Most important things in life are family, friends, and health. If you have those 3 things consider yourself blessed. I always try and put those 3 things above work, even though I work a lot, because having those 3 things is so vitally important.
Wise words, although I would also count work as a blessing in itself. Having a real sense of purpose and usefulness in the world is important. Being forced out of the workforce by advanced aging must be rough
If you can mix the two that’s great too. Creating a product and seeing people use it is an amazing feeling. Even if it’s not “perfect” and you’d love to have time to add another 10 features ;-)
Talking just from the perspective of having work that contributes to society (as opposed to the economic aspects of work) I think volunteering is a good idea.
There was a man at the church I grew up in who was seriously disabled in an industrial accident who volunteered 40 hours a week at the local library. Similarly my grandmother volunteered at a hospital into her 90s. In her case it actually saved her life when she had an aortic aneurysm that almost certainly would have killed her if she hadn't already been at the hospital when it happened!
I might suggest adding (a sense of) purpose in there as well. From what I've seen, it becomes hard for senior citizens because they feel like they've lost their usefulness.
Even with the three other things you mentioned, not feeling like a contributor to society must be really hard.
Honestly, this is one of the many things that makes me feel incredibly lucky that I have the interest in computing that I do. Not only has it led me down a supremely well-timed and lucky career path, but I also have a no-impact hobby that I can look forward to continuing into my old age.
Might have to get a niece or nephew to crawl behind a desk to plug in the odd dongle, I suppose. Whippersnappers.
As a sad anecdote, my father was a systems engineer for most of his career, deeply into all things technical. He's 86 now, however, and while he has plenty of family around, his friends have all passed and he no longer has the brainpower to do technical things that he used to enjoy. But his mind is sharp enough to know what he's missing. He talks somewhat regularly about how useless he feels. I've got no good answers.
Get him into VR. My parents are a bit younger (~70) but they are amazed at the valve index and the experiences that it provides. They use it more than me.
If you're able to could you interview him on video about the work he used to do?
I would find those videos fascinating. You might be able to set up an AMA-style thing where people ask questions about what he did, how he did it, why things were done in that way.
Doing it several times is perhaps a bit excessive. It gives the impression that you're using the thread to promote something rather than converse with the specific person you're replying to.
I would say the curre6 55-74 range is baby boomers who benefitted from strong growth in wages, stocks, benefits, and housing and are financially secure. Where as the 45-54 group is the first of Gen X that didn't have those benefits and are in a much worse state financially for the future.
I guess the question I have is how have suicide rates changed over the past century.
I'd guess retirements (in the US, at least) are gonna get a hell of a lot less comfortable, on average, as the years go on. And probably suicides will keep going up as a result.
I'm an early (the term I sometimes see is elder) millennial with excellent household income for my area, but if I ever retire it'll either be on a meager income or very late, because I had kids. Took me from probably a comfortable, but not extravagant, early retirement or a pretty good "normal"-timed retirement to maybe-never retirement. Those with lower income (so, most) aren't even getting that choice. Kids and lifelong near-poverty and debt struggles, or maybe, maybe a so-so retirement more or less on time, but no kids.
Generally trending upwards after 2000. Interestingly when split by race, Black, Asian and Hispanics are at a much lower rate than White and American Indian. I know in Asian and Hispanics (and probably Black) households it is common for multiple generations to live and take care of each other.
In a way that makes, people in lower incomes generally have more of a reliance on one another. Financial independence often means independence and people who are independent often struggle with asking for help.
Why? After 40 your body starts to decline and your mortality stares you in the face. If you aren't already running a successful business or an executive then your career is either stalling or in decline. If you haven't been planning for retirement then you're running out of options.
45-54 seems like the age group that's burdened most with their future and the consequences of their life choices catching up to them.
> the consequences of their life choices catching up to them
That's a bit harsh. If you are a post baby boomer, you're in the minority if you think you can retire comfortably. I frankly don't see how the majority of gen-x/millennials can retire - except to not have kids and save >50% of our salary, and pray the stock market doesn't blow up.
A absolutely agree with you and I'm a little confused as to why I said it like that. I'm old enough to have been part of the generation that was taught you'd be successful in life and be able to retire in comfort if you did what society expected of you, and I'm young enough to see that was a lie.
NA has designed its cities to require a car and has not paid any thought to how this isolates and erodes the quality of life of the elderly once they cannot legally drive due to health reasons. Whoops.
As boomers age it'll get worse.
Yet another reason we need to redesign our cities.
I don't completely agree. As Camus once said: "hell is other people". As prosperity increased people fled each others company thinking that being in isolation would rid them of social anxiety. There was little consideration for the results, which is profound loneliness.
Great, I agree - now do a bit more analysis and regress one step further - who profits from this? Why is this a problem now, rather than say, 50 years ago?
"NA" didn't design these cities, it was the old people who did it to themselves and, now, the younger people too. The best part is they're still showing up at planning commission hearings all over the country angrily demanding that their car-choked hellscapes be preserved in amber for all time.
It isn't contained to single cities. I don't know of a single family I grew up with where at least one if not all of the kids no longer live in the city they grew up in. Same goes for extended families. My cousins are scattered across the country as are my husband’s. I’m around and so are my aunts and uncles, so my parents aren’t lonely, but I think this is more the exception than the rule. I don’t think this can be boiled down to a city transportation problem. There is a larger erosion of community stability that needs to be addressed across the board.
Even some non-car-centric housing situations can lead to isolation. I've lived in a couple of mid- to high-rise buildings in walkable neighborhoods where you pretty much don't see any of your neighbors except some who live on the same floor as you.
Small (walk-up-sized) apartment buildings and co-housing arrangements seem to be some of the best for striking a balance between meddling and isolation.
Yes this is the "most right" answer among this entire thread of comments and even missing from the article. We have literally designed ourselves into isolation and we wonder why we are lonely?
This is one of the things I hate most about living in the US. Europe was so much more connected and accessible. Even rural places mostly had public transport. Where I live now there is nothing. I have no car of my own and have to borrow one to get into "town". No tram, bus, train to pop on when needed. It is a massive negative in quality of life.
My entire life I have heard the excuses, but it boils down to the reason that most other things here that are wrong...are wrong...because individualism is seen as proper and better than social systems of all types.
I've lived in Europe and Asia and of course, it is much easier to get somewhere on public transit than it is in my hometown of Toronto.
However, driving my car in Toronto is so, so much nicer than even the best public transit I've experienced (Hong Kong or Tokyo). I felt a decent amount of friction going places because "ugggh, I have to take this line and switch lines there and then walk and oh, btw, it's raining and 33 degrees celsius outside".
I guess for me the attention driving requires, the stress of other drivers trying to kill me, and vehicle costs, parking etc all outweigh the "on demand" nature of it for me. I found having public transport available actually increased my social interaction.
I would like to see how the numbers stack up to other countries that have a better work life balance.
Here's my hypothesis - the work life "balance" in the U.S. is incredibly messed up - like real bad.
The assumption most people make is "Let's work real hard while we are young so we have all the money we need when we are older. We will have fun then".
So right out of college, with six figures in debt, people are working 40+ hours/week (typically 60+ hours/week), working weekends without blinking an eye.
Everyone's doing it, it's the norm, so what's wrong with doing what everyone is doing.
No one has time to make meaningful relationships.
Most people spend less than 3 years at a job, so what's the point anyways. You can't get a good salary hike without quitting your existing and joining a new company.
That model bleeds into one's personal life as well - people are so busy working hard that they miss the opportunities to build a meaningful relationship with their spouse and children.
Guilt sets in so the spouse and children get showered with expensive gifts and vacations but they have nothing much to talk about during those vacations either so they spend most of their time visiting random places, taking tons of photos, posting them on social and handling the barrage of comments they get for those photos.
