They are - WE are - the new invisible women and men, to borrow from Ralph Ellison’s 1950s novel. Forty million or so of the 100 million people in America who are over 50 years old, many - even most – of whom have plenty of wisdom, energy and creativity.
What these 40 million people don’t have is money. Or the prized presumed “virtue” of youth.
I’ve written about this often, about how no one in government or business or the media is paying attention to this massive problem of people over 50 who have no money saved, no realistic employment or income-generating prospects, and who are, to the high-tech driven world of the 21st century, invisible.
Well, it is time for them – for us - to rise up. It is time for us to make ourselves visible.
If any other group of 40 million people was so ignored, overlooked and considered irrelevant, there would be rallies in the streets.
It is time for us to rally in the streets. It is time to start a movement.
We are indeed, in tens of millions of cases, wise, energetic, creative and have much to offer for the 20, 30, 40 years we have left. If we were asked at a job interview about our five year plans, our answers would be more than hoping not to have our joints replaced. But of course, few of us get those job interviews, and when we do, the five year plans of old people are not uppermost in the minds of those doing the interviewing.
We have stories to tell, hurdles we have overcome, joys and sorrows that have shaped who we are and what we have to give.
What we don’t have is a particularly receptive audience.
In my work on this subject, I’ve talked to many older folks (we have to come up with a better term than seniors) but also many younger ones.
I spoke at length not long ago to a globally-renown former high-ranking executive of one of the two or three best known tech companies on earth, and when I asked him if the tech world would be taking the lead in helping find pathways and opportunities for people over 50, his exact words were, “the tech world is the LAST place to look for help in this area.”
His candor was appreciated, but depressing.
But it made clear something that should have been clear to us all along: the job of telling the world that we are here and that we aren’t all going to conveniently die anytime soon rests with us.
We may be too old to convince Facebook or Google or Apple that we have much to contribute, but silence, invisibility, is not an option.
There are 100 million people in the United States over 50, 46 million over 65, and that number is projected to double by 2060. So yes, young people will eventually become old people, and if we older people today do nothing to make our voices heard, our grandchildren may themselves become invisible years after we are gone.
A recent study from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard noted that, “Today, one in seven persons is at least age 65; by 2030, that share will be one in five.” And an article in Motley Fool in 2016 pointed out that 26 percent of people over 55 said they have less than $50,00 in assets.
Yes, the poverty rates have gone down for seniors in recent years, but part of that is because more seniors are working, out of necessity, than ever before, painfully aware that they cannot live on the average Social Security check of about $1,370 a month, or their meager – if any – savings. In June 2017, the Social Security Administration published information stating that “Among elderly Social Security beneficiaries, 50% of married couples and 71% of unmarried persons receive 50% or more of their income from Social Security.”
Older folks by the millions are confronting a bleak future, certainly financially, and of course financial woes impact everything else from health to relationships with friends and family to general happiness.
The solutions are hard and not readily apparent. I have been stunned by how little is being done about this problem. There are a few local programs aimed at helping older people financially, but not many, and nationally, there are almost none (Good work is being done by the Stanford Center on Longevity, some faculty at Boston College and Harvard, but precious little else, given the size and scope of the problem.)
I don’t know why no one is paying attention to us.
I just know they need to start.
And I know with certainty, the only way to do that is to start a movement, to rise up, to make us invisible no more.