Breaking News: Scientists Say We Are Brand New.
By Karen and Erica
We founded Lustre because we became convinced we were completely new: the first large wave of women who graduated from college and graduate school, went to work, and are now retiring.
When we entered the workforce, we knew we were part of a movement, and so did everyone else. Now, we are a stealth cohort. No-one realized we were coming, and not that many people seem to know we are here. A lot of people can’t even see us. We’re hidden behind antiquated stereotypes. And because of that, the resources we offer are going to waste.
We need to get on the map. We are using Lustre to do that. Lustre is our voice. With it, we can show everyone who we are, what we look like, and what we have to offer—experience, tested judgment, big-picture thinking. And what we are doing.
How do we know we are new? Our journey so far has been based on experiential data—our own observations and those of others with career paths like ours. We did some research, to be sure, but it was not highly academic. We thought we were on to something, and we just knew there had to be data to support us.
Well, hallelujah! All this while minds greater than ours were analyzing the data and reaching the same conclusions we were.
Linda P. Fried, the Dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, is a delightful woman of enormous intelligence and concomitant accomplishments. She has been thinking about aging for a long time—and doing research and taking action. Here’s the amazing news:
As we approach a world in which life expectancy at birth is 76 globally and 84 in the United States, and at 65 people can expect to live another 20 years on average, we have achieved something without precedent in history: we have added a whole new stage of life to human existence of 30 extra years.
But not everyone gets it.
Remarkably, many of our default policy assumptions are that this added stage of life is a drag in every sense of the word, with older people gobbling up disproportionate shares of our public and economic resources at the expense of younger generations. Policymakers across the globe worry about the “old-age dependency ratio,” that balance between people of working age who pay taxes and those who are past retirement age who are “dependent” on society and withdrawing resources from the public till.
Dean Fried laments this lack of vision, and suggests that we might better ask: “if we want to build a whole new life stage from scratch, what would we want it to be?” Like us, she believes that it is critical for older people to stay relevant to keep healthy, and like us she finds that we have valuable attributes that can only be acquired over time.
With age comes experience and accrued knowledge and expertise, greater creative problem-solving, and ability to make even-handed decisions—particularly in emotionally charged situations. These attributes can be summarized as wisdom.
Dean Fried is a woman on the move, so she herself designed a program—Experience Corps—to make use of the unique assets of older people to further educational goals for underserved populations. The evidence derived from that program supports her conclusion that “there are many areas in which older adult volunteers could be engaged in high impact roles to improve society’s future: better success for children and youth, providing new kinds of support for vulnerable older adults, contributing to our population’s health and environmental health in our neighborhoods and strengthening and transforming communities.”
Like us, Dean Fried is energized by the amazing opportunity now presented to us: we are free to design a whole new stage of life for which there is no precedent. Hard to imagine anything more fun. Or more challenging.
Of course, this new phase is for all of us, not just women. But we think women will be the motivating force behind the design, because we still are so new to this world that we are not ready to give it up. We know how to change everything—we did it once, working together—and we can do it again, working together again, with skills now honed over time.
So yes, the evidence is in. This is a new world, and we all have work to do. It is time to come together again to draw a picture of the future. We see our careers as a foundation for what’s next, and retirement as a waypoint, not the finish line. We must decide the shape of this new gift of years we have been granted.
Dean Fried has written widely on many topics. The quotes in this post come from “Building a Third Demographic Dividend: Strengthening Intergenerational Well-Being in Ways That Deeply Matter,” published in Public Policy & Aging Report, 2016, Vol 0, No. 00, 1-5 (2016).