The emptiness does not resolve though - and when it gets intolerable the spouses file for divorce.
Maybe it will work out with someone else.
Once they retire - they have two big problems:
1. yes, they do have money, but don't know what to do with it
2. they also don't know what to do with the free hours they now have available!
As a result, they hand over their money to fund managers who proceed to loose all or most of that money because they are sure they can beat the market.
In the meantime, they have been so frigging busy most of their adult life with the one thing they did for their employers that they did not develop social skills (outside the fake "professional" facade) or general skills - and everyone's so fake that it gets down under your skin because deep inside you can feel the fakeness so you hesitate to make more social ties.
With the money depleted and being bored out of their minds, what's the next step?
It's easy to blame everyone else for this, but the reality is the time is past for deep introspection.
If I understand you correctly, we don't have our priorities straight.
Money and consumption is put above relationships and growth. (I almost said "experiences" but, in my opinion, people use that term to justify shallow, expensive pursuits like traveling so they can show off how great their lives are. I think experience is valuable, particular leaving your comfort zone so that you can adapt, learn and grow.) Instead of leaning on relationships to provide for each other, and enduring hardships together, we want to individually achieve for ourselves, and remove any sense of inconvenience or boredom from our lives.
Thank you for taking your time to read my comment and then responding to it!
I completely understand and agree with the spirit of your response but here's my pedantic take on the specific ways you put it because I have heard it many times before and I do feel being pedantic about these will force you to introspect further.
I feel deeply about this and have seen not only people's life change for the better when they go down this path of introspection, but people around them, so bear with me.
> If I understand you correctly, we don't have our priorities straight.
We are all very smart people. We do have our priorities straight.
The issue seems to be that these are extremely short term priorities that are, most of the time counter productive for the wellbeing of a person over a span of 50 or so years.
Its like getting really good and efficient at digging your own grave.
You see, you're going to die eventually, so why not work hard at ensuring that your final resting place is as nice and comfortable as you can possibly make it?
> Money and consumption is put above relationships and growth
Of course and it's good for the economy. Think about it - without money and consumption, we would be in deep recession!
So what exactly are we missing?
> to justify shallow, expensive pursuits like traveling so they can show off how great their lives are
Travelling is extremely valuable and educational. It also means different things to different people.
However, I believe, the mainstream interpretation of travelling seems to be a vacuous method of distraction from the emptiness of the regular grind.
Now, at best, I think that's extremely sad and at worst, can force someone deeper into depression.
> Instead of leaning on relationships to provide for each other, and enduring hardships together, we want to individually achieve for ourselves, and remove any sense of inconvenience or boredom from our lives.
Sorry this comment is already very large but without being more pedantic, you have made excellent points.
The last bit is simply brilliant.
Inconvenience is such a great teacher and enabler!
You're either a successful entrepreneur or well on your way to being one. I really enjoyed this discussion and you have added a lot for me to think about.
This is the least hacker news comment of all time and I love it. Maybe this weird era of SV-type a-social-life-and-sleep-is-for-pussies work mentality is actually starting the begin of its end.
That's a misperception of Hacker News. The majority of this community identifies strongly against the clichéd view you're describing. It lost its currency in SV years ago too, so far as I can tell.
By the way, the last time I ran the numbers only about 10% of HN users turned out to be in the Bay Area.
That's totally fair. Every now and then I do see a "you're not working hard enough" flare-up on here though. But of course, the loudest voices are often minorities.
That last bit is a pretty interesting stat, though.
> Maybe this weird era of SV-type a-social-life-and-sleep-is-for-pussies work mentality is actually starting the begin of its end.
> Or not. Maybe we're fucked
Well, we are very smart here. We have all worked through challenges, adversity and naysayers and landed on the top.
However, we still have a long way to go.
We still have to ask ourselves - so what's next?
Each of us run FIRE simulations on our wealth, set our objectives on how much money to make next quarter so our conservative withdrawal rate on retirement still gets us the money we need to enjoy life.
Why don't we run simulations on what happens when we get there?
What do we do then?
Who all do we spend it with?
We can engineer complex systems that scale to a million users: we sure can engineer our own lives to scale to a dozen or so people if we give our future equal priority as the JIRA tickets on our plate this week.
That's HN for you. If you can listen to me, don't correlate HN karma points with your worth.
It's a measure of how closely you correlate with the typical HN reader and that itself changes over time.
I have made more friends just through HN than the 200 odd HN karma points I have.
Have learned infinitely more thanks to HN.
As a person who believes that gun, healthcare and education are unalienable rights, people have a very tough time agreeing with me on all things, and me with them!
Perceptions of what's "constantly upvoted" are in the eye of the beholder. People notice and remember the things they dislike. Since (I'm guessing) you dislike that attitude, you're more likely to remember such cases than, say, the GP comment, which is heavily upvoted.
Currently at the tail end of watching my dad (now 87) go through this whole cycle, exactly as you described. I would encourage everyone to read what you just wrote and think really hard about where you fit into this narrative, and how you might step out of it.
Hey there! I'm really very sorry to hear about your dad, but tell you what - I did not jiust think about this all on my own.
It's an outcome of reflecting off input from hundreds of other people with the same story over and over again.
Once I started to write on Quora, I had the fortune of getting in touch with thousands of people. It was like magic and I was able to live through the lives of these people all around the U.S. and a pattern started to emerge.
Back to your dad - you sound resigned about it
No. He's your dad. Help him. That will soon enable him to help others. Dont give up! It's never too late. otherwise you will really regret the outcome for the rest of your life.
I agree whole heartedly. When we were kids, we knew everyone on my block and people didn’t move much. We could tell neighbors we were going on vacation or when something happened neighbors were looking out and we could run around freely. My mom would talk with older neighbors when they were out doing yard work. Due to continued movement for careers, there isn’t long term stability in community like there used to be.
Another factor, as I stated in another comment, is families don’t live as close as they used to. Most of the families I grew up around have at least one kid in a city 4+ hours away. Before, one cousin could take Mom and Aunt Sue to an event and then other cousin could do it two weeks later due to everyone (or at least Mom and Aunt Sue) living close to each other. Siblings could jointly care for an ailing parent. Now, those burdens tend to do fall on an increasingly small percentage of the next generation of the family because everyone is a half day of travel or more away. (EDIT: And to note, I didn’t grow up in the middle of nowhere. I grew up in a suburb of Pittsburgh that is a 15 minute drive to downtown. I wonder if it is an even larger attrition rate for small towns.)
Finally, grandparents played a big role in raising me. I was with my Nana nearly daily through high school when my parents were working or busy. I saw my other grandparents weekly. Now most of my friends are grateful to be living within an hour or so of one parent. You know who else that kind of interaction is good for? The grandparents! My Nana wasn’t as lonely because she interacted with or was around my siblings and I daily. When you are hours away, a 5 minute skype call every few days isn’t the same.
> I would like to see how the numbers stack up to other countries that have a better work life balance.
The numbers are similar, because this article has chosen to use a misleading presentation of the data.
The rate is high. But the numbers of people dying by suicide over the age of 85 is very small. The reason the rate is so high is because there are so few people over the age 85.
Of course, any death is a tragedy, and most suicide is preventable, especially in groups who are in close contact with health care providers, and so we should be working to prevent suicides in this group.
But if you look at the actual numbers you'll see many more thousands of people in the younger ages dying by suicide.
> I would like to see how the numbers stack up to other countries that have a better work life balance.
From a western European country with way more holidays and worker's rights than the US here. It's just as bad; I immediately found 2 studies and 3 newspaper articles detailing similar or worse problems. I think it's actually harder to make friends here, because people are way more reserved than in the US and it's hard to become a member of local communities. I'm 21 and I've been lonely my whole life.
