there are now three, okay, I’m not gonna have the numbers and I’m gonna have to look at them. So I’m sorry, I have to edit this part out. But there are three times as many people in their 80s now as there were when I was born. We’re ignoring them and all the people that you see on television commercials,

dancing on the beach, taking cruises. None of them are 80, and yet a number of the people who actually take cruises and dancing lessons and have quite nice lives are over 80.

speaker-0 (07:13.102)
It’s funny, you are now, this has come up numerous times in the last week and a half. So it’s almost like the universe is saying, really talk about the 80s side. Abigail Trafford, who you may be aware of as another columnist. She was saying when she was in her 60s, she interviewed somebody that was 94. And that person said her happiest decade was her 80s.

I had somebody else say something along the same lines to me yesterday. And I’m just wondering why that would be.

speaker-1 (07:50.04)
You know, I don’t, we’re just speculating here, but we know that older people in general are resilient and they are more content and happy than younger people. And probably everyone you talk to tells you about the U-shaped curve of happiness that Laura Carstensen, who’s a psychologist at Stanford published years ago. And it goes like this. So people are very happy when they’re young.

before they’re married, before they’re parents, when they’re getting an education. And then the pressures of midlife, family pressures, financial pressures, just, you know, people are weighted down and the happiness kind of goes down. And then it comes up again at the other side. Now there might be a limit to this. And I don’t know if Dr. Carstensen actually looked at people in their eighties, but it makes a certain amount of sense because there are fewer pressures on you. You have to deal with your health and that’s not always easy. And you know,

You are still dealing with your family and that’s not always easy, but you are who you’re going to be. You don’t have to figure out what’s my life gonna be like? What’s my work gonna be like? Who am I gonna be? That’s, know, much of that is already established. It’s in the rear view mirror and you have the leisure and a fair number of people have the finances to explore who am I now? What brings me pleasure?

How can I leave a legacy for the next generation? The things that are meaningful to people. So I’m not shocked that this is a good decade for people who get through it and come out the other side, which also is an increasing part of the population.

speaker-0 (09:32.866)
Yeah. I’m wondering, you mentioned that there’s a age discrepancy between how long women live and how long men live. And over the decades, I’ve kept on hearing that. I’ve always attributed it to the fact that I’m married to my wife. But that’s a different story. Is there any tie to those additional pressures that may have come around?

speaker-1 (09:58.028)
You know, this disparity has always been there, decades and decades, but it is getting narrow. so, know, men are in gains and longevity. So that age gap is getting smaller. It probably has to do with the number one cause of death in the United States still is heart disease. And men are more prone to heart disease, although women have it too. But men for years died earlier of heart attacks and strokes. And now,

We know how to treat those more effectively. And so the longevity for everybody has increased. Also, people are less likely to smoke. People are more likely to exercise. Not enough, but they are. So this gap is closing. And that’s probably a good thing. It means, for example, that in their 80s and their 70s too, more people are actually married than used to be because

it is easier to repartner after you are widowed. And usually it’s the man who dies first, not always. And so a few years ago, well, a couple of decades ago, there were very high proportions of women that were, of both genders that were widowed. And now more people are married because there’s a bigger pool. There’s more divorce. Divorce is less stigmatized. People are not expected to mourn their

spouses for the next 15 years. So people repartner and they live together. And that also helps with both health and finances, right? Two incomes are better than one. So that’s a different part of the picture too. And there are dating sites for old people.

speaker-0 (11:47.894)
I’ve okay, I’m going to if I ever get into that situation, I’ll have to look that one up. Now you’re I’m running now into more and more people that are writing or are columnists with regards to aging more than I recall there ever being. Is there more and more interest and focus on the

elderly, the senior people, I’m not sure the right terms anymore, but that’s another common.

speaker-1 (12:19.534)
something you can talk about too. Yeah. I think there is. I think that’s a good thing. The new old age column, I started doing it in 2009. Jane Gross, my predecessor started it in I think 2006 or 2007. And we were really out there alone pretty much. It just wasn’t something that people focused on, although there were always researchers, scientists, gerontologists saying, this is coming. This age wave is coming. We should get ready for it.

