What happens to old people in America? It seems like a silly question, especially for college students to be wondering about. This is the time in our lives when we are surrounded by other people our age — young people, people who have lives to carve out for themselves, people who are too busy to slow down for anybody else. Gone are the days of supporting your elders. Now, many of us operate under an unspoken agreement of avoidance. This avoidance is societal; fast-paced American consumerism doesn’t exactly celebrate the wisdom and experience of the elderly. As our technology and trends evolve ever more quickly, old people are more often seen as poorly adapted to the present rather than keepers of the past. They are expected to leave the workforce, but we’ve carved out no place for them to go. To a society that values only one’s power, the elderly seem unavoidably powerless. I say all of these things not in an attempt to reveal a personal contempt for old people, but to reveal the uncomfortable mindset that American society has adopted in order to justify its treatment of old people. As many of us are moving through the “best years of our lives,” we have to think critically about the world we are helping to perpetuate before we put ourselves in a position we cannot escape from. 

Do old people really have it that bad? In a scene from George A. Romero’s 1975 film, The Amusement Park, a couple asks a psychic what their life together will look like in old age. Richard Brody’s review of the film reports that, “The clairvoyant, peering into a crystal ball, gives it to them straight, in a terrifying scene of a couple facing a future of poverty, illness, inadequate medical care, substandard housing, and the cruel indifference of strangers.” This depressing picture is no exaggeration. Currently, 14.2 percent of adults ages 65 and older live below the poverty line, making under $14,040 a year when taking into account out-of-pocket medical expenses. This is a gentle but unsettling increase from the general population’s 12.9 percent, seeing as our society expects people to climb out of poverty as they age, and old people generally have very few avenues for increasing their income. Older adults are disproportionately affected by poverty for a multitude of reasons, one of them being a lack of salary. A lot of old people aren’t physically able to work anymore; their bodies break down as they age. Of Americans ages 75 and older, 46 percent have a disability, which is nearly six times the amount reported by Americans ages 35 and younger. Furthermore, 30 percent of adults ages 75 and older have serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs. We tell ourselves that we work while we’re young to build up savings for ourselves when we’re older. Building up savings is harder than it seems, with at least 34 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck and over half of Americans feeling like the amount of money they’ve saved isn’t enough. More than two in five older Americans end up relying on Social Security for their sole source of income, which is insufficient to meet their needs, especially as medical expenses skyrocket. About 93 percent of older adults report having one or more chronic medical conditions, and one-fifth of them are battling cancer. Frequent visits to the doctor put a lot of strain on the wallets of the elderly, especially as driving becomes inaccessible due to slower reaction times, impaired vision, and higher fatality risk. As the years go by, old people get boxed into a life that doesn’t accommodate them anymore. 

I’ve been using the term “old people” throughout this article, knowing it might make some readers uncomfortable; it’s important to question why that might be. We all hope to live a long life. How can we do that without becoming old? What is so offensive about wrinkles, creaky knees, and slowing down while we walk? If we’re all going to get there one day, why does it scare us so much? The life laid out for the old folks we live among doesn’t reward them for all of their labor. Instead, they are expected to keep up with people in their prime, and they are punished if they cannot. These structural issues stem from a culture that only recognizes value in somebody’s ability to work. Our discomfort should be with our culture, not with the people being neglected by it.

There are structural barriers to taking care of the older folks in our community; old people have maladies that young people cannot remedy. I think this can make the younger folks feel uncomfortable interacting with their elders. It is hard to come upon a problem that you cannot fix alone. However, if we give in to this discomfort, we create a world in which one-third of older adults feel lonely or isolated. Changes in governmental policy are necessary, but they will take time. Right now, we can make a difference in our own town. Reach out to the older people in your community. Make conversation at the library, help unlock a box at the post office, grab something off a tall shelf at the grocery store. If we allow the old people around us to feel lonely, isolated, and discarded, then we will all feel lonely, isolated, and discarded. The scorn against old people isn’t just an ageism issue — it’s a community issue. And it’s one we’ll all face the longer we live.