If your loneliness bothers you, I recommend the following two things:
1. Get clinical help. Immediately. Take this very very seriously. Depending on your social setup, you might feel this is an insult, but I do not mean it that way, so please, follow this input
2. You write well. I looked at your comments and they are all very insightful and enjoyable. If you are unable to find people who enjoy your company, you're probably looking at the wrong place. I have recommended people to blog. You will be surprised how many good friends you can make this way. However, blogging attracts negative people too. It comes with the territory.
For example, you comment from 4 months ago about Art and how modern journalists are failing at their job was an interesting read as was your concerns about the GDPR
I agree this is a common archetype these days but it's still not a large part of the population - probably less than 20%, maybe less than 10%. Most people don't have six figures of college debt nor do they make enough money / have the kind of job that demands more more more in exchange for making you rich in your 40s+. Also this type of person has existed for a century at least, basically since the economy corporatized and white collar career oriented jobs became common
I think another issue is that those without career oriented / rich lifestyles live in a society that is not designed for them. Almost all land in areas where people live is privatized, so the area they can realistically use for social activities is limited to mostly parks, and in the US getting most places quickly requires some form of private transport. Digital media gives the most entertainment/$ so a lot of poorer people actually spend more time in front of screens than rich people, moreso for children. And much of that time is spent on social media which makes many people feel insecure or inferior.
Further, most people don't have any sense of progress or improvement or even purpose in their lives - which can be a foreign feeling to those of us who are better off. Religion used to be a cornerstone of people's lives, and is quickly losing popularity. Social mobility in the US is very low, and most people don't have any meaningful sense of "career progression".
Idk, I think we should make assisted suicide options more prevalent for older people. The reality is that life sucks for many of them. The article says that many of them feel like they’re a burden. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong. You’re going to be aware that you provide little value to people’s lives if you’re unable to do anything and are personally in general discomfort from your decaying body. Suicide does not need to be seen as a terrible thing. It’s totally reasonable to celebrate the end of life. To leave on your own terms sounds much less scary. The normal ideal way to die seems to be surrounded by loved ones but most people don’t get that. They get a scary bodily failure alone and in pain.
Not to mention the psychological benefits that might come from a healthier image of dying for young people.
My family has a history of dementia and it's terrifying. Currently my grandmother is 95 and more or less can't remember anything from the past 30 years. She doesn't know who I am when I visit because I don't look like I did 30 years ago.
She requires 24/7 caretaking and most conversations with her end with "I don't know why the lord hasn't taken me yet". She's very physically weak and struggles to just walk around the house, etc.
This has been more or less her state for the past 15 years. Despite the best efforts of the family she is 95 and ready to go and not sure what else we can do.
I suppose what I’m really saying is that dying of natural causes and living in the frailty of old age really sucks. I’m not advocating for unhappy to kill themselves. I’m saying making an informed decision about when you’d like to die is ideal regardless of your emotional state. It makes sense for happy people to do this too. And maybe the answer is as long as possible, but I doubt it for most cases.
Money will get in the way of solving this problem. The sick thing is that old people actually do provide value, just not in the way you think.
In 2016, people over 55 years old accounted for 56% of healthcare spending even though they make up 29% of the population [1]. If you allow for an assisted suicide option, you will give this population another option instead of healthcare. Right now, when they get sick, their only option is to engage with the healthcare industry. Instead of grandpa going for his third triple bypass, he will opt for suicide. The doctors and nurses will not get to perform that operation. The hospital will not get to loot grandpa's savings. The insurance companies will not get to bill the hospital.
Old people are the lifeblood of the health care industry. Not only that, but terminally ill patients as well! If you let them kill themselves, that entire industry dies too. They will not let this happen. They will argue for morality but behind the scenes what they're arguing for is their bottom line.
Why stop with older people? Why not simply allow anyone who wants to off themselves to get on with it safely? After all, we wouldn't want young people to think that being useless is something you have to suffer with for years.
To take it a bit farther, why wait for them to decide to go themselves - some of these people don't have a lot of get-up-and-go in the first place, maybe they just need a little helping hand. Why not off those who are _demonstrably_ providing little value to {others, the state, the corporation}?
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In case you don't do sarcasm, this is how we wound up with Nazi Germany's death camps. They were (from the Nazi's perspective) humane solutions to the problems of untermensch polluting the gene pool. s/gene pool/society's emotive context/g.
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Life is worth living. No matter how worthless you feel, no matter how how alone you seem. You are not alone. You are not worthless. You Are Loved. [1]
Life is generally worth living. You can have loving family. But you can also be doing nothing but waiting to die in a retirement home away from friends and family, in pain and hopped up on drugs.
It’s really not an empathetic thing to assert that people who are comfortable with the end of their life must believe they are not loved. Ending your life does not have to come from grief. It is BETTER to have acceptance and die than to die alone in fear. It is BETTER if people talk about this difficult subject rather than stave it off as long as possible. People will be happier if they can do this.
If your doctor tells you that you’re going to have an uncomfortable 3 years, it may make sense to you to just say no thanks and have an honest good bye with your family, saving you and them from the uncomfort to come.
It is ok to die. Even without (but for 99% of people only with) medical circumstances.
Dying is the one part of life we are guaranteed - I absolutely agree with you that it is okay to die. I also agree that you don't need to take extraordinary means to preserve your life - you don't have to take the chemotherapy, for example, or have your heart kept active after all other vital signs have ceased.
I also know that our lives our not our own. We do not choose to pick them up and we may not choose to lay them down ourselves. People are happier when they accept this (I assert, as an _ad contra_ to your assertion).
Why do you say that "for 99% of people only with medical circumstances is it okay to die"? Is it just that you think most people _will not_ choose death? Or that they _should not_ choose death?
> I also know that our lives our not our own. We do not choose to pick them up and we may not choose to lay them down ourselves. People are happier when they accept this (I assert, as an _ad contra_ to your assertion).
I think it depends on how you view the importance of your feelings. Dying of a heart attack on the toilet is pretty common (I think?) and probable majorly sucks. But... you also die immediately after so you don’t really dwell on it. Conversely dying peacefully surrounded by friends and family with a celebration of your life is pretty cool. One could argue that the moment of death doesn’t matter because it’s shortish and final, or you could argue that your final thoughts are going to be important to you and thus desire for them to be controlled. I’m going to bet that while people generally want to maximize time alive, they also like the idea of a warm and peaceful exit- and would value that over the assumption that you will have more days of life but a sudden and frightening exit.
And while I think your point of view is also reasonable, my contention is that nobody has the ability to pick my point of view.
> Why do you say that "for 99% of people only with medical circumstances is it okay to die"? Is it just that you think most people _will not_ choose death? Or that they _should not_ choose death?
I’m saying 99% of people would probably not choose to end their life without a medical problem as the alternative. But there’s nothing saying you can’t decide you’ve had enough while healthy. Differentiating this from impulsive decisions made in stress and grief.
Edit: I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. This seems like a good post.
> my contention is that nobody has the ability to pick my point of view.
Completely agree. The question is, "should the point of view matter"? In general, in morals, we distinguish between that which is acceptable to have differing opinions on (having red shades in your bedroom) and that which it is _not_ acceptable to have a differing opinion on (killing Gypsies because they are Gypsies). Morally neutral vs. morally charged.
You seem to be of the opinion that killing oneself is a morally charged act, but that it can be morally good. I agree with you that it is morally charged. I hold that it is always morally evil. We do not receive our life freely and we may not let it go freely. It is ours to put in the service of others, even at the possible expense of it, but not to reject.
There is a difference though. One is voluntary, the other mandatory. And I can see it having it's advantages, even if offered to people of all ages (only requiring evidence that they comprehend and understand what it is they're asking for).
