Why Aren’t We Investing In Our New Stage of Life?

Have you noticed:

• When funding for programs for young people is debated, we talk about “investing in our children.”

• When the defense budget is under consideration, we talk about “investing in national security.”

• But when subsidies for long-term care and other benefits for older adults are part of a government spending debate, the word “investment” seems to vanish.

This is a key reason that it’s difficult to secure additional, much-needed funding to support older adults. The public doesn’t see that increased longevity has created a new stage of life, nor that investing in that stage offers benefits to all of us.

Instead, as I wrote in a previous post, older adults are viewed as “net takers” in society. Few people see the possibilities created as large numbers of older adults enter a new, uncharted stage of life.

Some key points about this stage of life (which has been described so well by Laura Carstensen and the Stanford Center on Longevity):

• On average, Americans are living significantly longer now. The premise that most of us will retire in our 60s and die five or 10 years later is no longer operable.

• That means many older Americans have additional decades of potentially useful life. Some want (or need) to use those years to continue to work, some want to volunteer, some want to be mentors.

• The older Americans who still want a job comprise the largest untapped workforce available to us right now. Adding them to (or keeping them in) the labor pool provides experience and wisdom, which makes a difference. Studies show that multigenerational workforces perform better than chronologically homogenous teams.

• As Ken Dychtwald has written, we have the chance to convert the older Americans interested in volunteering into an army working on the most pressing social problems we have.

• Our vision of life after 50 is flawed, as Jonathan Rauch wrote recently in The Atlantic. Reaching this new stage of life “brings gains, too: greater equanimity, more emotional resilience, and what Carstensen and others have called the positivity effect, a heightened appreciation of life’s blessings.”

If we don’t recognize these gains, we won’t grasp the full extent of benefits that older adults can bring to society.

(Rauch’s piece also correctly credits thinkers like Andrew J. Scott, Phyllis Moen, Chip Conley, Marc Freedman and Ashton Applewhite for their important work on this subject.)

• It’s important to remember that not every American can count on this new stage of life. We are not seeing uniform increases in longevity across socioeconomic, racial or ethnic lines.

Add it all up, and it’s clear that an investment in older Americans could produce immense dividends. Our economy, our social fabric and our sense of community would benefit.

But the investment in the new stage of life will only happen if the public starts seeing it through that lens — as an investment.