We just didn’t think about it. You know, we’re a very youth focused culture. We are ageist, you know, in the same way that you can be sexist or racist. You can be ageist and just think old people don’t matter. I don’t want to be one of those. So it was kind of off the table, although there was always a lot of medical research, but there wasn’t a lot of media attention. So part of what’s changed is the media recognizing this has had a number of

training programs at universities through journalistic organizations. I was part of one at Columbia University for years called Age Boom. I’m working in two weeks with a program at City University Graduate School to help train journalists to write about aging. So I do think there’s more attention. And also, we are a big market. We have money. We control a lot of assets. If you are a publisher,

or any kind of other business person, ignoring us does not really make a lot of financial sense.

speaker-0 (13:52.27)
That’s so true. When I was doing the research prior to starting this podcast, what I found was that 70 % of the wealth in the US was owned by people that were 55 and older. Yet the focus of media is on the 20s and 30s.

speaker-1 (14:11.83)
Right, and unfortunately, they’re not really reading us and they’re not watching television news. They are all online. But a lot of publications are online too. But you’re right that there are more people paying attention to this, including Abby Trafford, who I knew at the health section at the Washington Post when we were both there.

speaker-0 (14:32.502)
One of the things, I was talking with Rick Moody, who, former AARP, he’s a VMP, and he’s gonna be doing a podcast under the TTN banner. When the No Kings movement happened, he said when he was looking around, the vast majority of the people there were seniors, were older people. And we got to thinking about how…

The 60s was when that social activism really started. And as people have aged, that social activism has focused on those various different topics. Now that they’re seniors, that activism is still there. In this case, it was with the no-kings. I’m wondering whether there’s going to be a push against ageism as opposed to the sexism from the 60s and 70s.

speaker-1 (15:26.092)
Well, there is that push and there are also laws. Age discrimination in employment and housing is illegal. It happens anyway, but it is illegal. So I do think there is a push against ageism and against a lot of debate about what language you use. But this is really baked into us from a very young age. You probably are familiar with the work of a psychologist at Yale. Her name is Becca Levy and she has written about this

for years and you will find ageist stereotypes in toddlers. is just as you will other kinds of stereotypes. It is hard to get rid of. And like other kinds of stereotypes, we buy into it ourselves. Like every time someone says, what’s that person’s name? I’m having a senior moment. Well, as someone who teaches graduate students who are 22 and 23, I will tell you,

They forget plenty of things, but when they do, they don’t chalk it up to their age. They just say, I forget things. And I always say to them, I am so happy when someone who is 50 years younger than me forgets things. but, you know, Rick is, is right. We were very much shaped in both directions by the Vietnam War and sixties activism and the social movements that have come since. And we also.

we vote more, you we’re much more likely than young people to register and vote. So the idea of being involved in civics, involved in policy, involved in protest has been there for a long time and it’s still true.

speaker-0 (17:11.298)
Yeah. We had put aside the conversation about language and words and that sort of stuff. One of the things I’ve been struggling with for the last several months is simply trying to change the terminology that I use. What are some of the areas that we need to change the way we approach there? Because language at the end of the day will provide those signals of the way we think.

speaker-1 (17:39.246)
Language is very important. It does, it sets the agenda. And just to return for a minute to the work that Becca Levy has done, part of what she has found is that having negative stereotypes about aging in older people themselves has a direct effect, not just on our psychology and do we feel good about ourselves, but on measurable health outcomes like heart disease, dementia, just your physical

ability to function. Your longevity. She followed a couple hundred people in a small Ohio town for several decades and people that had negative images of aging did not live as long. People had positive ideas about aging with seven and a half years longer on average. So language is part of this, how we see ourselves. But I am going to

be an outlier here because the current polite terminology, you can see this changing over the decades. First, we’re aged. No, we don’t like that. We don’t like to be called aged. Then there was elderly. No, that’s no good either. Then there were seniors. Every time you say seniors now, someone says, well, what happens when you graduate? You know, it’s like a joke. So the polite terminology now is older adults. And here’s my take.

I think it doesn’t fundamentally matter what terminology you use because what people are objecting to isn’t really the nomenclature. It’s the status. It’s they don’t want to be old. They don’t want to think about being old. They don’t want to be perceived as being old. And so any language you use will be insulting if it refers to their age. So I am just going to go back and say old people. I’m an old person. I think the mission is not to pretend that we’re not old, not to be evasive.