Suicide's main issue is the sudden and unexpectedness of it all for those that remain. We like to say that there is help, that we need to talk, but every time someone like me reaches out, the ones that espouse the most of saying life is worth living, that there's someone willing to listen...are often the ones that swiftly step back when they realize that execution is more costly then rhetoric. If you're lucky you find only silence, if unlucky, becoming ostracized from people that cannot or do not want to understand.
A medically program would help would negate this. Being able to say definitively that you're going to kill yourself with an open way of doing it means that at least the family has some time to prepare themselves. And perhaps bring some comfort in a person's last minutes; the moment of dying is terrifying, even against the greater fear of living.
And as to your last point... it's a nice thought. But for many that simply is not true. There are people's who's lives have no value, even to their family. There are people that die without any to mourn them, even among the very young. You never see them because they are often invisible unless you look carefully; the one looking tiredly out the window of the bus, or the one shuffling down a street asking for change. And the systems that collects the unmourned dead is rarely ever thought of by the living.
This is spot on. I say this as an aging person living in irreversible and progressively increasing discomfort. To quote an old film title, whose life is it, anyway?
Look to Japan for insights on the effects of an aging population on an advanced economy. While immigration acts as a buffer within the United States many trends we are currently experiencing can be seen in Japan as well.
With current societal trends, I suspect that human interaction and emotional labor will become quantified and decoupled from the health care sector. A large fraction of the population - from children, to teens, working adults and the elderly - need more face to face interaction. Volunteer organizations, social clubs and other forms of physical 'social infrastructure' (parks, libraries) need additional funding to help fill the gap in so many of our lives.
Look to medieval society. Everyone was in some form of guild. Guilds determined how you dressed, who you socialized with, held ceremonies and parties. It wasn't just a trade union, it was a whole way of life.
Tocqueville wrote about something similar in Democracy in America (this is talking about American society around 1830).
He talks at length how he was struck by American's social connections. Everyone was in at least one social club. Organized for every purpose conceivable. Some were purely social, others were for some political advocacy. One huge difference between this and the medieval guilds is these associations weren't (near as I can tell) exclusive. People might belong to several.
It sounded a bit ... intense, but I do think we've lost something in the intervening centuries
people still had sense of community then, because there were challenges that needed cooperation from everyone. In areas of the world where this still holds true, often there is still more care for each-other.
One aspect of the problem is face to face interactions can be tedious and boring. E.g. if you have a particular interest, you can easily find a virtual community with people from all over the world, but you may not be able to find people close to you.
If that's the case then you may think you'll go to some local organized event for more face time with people, but if you are not interested in that activity then you'll just hang around bored.
That's why virtual connections are so rewarding, because you can easily find people with similar interests, and also you can be there whenever you feel like it, unlike in real life when you can't just leave the group for several hours, returning when you are in the mood, like you can do with an internet forum.
Presumably you could reverse that logic, and say that the problem with online communities is that they are too comfortable, and don't expose you to people aren't easy to get along with. Growth requires challenge...
While there's an issue, I kind of feel its a temporary gap as society changes.
A generation or two ago, family was everything. Today, less so. My grandparent's entire social circle was their family, children and grandchildren. My mother was half and half. My entire social circle is made out of people I met through speciality interests and made friends with (board games, videogames, engineering meetups, etc).
I'm honestly at capacity: I could not really afford to keep touch with any more people than I actually do. But unlike family, those people are "replaceable". Don't read this as "disposable". Rather, with family, if they move away or die, you can't (easily) get more. With friends though, you always can.
If you have extensive channels to tap for to meet more people and potential friends, you'll never be lonely against your will. The new generation is more and more that way, and there's a clash with the old one. Once the majority's like that though, it won't be an issue. The old people 30-40 years from now will be playing MMORPGs, board games and going to Pax together when they need to see friends. It's already happening.
This is a very self selecting group you are talking about, I assure you that most adults and even teens have zero interest in any of the activities you mention.
These are examples. If its not board games its going to be knitting. If its not knitting its going to be skydiving, and if its not that it will be something else. At the end of the day, to thrive in the current world on a social, cultural, and emotional level, you need to have SOMETHING getting you out of bed that isn't work/kids/eating/drinking.
If the only thing you live for is going out to the local bar's happy hours with the bros, yeah, you probably will have some social issues later down the road.
Read the first sentence and thought it might be an interesting discussion of how Jewish culture handles social connections across generations. Read the rest of the post and am disappointed (and kind of confused).
This is a issue that many churches in America are uniquely positioned to help with. They often have busses, an army of people willing to volunteer, and wide open spaces totally unused on weekdays.
But church leadership would rather spend their resources waging a war against people’s sexual choices and getting involved in political positions. It’s sad to see religious resources so widely unused to help those in society in this time of need.
I think church leadership is helping with the issue of senior citizen loneliness, for those senior citizens who are willing to become bigots, which is a lot of them: Don’t you think that the church-led wars against people’s sexual choices are designed bring fighters on both sides closer together?
> for those senior citizens who are willing to become bigots, which is a lot of them
I wonder if you or the grandparent happen to know of some convincing evidence of this that I'm not aware of?
I often wonder when I read claims like this if they are fact-based, and to what degree (usually never mentioned), or if they might instead be examples of the propogation of memes, similar to those related to race.
spew generalisations elsewhere. Churches do work with older adults. Church communities give older adults a way to connect with other people, especially for those who are widowed, or don't have families. For me personally, I have been able to connect to an older generation that I don't have in my family and those are relationships that I treasure. It seems to me that these types of connections are EXACTLY what avoids loneliness and isolation. Churches are a big family, especially for those who are needy and infirmed. Be it going to deliver food to someone who cannot get out, or making sure to call them every week and check in, or picking them up and helping them get to the decons picnic, i think this is just yet another internet athiest with a sharp tongue who should probably sit down and shut up. maybe go to church and see what goes on there. Did you even read the artice?
I tend to agree with you and I'm not a churchgoer.
Roy Hattersley an atheist former English politician wrote about the relief of Hurricane Katrina
The Salvation Army has been given a special status as provider-in-chief of American disaster relief. But its work is being augmented by all sorts of other groups. Almost all of them have a religious origin and character.
Notable by their absence are teams from rationalist societies, free thinkers' clubs and atheists' associations - the sort of people who not only scoff at religion's intellectual absurdity but also regard it as a positive force for evil.
For a long time my church community (mostly in their 20's-40's w/ some folks 60+) frequently worked w/ our local volunteer organizations that specifically reach out to the elderly, disabled, impoverished, etc. This included yard work, resume/career support, counseling, making care packages and so on
I posted elsewhere that my first date with my now wife was volunteering at a hospice care center to provide some company to an elderly lady; she ended up dying before our eyes within a few hours. We spent another hour comforting her husband.
Sidebar - sometimes it makes me sad to see people stereotype people so easily online. Kind of feels like I have to carry the weight of and associated judgment of all those who did bad things in God's name or whatever. This is probably how good police officer, teachers, oft criticized good public servants feel.
Oh well, we all do what we can do. Thanks to all who continue to serve.
I'm an atheist but even I can see that this is an outdated view of churches in at least some of America.
It's almost a little strange from my perspective how many churches are now almost secular in nature. Yes, they talk about god, good and evil, and read scripture. But it's much less prescriptive than it used to be and almost sounds like a pep-talk about being a good person, good spouse, and a good parent.
Obviously this is from the rare interactions I have with churches -- usually in support of extended family.
I agree that Churches are in a position to help, but there are lots of obstacles to overcome. Church attendance is shrinking. Older Churches cost a lot of money to maintain, and even more modern Churches still are not free to operate. In the Diocese of Pittsburgh, donations to parishes have shrunk by 20-30% since the AG report came out (rightfully so). Outreach services depend on volunteers (and to a lesser degree, money). There are a lot of Parishes where young people are increasingly hands-off/un-involved. If you don’t have young people, your volunteer pool to provide outreach services continues to get smaller. Add in Parishes merging and your Church building closing, people feel less invested in the “community” of their Church.
