33. Elders for Everyone
October 31, 2025
I’m reading “Primal Intelligence” by Angus Fletcher. He calls himself a story scientist, and he’s at Ohio State University now. In the book so far, he writes about how we need to re-learn imagination. It reminded me of the essay I wrote when I harked back to my childhood, trying to take myself back to what I loved doing before I “learned” from the world telling me what I “should” be doing. Dr. Fletcher says that we need to re-learn imagination, and one way to do that is by looking for the unexpected, instead of the expected. This sounds a bit to me like looking for the “small joys” in each week, as I wrote about two weeks ago. Our brains are made for pattern recognition, and that explains why it is so hard for us to get out of a certain way of thinking, especially if we’ve thought that way for a long time.
To honor this reminder about the importance of taking ourselves out of repeating patterns, I’m using my imagination this week to visualize a society in which elders are nurtured, valued and great contributors to the human experience. I first wrote about this in an earlier essay, and I will expand on that foundation here. Culturally, this is needed for many reasons, primarily in my opinion because wise, grounded advice is missing from many lives these days, and because we have built a society in which our elders are put away from us when they no longer fit our cultural definition of productive. I want to change that.
Some of us have people older than us to look to for guidance. You may have a mentor you admire in terms of their professional or community contributions, and maybe you are lucky enough to know them well enough to ask for advice. You may have a grandmother or uncle who has a special affection for you and spends time listening to you and providing advice and support. But to address the epidemic of loneliness, social isolation and mental health challenges, we need a new plan. We have to stop winging it and hoping that luck and hard work lands us the advice we need. We need to build it in.
I’m imagining a strong community of elders. In my imagination, this community exists in and around our families and schools and gathering places. Individuals from the elder community are in our parks and coffee shops and libraries and grocery stores. They are not isolated in their homes or in the rooms of skilled care facilities, or even in independent living communities for 55+. Rather, they are in housing developments, apartment buildings, condos and townhouses. They live in cities and villages and rural areas. And, they have the infrastructure to support their needs (physical, social and emotional) because it’s part of our plan. They are needed by their communities, so they have purpose and connection.
I expect that many of you are thinking – well older people are set in their ways and older people are curmudgeonly and aren’t able to adapt to new thinking. Hogwash. That is a story that our society has put into our heads, and now we also tell ourselves. We are moving beyond that rut of thinking. We are in the midst of a revolution in how we think about aging. My social media feed has women in their 80’s doing pull-ups and deadlifts and teaching yoga classes. We can still get stronger and we can still learn and grow. We simply need the supports and infrastructure and desire to do so.
My big goal, my focus right now is to level-up our culture so that everyone looks forward to being an elder. That everyone in their 20’s and 30’s and 40’s recognizes that the path they are on right now will shift as they age, and they can choose to aim their journey towards being a beloved and valued elder. How would that change the choices we make about our lives? What would be possible?