Not to say, I’m not old, I’m mature. I’m not old, I’m vintage. Oh, stop it. You know, once you’re 76 or younger, I’m old. And the mission is to make it okay to be old, not to keep coming up with euphemisms because no euphemism is euphemistic enough for most Americans to be okay with it because they don’t want to be old. And I really have a sort of, can we get the hell over this?

speaker-0 (20:00.206)
Yeah, I was talking with interviewed Alison Bow from the Act of Retirement Ireland. And one of the things she really tries to be keep focused, they focus on trying to push policy into the Irish government and that sort of thing. Is there’s this trap that people fall into with regards to seniors is talking about dollars, pensions, that sort of thing, as opposed to

changing the mindset, the way that the conversation is going about the active aging, about removing any of the barriers, as opposed to specific things that we always associate with aging. So.

speaker-1 (20:43.244)
You know, I should point out that every publication has its own language style. So when I’m running for the New York Times or for KFF Health News, I have to say older adults. But in my own book, or when I’m just talking as an individual, I say old people and I’m waiting for that intake of breath. I’m not old. Honey, you are. And how can we make that an okay thing to be? You know, one of the problems with ageism is

when we buy into it ourselves, we don’t resist it the way we should. And I would like to invite people to join me in this anti-ageism campaign. And if you don’t like to be called an old person, fine, know, fine. But can we just acknowledge that this is a growing group. It’s fairly powerful. It is fairly affluent. It votes.

We have power that we haven’t even used and I wish we could harness it and not be fighting about how I’m not really old.

speaker-0 (21:52.662)
Yeah, no, it’s, I can’t remember who I was talking to, but when we were talking about ageism, she had mentioned that we have an unconscious ageism for ourselves. We always tend to focus on the ages of somebody else or other entities as opposed to our own. I’m just, I’m too old for this. That sort of thing.

speaker-1 (22:16.12)
You know, I think calling us old people is following in a well-defined path that other groups have set before us. So when I was growing up, you would not call a Negro a black person. That was a slur. And then the 60s and the 70s, black people adopted it themselves. And now it’s, you know, a capitalized way we refer to African-Americans. And similarly, when I was young, you would not

call a gay person queer, because that was also a slur. And now people claim it for themselves. So why can’t we follow that pathway and say, in the same way that activists say we’re here, we’re get used to it, why can’t we say we’re old, we’re bold, get used to it?

speaker-0 (23:02.05)
Yeah, to me it’s it’s I’m so done with the politics of language. just

speaker-1 (23:08.29)
Well, it never ends, but it does tell us something about ourselves that we’re so mincing and careful not to say alt. Come on.

speaker-0 (23:17.686)
Yeah. What’s interesting though, is that I’m starting to see shifts in society where you’re starting to see things like seniors advocates. So yesterday I interviewed Dan Levitt, who’s the senior’s advocate for the BC government, just to understand what he’s doing. And he says, right now here in Canada, there’s four senior’s advocates in the various different provinces.

And that’s increasing. I have to look into it to see whether that’s going on in the States. But the fact that there’s now starting to be a focus and a twist on how everything’s going on and not ignoring that age group is really nice to see.

speaker-1 (24:02.978)
You know, here in New York City, we have a Department of Aging. I’m pretty sure metropolitan areas have some kind of city government function that’s related to age. helps operate senior centers, helps advocate for buses that lower so you can get onto them, puts benches at bus stops so you can sit there for 10 minutes instead of having to stand. Even things like

speaker-0 (24:14.893)
RULE

speaker-1 (24:31.746)
how long does the green light, the walk signal last, you can get across a major intersection? Well, sometimes it’s too brief and you and your walker are halfway across. This is not a good situation. So there’s been, they’re looking at that and it’s very active. And I’m sure most major cities have a similar department.

speaker-0 (24:54.446)
So what do you think the next step, the next thing that’s going to start raising its head is going to be?

speaker-1 (25:02.594)
Well, I think on a couple of fronts, I’m seeing some changes. First of all, let’s acknowledge that the 80s is the decade when most of us die, even though longevity has increased. And we’re seeing that hospice care, used to be, was not really funded by Medicare until a few decades ago.

So now more than half of people who die are in hospice care. And I think there’s going to be a lot of attention to end of life. There are now 12 states plus the District of Columbia that have aid in dying laws. Those are used mostly by older people, not everybody, but older people. There’s more attention to burials because this is the older generation.

also came of age with the environmental movement and Earth Day. And so do we really wanna spend tens of thousands of dollars on mahogany, fancy coffins and grave sites? Well, it’s cheaper to cremate, but then you have emissions in the air and that’s not what we wanna do either. So there’s a lot of attention to something called green burials.

in which we are trying just to put our bodies into the ground with minimum, you know, stuff around it. We want our bodies to decompose. We want the plain pine box or the shroud to decompose. We don’t want to take up, you know, space with elaborate headstones. We are trying to just go back to the earth. And there are now green cemeteries in virtually every state or parts of existing cemeteries that allow green burials.