My mom does volunteer to spend time with people in nursing homes via the local Parish, but a once a week visitor isn’t much. Many of the people tell her that their kids rarely visit (or are too far away to visit) and their friends are also not mobile or have passed away. Even if the Parish had a mountain of volunteers, to visit everyone in even one 90 person home 3 times a week for an hour means 270 hours. That is a part time job for 10 people and that is only one small nursing home!
War against people's sexual choices? Like, with bombs and guns, or a figurative war?
It's interesting to look at Jesus's actions in the area. A mob brought him a woman caught cheating on her husband. Asking, should she be put to death? They wanted to trap Jesus: if he said "Yes", he would violate Roman law, if he said "No", he would violate Jewish law. Jesus said, "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her." (John 8:7). After that disbursed the mob, Jesus told the woman: "Now go and sin no more."
There's nothing harder to convince a man of than the fact that he's a sinner. And yet, when I finally realized that fact and asked Jesus for forgiveness, it was more liberating than anything else in this world, more liberating than I could ever have possibly imagined. When you experience something like that, you realize: the kingdom of heaven is near.
Pretty sure that's a vanishingly small minority of churches. BTW, did you know Jesus provided us a protocol for correcting such misguided churchmembers? You can read about it in Matthew 18:15-17. You should accept Christ as Lord and Savior and then apply this protocol against the offending church-leaders. If they refuse to listen to you, Jesus himself sanctions you treating them as outcasts!
The sentiment against LGBTQ people is not small at all, which is why I included 'and other bible camp activities'. Just because there is a religious tenent for it doesn't mean that religion is practicing that. Catholic institutions regularly commit systematic oppression of minority demographics, most notably by depriving women of necessary healthcare and medication. Protestant institutions in many places drive systems of oppression and ostracizing of vulnerable groups- victims of domestic violence, removing agency from women, labeling LGBTQ identities as morally wrong, etc.
Worldly morals change from decade to decade. That is why Jesus said: "Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them is like a foolish man who built his house on sand." (Matthew 7:26)
In the future, things you and I do today will be considered as barbaric as the intolerant things you're talking about there. Also, in the future, things will become accepted which you and I today think are barbaric.
None of Jesus's disciples do a good job of following Christ's teachings such as "Judge not, lest you be judged" (Matthew 7:1), myself included. Discipleship is a lifelong process. Now as for myself, I love LGBTQ people, and because I love them, I hope and pray they too will know the joy and love of Christ as I know it. Some of them may be offended when I say something like that, and we Christians should try (although it is difficult and we often stumble) to continue to love them even in spite of their taking offense at our loving them.
You are mistaken because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God.
When asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, "The kingdom of God will not come with observable signs. Nor will people say, 'Look, here it is,' or 'There it is.' For you see, the kingdom of God is in your midst." (Luke 17:20-21)
Well I belong to the supposedly sexually obsessed catholic church and our relatively small catholic parish mostly does poor ministries, and elder visits due to the local community needs. I dont think its an outdated view at all... The church provides disproportionate amounts of companionship even for non catholics
I'd like to develop a blueprint for a cookie-cutter community for social security recipients. The blueprint would include design and construction for physical structures such as community spaces, bedroom spaces, land size, possibly food gardening areas, and activity areas.
Then, design a type of self-governing community 'constitution' that would direct operation of the community by the community. An expanded home owners association of sorts.
The community would be funded by the social security income of the residents. All residents who are still able work in some capacity to offset the costs of operation. Those who are no longer able to work would still remain and be assisted by other members and skilled nurses.
Professional services such as legal and counseling can be provided on site. Perhaps add a medication dispensary.
A single community could have, I don't know, 1,000 people? The average social security benefit in 2019 is $1,461. This would yield a $17,500,000 annual budget for the community to operate [3].
This is a similar concept as a Kibbutz, which works as an organizing approach in Israel [1]. One difference is that this community would be primarily funded by social security receipts, rather than industrial or business activities. Many costs of operation can be offset by growing their own food, making their own beer and wine, doing their own maintenance, managing the finances using standard corporate control policies.
Such an arrangement would have all the opportunities that seniors need: Social engagement, valued work, friendships, privacy when they want it, people watching out for each other, a feeling of contributing.
More importantly, it would be available to seniors who hit retirement with no wealth, and no income other than their social security check. There are 25 million Americans in this situation today [2].
Your idea is very well placed and your vision has a lot of value but I think you're trying to achieve it in a very painful way.
You cannot force people to like something: for any initiative to be successful long term, it has to be accepted naturally and organically.
What you are proposing, your idea of a community, counseling, engagement, friendships are very good and a natural way of living life - that's how it used to be forever and still remains to this day, across most of the world where people live truly fulfilling and meaningful lives.
Except mostly for the U.S. and the countries that try to emulate it.
Communities arise spontaneously when a group of people find themselves together with a common purpose, common values, common moment in time, or they just enjoy each others' company. If those elements aren't present, you just have a bunch of individuals sharing space. If they are, a small group forms, they invite others who share their values, and the community grows organically. The physical plan and organization can affect whether a community develops, but nearly all interventions appear to be negative. You can kill community, but only its members can grow it.
Lots and lots of people have tried to engineer community, from everyone who failed at building a Web 2.0 social-networking startup to colleges that manipulate their housing & dining arrangements to apartment complexes with "community rooms" and scheduled events to the huge planned Chinese & Soviet megacities that were supposed to house millions but basically got nobody.
Community always starts with individual humans, authentic emotions, and a time and place. A lot of people think that by supplying the time & place they'll get the community, but it doesn't work that way. People and emotions come first.
I mostly agree, but I think (affordable) time and place is actually incredibly scares these days. To the point where people will travel half way across the world for it. Pretty much everywhere is pricing themselves out of having communities. That is where a lot of these places fail. They have all sorts of barriers like high costs, difficult admissions or rules, and then expect people to be creative.
That must be how the Matrix got started -- create a few cookie-cutter retirement communities, have most of them get taken over by a few management companies, have the most ruthless one of those take over whole market and start earnestly geri-farming people for their social security paychecks, optimize and streamline operations, iterate on that enough and you end up with rows of pods with people in VR. Put them in from the birth to improve adaptation metrics and extend useful paycheck receiving time.
Matrix is the result of paperclip optimization process on a retirement home concept.
It’s a not-for-profit Corp, owned by the community. Perhaps held in trust.
If the community voted to sell at any point, then I suppose yes, they could wind up in The Matrix. Though, most of them saw the movies, so I’d guess they’d know to void that fate.
I know people in their 30s who have suicide as their ultimate end of life plan. They don't have retirement savings beyond a 401k, they live paycheck to paycheck, retirement and pensions aren't an option for them so they know they'll work until they are too old or sick. They're hoping that assisted suicide will be legal by the time they are overwhelmed by medical expenses or pain, but all them are willing to put a gun in their mouths if it comes to that.
Curious what you think is deficient about only having a 401k (and, presumably, Social Security) as a retirement plan. Isn't this the entire sales pitch of Vanguard, that you put a couple of bucks in your 401k every week and then you retire?
I'm not personally all-in on IRAs, but it seems like an accepted strategy.
There is an entire class of people who are living paycheck to paycheck. And have a lifetime of part-time, minimum wage work. How much do you think they have in savings and 401k?
> There is an entire class of people who are living paycheck to paycheck.
Like over 75% of all full time workers in America. If you aren't living paycheck to paycheck you're much better off than the vast majority of the nation.
