Bringing Older Americans Back Into the Fold

Marc Freedman is not here to give advice on how to squirrel away dollars and cents for a leisurely retirement. He doesn’t want to talk about 401(k)s, IRAs, or stocks and bonds. Instead, he is asking us all to dig deeper — to entirely rethink our latter years.

Freedman — the president and chief executive officer of Encore.org, a nonprofit group that aims to tap the skills and experience of people in midlife and beyond to improve communities — is the author of the recently released book “How to Live Forever: The Enduring Power of Connecting the Generations.”

And he is on a mission to reintegrate older people into the lives of younger ones.

He helped create Experience Corps, one of America’s largest nonprofit service programs engaging people over 55. The program, he said, evolved from the Foster Grandparents program, which enables older people to tutor and mentor students.

In researching his new book, Freedman found himself focused on the now-entrenched reality of age segregation in the United States, and what can be done to bring older Americans back into the fold, especially as more people are living longer.

The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

Much of that whole conception was invented with a profit motive in mind and out of a real feeling that older people were superfluous. And it was invented so recently, within the last half a century or so: the idea being that people are kind of drifting through this anteroom to the great beyond.

And these entrepreneurs came in and realized there’s some money to be made here, and they invented the idea of the golden years, that this should all be about leisure. Dying went from just a natural part of life into an incurable medical condition. That really contributed a lot to segregation, to developing all these institutions where the elderly became separated from society.

As this period in life has grown, we really haven’t had a culture of the institutions to deal with it. It’s been described as a season in search of a purpose. And so we filled that gap with a lot of leisure activities and this frenzied pursuit of a second childhood. But in fact it doesn’t fit with what we know developmentally; that this is perhaps not the most fulfilling approach to that period of life.

When you look at what developmental research on happiness and purpose in later life shows, it fits together like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Older people who mentor and support young people are three times as likely to be happy as those who fail to do so.

Science is telling us that this is a natural process. And we thwarted it over the last century. Research on loneliness in a new study from Cigna and Ipsos shows that the two loneliest groups are younger people and older people. And it makes for a solution hidden in plain sight.

A: Because as we get older, instead of trying to deny death or forestall it at any cost, shouldn’t we be recognizing that the true way to live on is not to try to be the next generation? It is to invest in younger people and live on through their lives and work and contribution.

I think it is, and we approach it in such a stark way. You’re either independent or dependent. But in fact what we need is interdependence, and that’s so deeply embedded in human development.

We were social animals to begin with. You go back to the early days of human history, and anthropologists have shown that the critical ingredient in us developing the larger brains that set us apart was the role that grandparents played, particularly grandmothers, in nurturing children.

The only reason we survived as a species and developed in the way we did was because of our interdependence between the generations.

Alison Gopnik, who’s a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, talks about older women as the key to human nature. And that’s an insight that’s worth hanging onto. That’s much more useful than the current glorification of independence.

When I was younger, I was really interested in ways to find greater support for children who were growing up in poverty — and more and more research was showing that the presence of caring adults was the critical ingredient in helping so many young people navigate their way successfully to adulthood.

I became interested in older people as a way to solve human and social capital needs of the younger generation. It was almost out of an interest in matching supply and demand — untapped human resources and unmet human needs.

Over time, what I’ve become increasingly aware of is that this is about so much more than efficiency. Older people and younger people, there’s a connection there that goes beyond labor economics.

First of all, re-evaluate their sense of time. This period, rather than being the leftover years, may be one of the sweet spots in life.

We’ve been in many ways told to prepare for a life that is three score and 10, but in fact there’s a good chance that people will remain healthy into their 80s, and in the future, into their 90s and beyond.

So this is a wonderful new time horizon that people have. You don’t have to do everything at once; you don’t have to cram everything in. What might feel like a sprint is really a long-distance race. There’s an opportunity to explore different routes.

The other realization is that the years that have been added to life that we keep hearing about have not been added at the end, they’re really being added to the middle or late middle — this period when we actually have learned a great deal and have the chance to do something with that.