And I have this written into my advance directive. And I have a plot that I bought last summer on Cape Cod that will allow me to do a green burial. So I don’t know when I’m going to die, but I know where I’m going to go. So that’s one aspect. But the other aspect is while we are living and we have these years that maybe we didn’t plan for, the idea of retirement as this just time of leisure.

speaker-1 (27:21.326)
when you’re just traveling and playing golf and going on cruises and dancing on the beach, this enforced leisure, I think worked better when maybe it was five or eight years. And when it fits 20 years, people need a purpose. They need to have something they do that feels meaningful to them. They need social context. They just can’t just sit alone in a room that is dangerous. It affects your health. We need to be part of the community.

We need to have social connections. We need to figure out how to spend this time. So I’m writing a lot about purpose because it takes people a while. And I’m sure you’ve talked to people about this. Retirement can be kind of a shock. know, the first six months feels, great. I don’t have to get up early. I could do what I want. But pretty soon people start getting confused about who am I now? Why does it matter if I’m even still here?

What am I doing for anyone else besides my own self care? How do I connect to others? How do I leave a legacy? And those are big questions and people have a lot of individual responses to it. But one thing I’m doing, for example, for this book is I’m traveling fairly often from Brooklyn, where I live to New Haven, Connecticut, where there’s a community group affiliated with Yale University and

They are planting trees and planting trees and other things. But planting trees is sort of my definition of leaving a legacy. Because there are people in their 80s that are there working with this group. You’re planting trees in inner city neighborhoods. That’s important for shade, for fighting climate change, for fighting flooding, for keeping the temperature down. But you are not going to live to see this tree grow and give shade.

So why are you doing it? Because you want to leave a legacy for the people that come behind you, for your family, for your neighborhood, for your community. And there are lots of things like that that people do, teaching, mentoring, volunteering, that it helps them outlive their own lifespan. It helps you be present when you’re no longer present. And I think that’s very meaningful to people. One other thing, if I could just keep nattering on. Be Be gone.

speaker-1 (29:48.652)
I think older people need ritual. So we tend to think of these rituals as being behind us. All the weddings, the bar mitzvahs, the birthdays, even the retirement parties. If you’re in your seventies, it can feel like all of that is in the past, the graduations. But I think people kind of want rituals. We still have milestones we want to mark. We still want a feeling of

accomplishment when something is done. I’ve been talking to people about how they’re adopting rituals or in some cases, inventing rituals because they don’t exist. So people who were in their 80s had an art show at retrospective. They’re artists, they want everyone to see their work. They rented space, a gallery, they invited everyone they knew, it was up for a week, everyone got to see your work. That’s a ritual.

From my book, I followed a woman here in Brooklyn who was having her bat mitzvah at 83 because 70 is the biblical lifespan, right? Three score and 10. And then the odometer kind of turns over and 13 years after that, because 13 is when people have bar and bat mitzvahs, 13 years after that, you can have a bar or a bat mitzvah. Now you can do this at any age, frankly, in Judaism, but

That’s a ritual. And her whole, she read from the Torah and the whole synagogue was there. And then there was a little reception afterwards and was very meaningful for her, especially for women. Because when I was 13 years old and Jewish, girls didn’t have, in most congregations, girls didn’t have a bat mitzvah. So this was her bat mitzvah. And so people are being very inventive, I think, about finding

milestones to celebrate, about finding purpose. None of this used to matter much because we were dead, but now we’re not.

speaker-0 (31:54.688)
That is, I hadn’t even thought about that. So the conversation about legacy that has popped up, like my dad wrote his biography because he wanted to leave it basically behind who he was. Right. The planting of trees, leaving something behind of who he was or she was. I hadn’t thought about the ritual side of things. And you’re right. Now, a lot of that is

like the entire reason behind 65 plus with the statistics as well. It becomes more of a fog, for lack of a better term, because there’s nothing defining it. There’s no…

speaker-1 (32:38.358)
It’s just all those old people. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. And there are some things that people over 65 have in common. We are the only part of this American society that pretty much has universal health care coverage, health insurance through Medicare. But apart from that, we’re not only as different from each other as everybody else, we’re actually more different from each other because