I don't think any of them are so sure their 401ks and Social security will be reliable. People who were depending on their 401ks in 2008 were horrified while their savings just started disappearing. Social Security was never intended to be enough for people to live off of and my entire life people have been concerned about how/if it can continue into the future. A lot of Republicans would love to see the Social security program ended entirely and these days who knows if those folks will end up in a position where they can make that happen.
I think whether defined-contribution retirement is a successful experiment is yet to be determined. I’m in my 40s and everyone I have opened up to about finances and who have reciprocated have admitted to having savings that are totally inadequate, by one or two orders of magnitude. And these are people in tech, better off than average. Few people I know expect to be able to retire and keep their standard of living.
The median American has around $10k in savings and 30% of us have less than $1000. The median savings for people of retirement age is a mere $100k, which isn’t enough to live on for more than a few years in most cities. I’m not sure how self-funded retirement is really expected to work.
All of the people I know who are comfortably retired are on old school defined-benefit pensions. AFAIK 401k-dependent retirees have not yet hit critical mass, so we haven’t seen the financial catastrophe that may be coming.
There are end of life issues beyond languishing in retirement (or a lack thereof) and loneliness. No matter how much money you save or how well your physical body holds up, eventually your mind will dim. If you're lucky you'll just slowly fade away in pain that's really only obvious to those close to you, if you're not you'll go the way of the late Sir Michael Atiyah.
At least for me, spending time with people in the final stages of their lives has made me believe that euthanasia may very well be the more humane way to pass. The thing that was the actual person is very often long gone by the time their body ceases operations.
If you're lucky you get people to take you to the beach, or other activities so you can live what little life you have left with joy, rather than sitting in the dark waiting to die.
I am in the last few months of my 20s, and I would say that I have suicide as my ultimate end of life plan.
It's not a financial thing - I am generally quite frugal, have built up decent investments, and don't think I'll ever have to worry about food/shelter/etc. I am citizen of a country that provides free healthcare, so that's one worry off my mind as well.
But the past year or so, I have seen my 93 year old grandmother slowly lose all of her mental capacities and with it any trace of a personality. Her life now is spent in a barely conscious/awake state, and she can't even recognize those who gave her the most joy when she was younger.
Who would want 5, 10, 15 years of this? Of course I'd rather die peacefully in my sleep after a long day filled with things I loved doing, but that's not the case for many. Medical science has advanced to the point where we can take care of the human body way beyond what the human mind can follow.
In the years after my grandfather's death, while my grandmother's mental decline was beginning and she slowly became aware of it, she said that her only wish was that God would take her then. She lives in a country where legal assisted suicide is not a thing.
If I ever find myself in a similar situation (something not unlikely - people in my Mediterranean family tend to live well into their 80s and 90s), I hope I have the clarity of mind to end it on my own terms.
I’m at the upper end of my 30s but I half jokingly tell my friends that when I’m too old
I’m going to take the sailboat out for one last sail...and just not come back.
Death is sad, but if you have some terminal thing and a month to live it’s kind of a romantic way to leave. But idk, people get terminal diagnoses and live happily in good health for years afterwards too. I suppose what most people want is a peaceful exit, like no pain and while sleeping or something.
I've pretty much told my family my primary issue is happiness and comfort. If I'm even at the point where I'm not able to enjoy my life any longer and there's little chance of that improving they are free to pull the plug on me. I don't want to burden them with medical expenses or draw out pain and suffering needlessly.
I'm not sure if there's a less distasteful way to say this, but I think that the statistics in the article we're commenting on indicate that a good number of people will indeed follow through with that.
I am 40 and I do not currently plan on retiring. I still put money into retirement for my spouse, but as for me, I think that when I lose the ability or simply the willpower for continued productivity that there is simply no point anymore. I refuse to be a pressure on the earth's ecology if I cannot aid in the development of the world in the interest of posterity and their well being. My last huzzah will hopefully be meaningful use of my corpse for scientific purposes, or even my live body should it be allowed at that point.
I pessimistically think this problem is only going to get worse as young people today grow older and people/politicians today largely ignore the current problem.
In Western cultures, people have become isolated and atomized - by trends such as technology, changing social norms (and family structures), diversification of demographics, and the gradual decline of social structures like religion - as a result, people feel more lonely and feel as if they have less support or purpose.
It seems as if people are more genuinely kind in places that are remote and not densely populated. Folks in cities have so many interactions on daily basis and see so many people (some of those people in dire situations, like homeless people or drug addicts) that they seem to become almost numb to it. If you fell on the sidewalk in New York City, how many people would step over you and how many people would offer to help you up and/or see if you're okay? Would this change depending on the age of the person who fell?
I have a grandfather who is old enough to remember betting with friends on Nazi battles with the Soviets that were broadcast over the radio (details of the battles and the progression). So much has changed since he was a young man - I imagine it's startling and quite unsettling for older people. The rate of change seems now faster than it's ever been and they certainly can't keep up with it. I've talked with older people that simply feel like for this reason, among many others, they've been left behind and forgotten about. This could be a possible contributor to elderly suicide rates as well.
It shouldn't be religion. It also shouldn't be hanging out in a bar, or smoking, or some inane stadium event where people don't really mingle.
There needs to be a third place# where it's expected to have polite conversation and interactions that can lead to "being social".
In smaller communities maybe that's a town square or a park between things, but that just doesn't scale and can't cope with decentralization (which is one of the driving forces behind the tech revolution).
I don't really have an answer, but I do know that actual civic planning a re-organizing society so that we actually move towards having more free time and less "work time" will be beneficial to this and many other problems.
Article elides over the fact that in the US, suicide may be the result of rational analysis, including consideration of pros and cons, in response to specific and relevant factors. Particularly economic factors.
Looming large is the idea that healthcare costs can burn down an entire lifetime of toil, saving, and planning in a matter of months. Some people would prefer to leave something of value to their survivors, rather than give everything that's left to their last physician, and then be a charity case or family burden for all their remaining days.
Gen X and Millennial cohorts are even less secure than Boomers financially as they age, so the problem will only grow worse. If you have a tiny nest egg, and a fixed income, it doesn't take much math to calculate the amount of time one can afford to continue to live, given a certain expense profile. When the choices come down to the number of additional weeks you can eke out by switching from Spam to store-brand cat food, it may also become attractive to look into eating a nice steak dinner, saving the last big chunk of meat to be aspirated, so your survivors don't know, for certain, that you committed suicide.
If you were staring down the barrel of a life where nothing joyful or worthwhile will ever happen to you again, and every day will be slightly worse than the last, and is marked only by the angle of the shadows and the color of the pills, with no hope of reversal, I can't reasonably argue against suicide. In that sense, denying the methods and opportunities for suicide without addressing the root causes of motive, as the facility is paid for every day the person lives, seems a bit like torture for profit.
I have personally changed domicile cities four times in my career, looking for gainful employment, and each time I came away with fewer people that would even notice if I die this evening. I expect that my children will soon leave me, hopefully to find work that allows them to support themselves, and if I don't die first, I will one day lose my spouse as well. I see no way to avoid this. I can't afford now to worry about whether I will be lonely later.
My lack of lifetime financial security has translated into a smaller social support network of friends, and has definitely resulted in choosing to have fewer children. And it has reduced the amount of time I can spend renewing family relationships. My parents see less of me when I am 400 miles away than they did when I was 150 miles away. I'm certainly not alleviating their loneliness. If either committed suicide, I'm not certain how I would even find out about it.
This is an ongoing tragedy, but not because the rate is high. It's because suicide is mostly preventable, and many of these people will be in closer contact with health care providers. It seems like there are years and years where action could be taken.
I can't speak to the US's approach to suicide prevention (other than to say it appears mostly incoherent from outside) but they should be paying some attention to depression, social isolation, and suicidal thinking in older people, and I'd be surprised if this was absent from the strategies. But they will be putting it in context: not many people over the age of 85 die by suicide. Thousands and thousands of people between the ages of 25 - 50 die by suicide.
