Aging Out, Losing Out

Both my parents died at 89. My mother from end-stage Alzheimer's, my father from heart failure probably induced by advanced Parkinson's Disease. These were, for both of them, easeful deaths. Among Shakespeare's heroes to die in one's own bed would have been the happiest death. Still probably is.But age, especially nowadays, is not so much about death or mortality. It's about falling off track, about technological derailment. To everyone keeping up with the changes in cable endings can get a little formidable, not even attempting to comprehend VR and tech novelties that are momentarily about to exist. The pace of that progression is, itself, progressing.I see peers, even people as young as fifty, becoming digitally dumb.The result is a new kind of dementia. It's a dislocation in the current times. Not loss of memory or the capacity to remember new events, new faces, new places.  This is an ever-increasingly abrupt stoppage of technological acquisition. Like not quite getting facile with the TV remote. Only worse when it comes to arming ourselves with Rokus and Apple TV and the furrowing through the growing panoply of apps and the odd, somewhat twisted machinations of social media and scary Facebook and, thinking about starting a website or a blog.Historically the aged could be relied upon, if they remained compis mentis, to be a resource for knowledge, wisdom and advanced skills. The old were who the young relied on to forward culture and local and personal and familial history. They were the anchor to the past that allowed the present and future to flourish and move forward. The old also carried the secrets, the deep muscle-memorized skill sets that allowed the young to jump start their own skill acquisition, allowing the young the time and space to interject improvements, modifications, advancements all mounted on what they got from the old. Farming techniques advanced generation by generation. Even the industrial revolution built itself on the models provided by the old.Now in the digital-internet based world, the old —now I'm speaking of mere thirty-year-olds—these are regarded as backward or time-stopped thinkers. The young are like high tech vampires devouring the new, trolling for the not-yet-realized, catalysing change and reaching, like in a cocaine rush, for the new ceiling and how to break through it.Meanwhile, the aging population is not keeping up the pace. They find it amusing, rather useless, a lot of bother for tittilations that do not amuse or inspire or appeal to them. And so they tilt back in their rocking chairs and watch the world prepare them for the frozen death that awaits them in senior residences..

"What can the old offer except a model of frightening obsolence."

.The loss to society, and especially to the young, is the model of obsolence that now is moving rapidly down the age scale. People in middle age, even with IT and computer architecture and advance programming skills are facing career chopping. Their training and experience and skill sets have placed them at high-income levels, which companies view as financially burdersome while reading these older employees as stagnant - technically and developmentally spent.For the young, to fit into the advancing technological age demands rapid immersion in intellectually, cognitively very challenging training. And now this training has a rising expiration date.The models they might have turned to — parents committed to some form of retirement-living, cut off from technology and its alien redoubts -- no longer speak in the quasi langauges the young do. What can the old offer except a model of frightening obsolence. It must be terrifying to turn thirty or forty or fifty and find yourself without a county, and to have not heaped up the portfolio that at least grants their parents and easy life. That life must be viewed with a kind of horror. To the middle-agers the old must seem like social cadavers.So my argument addresses the need for "olds", including the over-forties and fifties, to resist the forward flow, to turn on their cognitive apparatus, engage their vast stores of knowledge and remembered experience. It is the aged that, once they get going technologically, can help that social drift turning into a wild stream, to re-pace itself.Bernie Sanders, warts and all, chanced on a way to appeal and harness the use of technology by the young to listen to him and take that into themselves.Just start texting. And remember, when offering condolences to a departed valued friend, that a final added LOL does not mean Lots of Love.