old age is more heterogeneous. And so, you know, there are people running marathons at 80, and there are people who are completely disabled at 66. And it’s hard to generalize about this population. But yes, ritual. And I think this legacy idea, are lot of, there are companies since, you know, capitalism abhors a vacuum. So realizing that there is this

large group of people, there are companies that will help you make a book. You know, it’s pretty simple now to self publish. They’ll give you the templates, you can upload photos, they send you prompts about your memories and growing up and you answer the prompts and then voila, you know, for a couple hundred bucks, they give you a book and then you can order how many you want for your family. Also, people are learning to do

something sort of related, on a smaller scale called legacy letters, a letter that you leave to your family or your loved ones or your community for after you die that talks about your values and what shaped you and what you hope for them and what lessons you might gently pass along. And there are people that will help you do this also. So this is kind of brewing around, I think, but it’s still kind of on the small side.

speaker-0 (34:32.376)
Hmm. What did… I read somewhere a while back that the life expectancy in the US is starting to go down.

speaker-1 (34:43.054)
Well, it certainly went down during the pandemic, but it seems to be rebounding. The question in my mind is, will generations behind us continue to be longer lived and have good health or not because there is more obesity and more diabetes in people younger than us now than there used to be. So people in their 50s

speaker-0 (34:46.668)
Well, that’s natural, but…

speaker-1 (35:12.526)
and 60s are more apt to have health problems that we didn’t have in our 50s and 60s. And then there was the opioid epidemic. So there were things that were eating away at life expectancy. So I’m not sure how that’s gonna play out. It’s also true that smoking rates have gone way down. I was talking to this demographer yesterday who was telling me that, you he was in his 70s and his friends in his 70s when they got together for lunch or something.

All they talked about was how they were exercising and how far they were running and how many pounds they were pressing at the gym. And he said to me, when my parents were that age, they were smoking and eating trans fats. So I’m not sure if this is a window of a particularly unusual group of people in their 80s or whether other groups behind us will continue, the education level will continue.

The health, I’m not sure. And I don’t know if people know, but it’s something I’m asking about.

speaker-0 (36:13.614)
One of the things we were talking earlier about how the activism has been, the group, the cohort, as it’s gone through, as it aged, the entire fitness side of things started probably in the late 80s. I remember, what was her name? Jane Fonda, with her tapes back in the 80s. she’s, so that exercise regimen has continued through.

One of the things I’m seeing right now with that younger generation is a lack of identification of who they are, because they’re too engrossed in other things. Example, TikTok. Example, absorbed in video games. That sort of Where it becomes more of their life along those lines. I’m wondering whether that’s again going to travel through

And one of the things you mentioned and others have mentioned is that when you get into those retirement years, it’s your purpose that keeps you going, that drives you longer. I had a conversation with Dr. Catherine Rickwood. She’s a researcher in Australia. She was talking about how you can see what the core purpose of a person is really young, and then their entire life seems to evolve around it.

even though they’re not aware of what that core purpose is.

speaker-1 (37:43.662)
Well, I’m not as pessimistic about young people, because I interact with them in the classroom. And this is a select group. I don’t see they’re as hardworking and curious and interested in changing the world as I was. I was lucky I knew from an extremely young age what I wanted to do.

like somewhere around fourth grade. And so, and I’ve been extremely lucky to be able to do it. But I do think it takes people, young people a little longer to figure out who they are and what they wanna do. But I don’t think that means that they don’t get there. I also want to just push back a little bit on this technology phobia that, I mean, I have it too. I would always rather like, you know, call the customer service

number and talk to a human, then try to solve a problem online. But it is true that being able to use technology in a fairly rudimentary way is part of what is allowing us at older ages to not feel disabled. Because what’s a disability? It’s something that you can’t do. Either it’s the activities of daily living, bathing, dressing, using the toilet. Those are called ADLs in the aging world.

or it’s an IADL instrumental activity of daily living, which is cooking, shopping, handling your bills. So technology so far is, except for medical technology, is not playing a big role in the ADLs. But the other stuff, it can. If I can have trouble getting to the bank, physically walking to a bank,

which we all had to do at one point, children. Like if you wanted money, you had to go to the bank. If you wanted to deposit a check or any, you know, make a transfer, you had to go to the bank. But now you don’t. So if I pay my bills online and probably, you know, vast proportions of people over 60 do that, I deposit checks online. The number of times I actually have to go to a bank is fairly small. So that doesn’t have to be a disability for me anymore. If I can use Instacart,

speaker-1 (40:10.412)
If I can have groceries delivered, if I can have meals services delivered, all of which costs money, but then you are not unable to take care of food and eating for yourself. So the ability to use even fairly rudimentary technology, I think actually is helpful for aging and the number of older people who are online, who have a smartphone.