So, from what I can tell over the age of 80 there were about 2500 deaths by suicide in 2017. For the ages 45-49 it was over 4000 people. For 50-54 it was over 4000 people. And for 55-59 it was nearly 4500 people.
One of the problems with suicide articles being posted to HN is that most people here have no idea how suicide is defined across the US, nor how it varies by counties and states. I certainly don't, and it makes talking about the data really hard.
I know promotional posts are annoying and I'm risking downvotes by posting this... but decided it's relevant enough to share a service my older brother built called NanaGram.co that helps with elder loneliness. The product's pretty simple: you SMS in your photos to a phone number and then then once a month they get printed and shipped to your loved ones in the mail.
It's honestly a very good way to keep your loved ones updated on your life and deliver some joy to their day. From experience, phone calls with my grandma before she passed away were much more interesting once she started getting regular photos too because we had new topics to talk about each time.
Want to be up front that I have no financial incentive to post this and am not involved with the product at all apart from helping to build the initial prototype. Just a proud of younger brother and happy customer.
Good on your brother for building something with a kind purpose at it's core. We need to use tech more for things like that, and less for things that take data/attention/money just to make someone rich.
Every person should be taught mindfulness in their adolescence or as soon as possible during their later life. People struggling from loneliness because they have never learnt to use their minds the proper way are like people struggling from immobility because they have never learnt to walk.
Honestly, if I pass a certain age and my mental or physical faculties start to go, I'd rather opt for some form of suicide than suffering myself or making my family pay to watch...
They've introduced a novel banking scheme in which retired care volunteers “deposit” hours worked looking after elderly people. In return they can use any time saved up for their own care provision later in life.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] thread2) Helping others is another thing that is incredibly rewarding, mentally at least.
There was a man at the church I grew up in who was seriously disabled in an industrial accident who volunteered 40 hours a week at the local library. Similarly my grandmother volunteered at a hospital into her 90s. In her case it actually saved her life when she had an aortic aneurysm that almost certainly would have killed her if she hadn't already been at the hospital when it happened!
Even with the three other things you mentioned, not feeling like a contributor to society must be really hard.
Might have to get a niece or nephew to crawl behind a desk to plug in the odd dongle, I suppose. Whippersnappers.
I would find those videos fascinating. You might be able to set up an AMA-style thing where people ask questions about what he did, how he did it, why things were done in that way.
Do you have anything similar to U3A where he is? It's a nice way to meet other people and keep your brain ticking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_the_Third_Age
I will look into U3A and similar options locally, thanks for the idea!
You grow a community. Your community is what you make of it
I wrote in some details about the challenge, the U.S. faces, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20557757
It's not "my" link. It's a hyperlink to a comment that I made here elsewhere that I think a person might like.
Are you upset that I'm trying to hyperlink to a comment that I made here elsewhere that I feel the person I responded to might find interesting?
Or are you upset that the text of the link itself is too long?
Or is your concern that the comment I hyperlinked to is irrelevant?
I would like the feedback of the person whose response resonated with me and thus placed the link there.
I don't like repeating myself over and over again. I prefer not having fragmented conversations if it can be helped.
Hyperlinking is the killer feature of the web, I think, so I use it.
How would you go about this yourself?
Pressure that if you're not worth 7 figures or famous is poisonous...
I guess the question I have is how have suicide rates changed over the past century.
I'm an early (the term I sometimes see is elder) millennial with excellent household income for my area, but if I ever retire it'll either be on a meager income or very late, because I had kids. Took me from probably a comfortable, but not extravagant, early retirement or a pretty good "normal"-timed retirement to maybe-never retirement. Those with lower income (so, most) aren't even getting that choice. Kids and lifelong near-poverty and debt struggles, or maybe, maybe a so-so retirement more or less on time, but no kids.
Generally trending upwards after 2000. Interestingly when split by race, Black, Asian and Hispanics are at a much lower rate than White and American Indian. I know in Asian and Hispanics (and probably Black) households it is common for multiple generations to live and take care of each other.
https://imgur.com/a/iktpfjS
45-54 seems like the age group that's burdened most with their future and the consequences of their life choices catching up to them.
That's a bit harsh. If you are a post baby boomer, you're in the minority if you think you can retire comfortably. I frankly don't see how the majority of gen-x/millennials can retire - except to not have kids and save >50% of our salary, and pray the stock market doesn't blow up.
As boomers age it'll get worse.
Yet another reason we need to redesign our cities.
This won't change until/unless civic participation in government increases.
Home builders making individual houses and possibly therapists and pharma making anti depression pills. Did I miss any?
>Why is this a problem now, rather than say, 50 years ago?
People shared bedrooms, went to communal bath houses for example and there was a stronger family unit most likely due to societal customs.
The state of Florida used a simple hack to solve this problem. They just let 'em keep driving no matter what.
Driving through my granny's subdivision is like a game of bumper cars lol.
Small (walk-up-sized) apartment buildings and co-housing arrangements seem to be some of the best for striking a balance between meddling and isolation.
My entire life I have heard the excuses, but it boils down to the reason that most other things here that are wrong...are wrong...because individualism is seen as proper and better than social systems of all types.
However, driving my car in Toronto is so, so much nicer than even the best public transit I've experienced (Hong Kong or Tokyo). I felt a decent amount of friction going places because "ugggh, I have to take this line and switch lines there and then walk and oh, btw, it's raining and 33 degrees celsius outside".
Here's my hypothesis - the work life "balance" in the U.S. is incredibly messed up - like real bad.
The assumption most people make is "Let's work real hard while we are young so we have all the money we need when we are older. We will have fun then".
So right out of college, with six figures in debt, people are working 40+ hours/week (typically 60+ hours/week), working weekends without blinking an eye.
Everyone's doing it, it's the norm, so what's wrong with doing what everyone is doing.
No one has time to make meaningful relationships.
Most people spend less than 3 years at a job, so what's the point anyways. You can't get a good salary hike without quitting your existing and joining a new company.
That model bleeds into one's personal life as well - people are so busy working hard that they miss the opportunities to build a meaningful relationship with their spouse and children.
Guilt sets in so the spouse and children get showered with expensive gifts and vacations but they have nothing much to talk about during those vacations either so they spend most of their time visiting random places, taking tons of photos, posting them on social and handling the barrage of comments they get for those photos.
The emptiness does not resolve though - and when it gets intolerable the spouses file for divorce.
Maybe it will work out with someone else.
Once they retire - they have two big problems:
1. yes, they do have money, but don't know what to do with it
2. they also don't know what to do with the free hours they now have available!
As a result, they hand over their money to fund managers who proceed to loose all or most of that money because they are sure they can beat the market.
In the meantime, they have been so frigging busy most of their adult life with the one thing they did for their employers that they did not develop social skills (outside the fake "professional" facade) or general skills - and everyone's so fake that it gets down under your skin because deep inside you can feel the fakeness so you hesitate to make more social ties.
With the money depleted and being bored out of their minds, what's the next step?
It's easy to blame everyone else for this, but the reality is the time is past for deep introspection.
Money and consumption is put above relationships and growth. (I almost said "experiences" but, in my opinion, people use that term to justify shallow, expensive pursuits like traveling so they can show off how great their lives are. I think experience is valuable, particular leaving your comfort zone so that you can adapt, learn and grow.) Instead of leaning on relationships to provide for each other, and enduring hardships together, we want to individually achieve for ourselves, and remove any sense of inconvenience or boredom from our lives.
I completely understand and agree with the spirit of your response but here's my pedantic take on the specific ways you put it because I have heard it many times before and I do feel being pedantic about these will force you to introspect further.
