I can't with the silver tsunami

"Greying" as a euphemism for "not dying soon enough"

Jan 30, 2023

a screenshot of the guardian headline: ageing planet the new demographic timebomb showing an elderly man who looks Asian doing situps while hanging upside down from a jungle gym — Oh no, this man with impressive core strength isn’t dead yet! It’s a demographic time bomb! We’re all ruined, since we don’t have enough raw sewage in our water and not enough people are malnourished and antibiotics still work most of the time!

The Guardian is the latest in a long chain of media outlets to publish doomsday headlines about how our increased lifespan is going to ruin everything. The “silver tsunami” is one of those things that I just can't wrap my head around. It's too absurd.

First, we spend a lot of effort preventing people from dying.
Then, we bemoan how our success in preventing deaths is going to be our downfall.

There are plenty of problems in the world. Not enough premature deaths is not one of them.

Societies around the world are facing a values conflict. We want the world we have to continue and in this world our success is measured by the GDP. Yet we also want to view all human life as inherently worthy, even the lives of those who don’t contribute to the GDP. So, we claim to value our elders and then speak about the “silver tsunami.” They’re the reason for everything and they’re also an unacceptable drain on the economy.

Japan's PM is one of many politicians from around the world who's on board with the not-enough-people-are-dying-young campaign. It feels ‘safe’ to choose Japan as an example because of all the times people insist that caregiving isn’t an issue in Japan because it’s a country where elders are respected. Alas, Japan’s struggle with care work is completely different and exactly the same as ours.

Of course politicians will decry that longevity is an “urgent risk to society.” The human suffering we’re talking about has its roots in two hundred years of political decisions. Our legal structures, our economy, and our social infrastructure treat the elderly as a monolith — a monolithic, stultifying burden. It’s too much effort to capture the compex and dynamic roles people over 55 play in society, so we make a simpler model treating them as dependents and base our decisions on that model.

Our legal structures, economy, and social infrastructure took on their modern form during the era of eugenics and have not shifted to reflect different values. That is the problem. That is why our education system, medical system, and corporate law are set up to treat workers as natural resources to be exploited — just like coal, water, timber, and plutonium. That’s why our medical system doesn’t know how to care for those with chronic conditions or the dying. That’s why legal protection for the disabled is through the courts, so the onus is on the oppressed. We have reformed the most brutal parts of these systems and kept the rest.

Corporations externalize the cost of raising future workers and supporting those who aren't able to be exploited as workers by treating the basic realities of being human as individual responsibilities and repercussions for our poor choices.

Many of these systems that seem unchangable date back to the cold war, WW2, and the invention of modern medicine. They’re not so very old. The tax code and our insurance plans change every year. We can change them to eliminate the lingering forces of eugenics in our institutions.

We tut tut at people in other places not taking good enough care of their elderly, while in the US it's an entirely normal part of retirement planning to intentionally impoverish the elderly so they become wards of the state, which is the current branding of the dreaded poor house. Yet we still imagine the poor house is for people who don't love their family, not those of us who simply can't shell out $18,000 a month for their care.

The Guardian article suggests that India is taking notes from our Medicaid look back period to outlaw their version of the intentional impoverishment game. God forbid parents want to give their kids money to get their lives started before they burn through every dollar they've ever earned on the world's most expensive medical care.

Then and now, families take these actions because it's the best of some pretty horrible options. There have been all of these technological advances to make our lives better, yet here we are abandoning our relatives at the doors of the poor house because that's the only way everyone can manage to eat. What has gone wrong that so many people find themselves in this situation every single day?

My favorite part of the demographic time bomb article is when they blame baby boomers who went to college and retired at 55 with generous pensions. As if we should read this article and sigh with relief that almost no one in the generations since then has had stable employment or union protections. As if maybe we should be grateful discrimination kept so many people from getting pensions even in the heydey of worker protections. Now employees cower under the threat of layoffs, being replaced by AI, or cast out and forcibly transformed into gig-workers.

They don’t ask why even people who retired in good health with generous pensions are still going bankrupt and ending up as wards of the state. They accept that no amount of good planning, responsible choices, and luck will insulate us from the high risk of becoming destitute in our lifetime.

How is it acceptable to use the phrase “demographic time bomb”? What do these disparaging words say about how our culture views people over 55?

There’s certainly no mystery about why nursing homes are underfunded and understaffed when our politicians view their residents as “takers, not makers” who pose an “urgent threat to society.” When money is allocated they are the lowest priority.

We live in a world where it’s assumed that we’ll all agree that someone being alive at 75 or 87 or 92 or 101 is a problem. I feel hopelessly naive that I'm still shocked every time.

I wasn't alive during the aftermath of WW2, but I was under the impression that was when everyone decided to agree, at least publicly, that eugenics is not cool. Apparently as long as you don't usher people into extermination chambers it's totally fine to bemoan the fact that you're not allowed to do that anymore.

I don’t believe that anyone who has used phrasing like “demographic time bomb” or “silver tsunami” honestly wants to exterminate anyone who can’t currently contribute to society. I understand the power of words, though. Each time we frame it this way, and support leaders who do, we encourage the status quo of underfunding and neglect.

As we’re seeing in Canada right now, each time we talk seriously about the survival of our elders as a problem and as a threat we make it easier to continue along our current path where so many people profess that they would rather die than use a wheelchair, would rather die than be a burden to society, would rather die than be sent to a nursing home.

The extension in human lifespan during the past few generations is an incredible achievement. This isn’t something to bemoan. This isn’t something to be used as part of austerity scare tactics. This isn’t something to campagin against.

Let’s accept the premise for a second and assume we need saving. The magic tricks to save us all aren’t a secret. Housing, buildings, and transportation built to fit the needs of people with a range of body sizes and abilities. Workplaces that provide flexibility and stability. Use of economic targets that that respect natural resources, including human beings.

These things benefit every person alive now and in the future, not only those who are currently “greying.” People have a range of abilities, regardless of age, that change over our lifetimes. What was going on with these architects who decided imagine some sort of Ideal Man and build a world for him? Why are we still following those norms?

There may be more people over ‘retirement age’ than ever before. It helps that retirement is a new concept. Aging isn’t new, though. We’ve had the entirety of human existence to figure out how to live interdependently and support each other. We couldn’t be more ready to take on this challenge of aligning our systems to fit our values.

No saints, no charity

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