who can do this stuff is growing, growing, growing. And certainly the generation behind us, we had to do this in the workplace. So, we know how to do online banking or we can learn or our kids can teach us. And that actually means that we are less disabled than we would be if in the good old days, you had to actually go out there and go to the supermarket and there was no way around that.

speaker-0 (41:05.454)
One of my very early interviews was with Michael Rogers, who was a futurist with the New York Times. And he was saying that our generation was the ones that actually started off. We grew up with the technology. We created this technology. So we learned to adapt and have to adapt as every new piece of technology came out. So we’re the first generation to actually be able to adapt to it. My father,

Excuse me, completely different story. I got him eight years ago an iPhone because if he fell, I wanted him to be able to call out and get some help. He has trouble making use of it.

speaker-1 (41:48.012)
Well, okay, there’s a couple of things to say here. One is that consumer technology is still not adapting to the older group. So, if you want us to use things with tiny little buttons and screens that are hard to read, we’re gonna have trouble. we could adapt this technology, we could make it more senior friendly, we could make computers more senior friendly.

We just need to do that. And I think there’s money to be made for people that are willing to do that.

speaker-0 (42:23.726)
The one thing to remember about that is most of this technology is being designed and built by people in their late 20s, early 30s. So as a result, they haven’t really thought about it. And that’s just because their life experience hasn’t been there for dealing with these type of issues.

speaker-1 (42:41.388)
Well, then you are leaving money on the table there, Apple and Sanyo and all these companies. We’re here, we want to use this technology to make it simpler, make it adaptable for people who have hearing disabilities, make it adaptable for people who have visual disabilities. This can be done. This is not rocket science. We could do this.

But I also just want to say that the social part of technology is also important because it is difficult at older ages for people to be out as much. And so here too, if you can summon a Lyft or an Uber, and there are companies that are making this easier to do, then when you can’t drive,

As long as you can get into a car, someone else and you can afford it, it’s not cheap. If you can do that, you don’t need to drive. Someone else can drive you. You have to be able to use the app. Make the app and the phone that it’s on useful for older people. There is a big market here. What are you overlooking it? Don’t you want to maximize your profit? Capitalism, of course, a vacuum. Here’s the vacuum. Do it.

speaker-0 (44:08.76)
Absolutely. Well, we’re getting close to the end of the interview, Paul. I always ask this one question of all the people I interview. If you were to give one piece of advice to whomever, doesn’t matter what the age group or the type of person is, what would that one piece of advice be?

speaker-1 (44:31.502)
Boy, that’s tough. But I think really central to our concept of ourselves is this thing we’ve been talking about is ageism. And I want you to be able to say your age, to not be embarrassed, to not make apologies, to be okay with being old. I moderated a session at a public library, Montclair, New Jersey, about two weeks ago.

with a group called AIM, Aging in Montclair. And one of the things that I did was everybody who spoke and everybody on the panel and me, we all said what age we were. And then I asked the audience in unison, just three, two, one, yell at your age. And everyone did. And then I thought, was that so hard? Can we get over this? We are an increasing part of this country, of its population.

People are complaining because we’re too apt to hold on to our roles in public life. Too many old people in Congress, too many old people in the administration. Well, we know things. We should be there. Maybe we’re there in a disproportionate number and there should be more young people. I agree with that. But we’re not going away. So can we just own that it’s okay to be old? And what else is true about you? That’s why.

Take away.

speaker-0 (45:58.882)
Yeah, that goes to the entire core of ageism. Deal with it internally first and then everybody else.

speaker-1 (46:07.736)
Well, they go together. They go together. How you talk in public, how you present in public also changes your public, your inner image and vice versa.

speaker-0 (46:17.4)
Paula, thank you very much for taking the time for talking with me. To everybody that’s listening, I will, in the description, give you information on Paula, her links to her column, and her books. And feel free to click like and subscribe. That way more people listen to this. There’s a lot of people that really should be hearing about what happens after retirement, because there’s a lot that happens. Paula.

Thank you very much.

speaker-1 (46:48.642)
Thanks, Neil. My pleasure.

Okay.