One aim of this personal publication is to comment on the ageing process itself and to see how long I can periodically record my own involvement in that process. What will shut down The Old Man’s Post? It could be an entirely external cause such as changes to Internet technology or policies. It could also be mental dementia or physical debility suffered by the old man himself.
Ten years ago, almost to the week, I wrote a lengthy essay on the subject of ageing for another self published printed effort. I did not then talk to any extent about my own confrontation with the beast, as I had not yet experienced the rapid decline now evident. That process is intractable but although I often say to myself about the vexatious physical indignities it presents, “Will no one rid me of these troublesome priests?”, I still feel very fortunate. I have enjoyed perhaps more contented independence in my long retirement than in my busy years. I consider I now have in hand a bonus of at least fifteen years beyond the years I expected when diagnosed with diabetes at about age 44.
Yet though I try to remain objective about my personal ageing process, I cannot escape reality. When I neared 80 I experienced a few household falls while doing normal chores resulting in rib and hand fractures. That brought a diagnosis of bone loss. My daily walks became ever more difficult, shorter and slower and I stopped venturing out during any slippery or wet weather. Just in the past year, and even since I published the first issue of The Old Man’s Post the deterioration has become ever more rapid and noticeable. In spite of valiant efforts with diet and massage by my wife, who is also approaching 83 and has equally serious problems, my decades of insulin dependency and diabetic neuropathy take their toll. I already carry a cane to maintain balance while walking. We can try to laugh at some of the many indignities, but at times the changes in one short year make me think of how Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s tale must have felt when the effects of the sins he had stored on his changing portrait in the attic suddenly descended on his body.
There are so many like me and ageing is now a major social problem. Not infrequently people now live to 100, still reasonably active and mentally alert. The problem lies in the bosom of our welfare state mentality. Traditionally we give up being productive in our sixties. With increasing demographic power seniors demand more and more goodies such as more political rights, housing, health care and government pensions, for rich and poor alike. The cost of all that becomes a charge against still actively employed productive taxpayers. Expanding government bureaucracies need always more from them to funnel goodies to the country’s squeakiest wheels. We seniors are among the squeakiest.
In sterner days of less government benevolence, ageing people had to keep producing enough to look after themselves. When they could no longer maintain a home, that was often the time to pass whatever assets were owned to some younger family members who had become the dominant productive people in the family. In those circumstances the elder still was often required to earn his or her keep in the new family order of things, if only by doing some menial service in the household.
This demographic reversal has been unduly kind to my generation. As social policy it was well intentioned but probably wrong-headed. All through this century a trend towards shorter work hours, earlier retirement, and earlier pension ages was evident and apparently still continues. In
Born in the 1920’s, I consider myself a depression child—a generation that has, since the Great Depression, enjoyed the best of times in this country. My depression psychology and resulting frugality has improved my personal condition in those already economic good times. The post-war Boomer generation did well while productive, but its members were overly taxed to provide for the likes of me.
With changing mores and greater reliance on the welfare state, the Boomers have saved little for a rainy day. They have also produced a much lower next generation population, partly because of the feminist movement and the need for both family parents to work for wages to pay taxes and keep up an affluent life style. Our welfare governments are forced to increase immigration to provide a population to produce more tax dollars to keep providing the welfare goodies, including goodies required by refugees and other immigrants who take time to integrate into our economy and society.
While recognizing the good fortune of my own particular choice of birth date, there is no escape from the negative effects of getting older. The passage of time is relentless as it speeds through space and the rate of its speed seems to increase in direct proportion to the increasing numbers of one’s age.
Improvements of science notwithstanding, our genetic inheritance and our determination when young to ignore all advice to maintain mental and physical condition conspire to accelerate the inevitable deterioration of age. However, the “natural death” that would normally have resulted whenever the time comes, is rarely allowed to proceed without some kind of intervention from modern welfare state practitioners.
They are people who can be found in the state bureaucracies, in the science and medical establishments, and in the families of the ageing person. What is more, people I have known in terminal situations, themselves rarely admitted they would not “get better,” even if they were completely aware of their situation. Some members of the medical geriatric industry go much farther than the Hippocratic Oath ever required of them. In the event they pull out all the stops, often with artificial feeding and elimination, to delay the departure of a tortured but still hopeful spirit living for no purpose but to reach another birthday.
Individuals who live to the ripe age of 100 years, physically able and mentally alert are the pride and example of their community and family. They are still the exception. I suggest their successful longevity is due to a special genetic inheritance coupled with a lifestyle since childhood designed to improve that inheritance. The vast majority of us, without special gifts, are destined to meet our ultimate fate much sooner.
I know of no easy answers to the problems of ageing. I do think that in the condition of our society and economy right now, people of my age ought to begin a trend toward a new mindset. We ought to resign from the Me Generation and be less demanding on the resources made available to us by a generous working population. That population accepts the high taxation we have demanded through lobbying organization and voting power because the income security and institutional care for seniors that taxation provides takes a big load from the shoulders of immediate families. But the load is getting too big for the fewer numbers paying taxes as the Boomers reach retirement. We say we have earned all those goodies, though statistically many seniors today have a larger purchasing power than ever before. Some proudly display bumper stickers on their recreational vehicles bragging, “We are spending our children’s inheritance.” Many could do well without the universally provided welfare of our Canadian system.
No doubt government has poorly organized the re-distribution of wealth required by the welfare state system. Having taken away from individuals the incentive, even the ability, to be frugal, to save, to invest and thereby to provide for their own retirement, government has failed to do that effectively with the resources we ourselves provide. They have forgotten the Keynesian economics taught by the ancient Hebrew, Joseph, to the Pharaoh of Egypt, urging him to store up grain in the good years to provide food for the lean ones. The present system cannot be sustained, nor will more rapid immigration do more than delay the inevitable, for it will cause other stresses on our social fabric to demand ever more from the few who can provide that ever greater wherewithal.
Only a change in our attitude, a break in our Me Generation way of thinking, will gradually develop a self-sustaining welfare system. Why should it not be a change led by the people of my generation, by being willing to give up our search for an impossible security that will never be found in this world?
Ageing is a big subject. No doubt the universe will unfold as it ought, or perhaps as it ought not. In our small part of it, we could organize ourselves as a nation in a way that would permit that small part to flourish for a time more, or we could continue on some of our wrong roads to sink into the decrepitude of other ageing societies of our time.
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