I feel deeply about this and have seen not only people's life change for the better when they go down this path of introspection, but people around them, so bear with me.
> If I understand you correctly, we don't have our priorities straight.
We are all very smart people. We do have our priorities straight.
The issue seems to be that these are extremely short term priorities that are, most of the time counter productive for the wellbeing of a person over a span of 50 or so years.
Its like getting really good and efficient at digging your own grave.
You see, you're going to die eventually, so why not work hard at ensuring that your final resting place is as nice and comfortable as you can possibly make it?
> Money and consumption is put above relationships and growth
Of course and it's good for the economy. Think about it - without money and consumption, we would be in deep recession!
So what exactly are we missing?
> to justify shallow, expensive pursuits like traveling so they can show off how great their lives are
Travelling is extremely valuable and educational. It also means different things to different people.
However, I believe, the mainstream interpretation of travelling seems to be a vacuous method of distraction from the emptiness of the regular grind.
Now, at best, I think that's extremely sad and at worst, can force someone deeper into depression.
> Instead of leaning on relationships to provide for each other, and enduring hardships together, we want to individually achieve for ourselves, and remove any sense of inconvenience or boredom from our lives.
Sorry this comment is already very large but without being more pedantic, you have made excellent points.
The last bit is simply brilliant.
Inconvenience is such a great teacher and enabler!
You're either a successful entrepreneur or well on your way to being one. I really enjoyed this discussion and you have added a lot for me to think about.
Thank you!
Or not. Maybe we're fucked.
By the way, the last time I ran the numbers only about 10% of HN users turned out to be in the Bay Area.
That last bit is a pretty interesting stat, though.
> Maybe this weird era of SV-type a-social-life-and-sleep-is-for-pussies work mentality is actually starting the begin of its end. > Or not. Maybe we're fucked
Well, we are very smart here. We have all worked through challenges, adversity and naysayers and landed on the top.
However, we still have a long way to go.
We still have to ask ourselves - so what's next?
Each of us run FIRE simulations on our wealth, set our objectives on how much money to make next quarter so our conservative withdrawal rate on retirement still gets us the money we need to enjoy life.
Why don't we run simulations on what happens when we get there?
What do we do then?
Who all do we spend it with?
We can engineer complex systems that scale to a million users: we sure can engineer our own lives to scale to a dozen or so people if we give our future equal priority as the JIRA tickets on our plate this week.
Surely?
It's a measure of how closely you correlate with the typical HN reader and that itself changes over time.
I have made more friends just through HN than the 200 odd HN karma points I have.
Have learned infinitely more thanks to HN.
As a person who believes that gun, healthcare and education are unalienable rights, people have a very tough time agreeing with me on all things, and me with them!
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
It's an outcome of reflecting off input from hundreds of other people with the same story over and over again.
Once I started to write on Quora, I had the fortune of getting in touch with thousands of people. It was like magic and I was able to live through the lives of these people all around the U.S. and a pattern started to emerge.
Back to your dad - you sound resigned about it
No. He's your dad. Help him. That will soon enable him to help others. Dont give up! It's never too late. otherwise you will really regret the outcome for the rest of your life.
Another factor, as I stated in another comment, is families don’t live as close as they used to. Most of the families I grew up around have at least one kid in a city 4+ hours away. Before, one cousin could take Mom and Aunt Sue to an event and then other cousin could do it two weeks later due to everyone (or at least Mom and Aunt Sue) living close to each other. Siblings could jointly care for an ailing parent. Now, those burdens tend to do fall on an increasingly small percentage of the next generation of the family because everyone is a half day of travel or more away. (EDIT: And to note, I didn’t grow up in the middle of nowhere. I grew up in a suburb of Pittsburgh that is a 15 minute drive to downtown. I wonder if it is an even larger attrition rate for small towns.)
Finally, grandparents played a big role in raising me. I was with my Nana nearly daily through high school when my parents were working or busy. I saw my other grandparents weekly. Now most of my friends are grateful to be living within an hour or so of one parent. You know who else that kind of interaction is good for? The grandparents! My Nana wasn’t as lonely because she interacted with or was around my siblings and I daily. When you are hours away, a 5 minute skype call every few days isn’t the same.
The numbers are similar, because this article has chosen to use a misleading presentation of the data.
The rate is high. But the numbers of people dying by suicide over the age of 85 is very small. The reason the rate is so high is because there are so few people over the age 85.
Of course, any death is a tragedy, and most suicide is preventable, especially in groups who are in close contact with health care providers, and so we should be working to prevent suicides in this group.
But if you look at the actual numbers you'll see many more thousands of people in the younger ages dying by suicide.
From a western European country with way more holidays and worker's rights than the US here. It's just as bad; I immediately found 2 studies and 3 newspaper articles detailing similar or worse problems. I think it's actually harder to make friends here, because people are way more reserved than in the US and it's hard to become a member of local communities. I'm 21 and I've been lonely my whole life.
If your loneliness bothers you, I recommend the following two things:
1. Get clinical help. Immediately. Take this very very seriously. Depending on your social setup, you might feel this is an insult, but I do not mean it that way, so please, follow this input
2. You write well. I looked at your comments and they are all very insightful and enjoyable. If you are unable to find people who enjoy your company, you're probably looking at the wrong place. I have recommended people to blog. You will be surprised how many good friends you can make this way. However, blogging attracts negative people too. It comes with the territory.
For example, you comment from 4 months ago about Art and how modern journalists are failing at their job was an interesting read as was your concerns about the GDPR
I think another issue is that those without career oriented / rich lifestyles live in a society that is not designed for them. Almost all land in areas where people live is privatized, so the area they can realistically use for social activities is limited to mostly parks, and in the US getting most places quickly requires some form of private transport. Digital media gives the most entertainment/$ so a lot of poorer people actually spend more time in front of screens than rich people, moreso for children. And much of that time is spent on social media which makes many people feel insecure or inferior.
Further, most people don't have any sense of progress or improvement or even purpose in their lives - which can be a foreign feeling to those of us who are better off. Religion used to be a cornerstone of people's lives, and is quickly losing popularity. Social mobility in the US is very low, and most people don't have any meaningful sense of "career progression".
Especially the ratio of
> Digital media gives the most entertainment/$
Not to mention the psychological benefits that might come from a healthier image of dying for young people.
She requires 24/7 caretaking and most conversations with her end with "I don't know why the lord hasn't taken me yet". She's very physically weak and struggles to just walk around the house, etc.
This has been more or less her state for the past 15 years. Despite the best efforts of the family she is 95 and ready to go and not sure what else we can do.
In 2016, people over 55 years old accounted for 56% of healthcare spending even though they make up 29% of the population [1]. If you allow for an assisted suicide option, you will give this population another option instead of healthcare. Right now, when they get sick, their only option is to engage with the healthcare industry. Instead of grandpa going for his third triple bypass, he will opt for suicide. The doctors and nurses will not get to perform that operation. The hospital will not get to loot grandpa's savings. The insurance companies will not get to bill the hospital.
Old people are the lifeblood of the health care industry. Not only that, but terminally ill patients as well! If you let them kill themselves, that entire industry dies too. They will not let this happen. They will argue for morality but behind the scenes what they're arguing for is their bottom line.
[1] - https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
To take it a bit farther, why wait for them to decide to go themselves - some of these people don't have a lot of get-up-and-go in the first place, maybe they just need a little helping hand. Why not off those who are _demonstrably_ providing little value to {others, the state, the corporation}?
----
In case you don't do sarcasm, this is how we wound up with Nazi Germany's death camps. They were (from the Nazi's perspective) humane solutions to the problems of untermensch polluting the gene pool. s/gene pool/society's emotive context/g.
----
Life is worth living. No matter how worthless you feel, no matter how how alone you seem. You are not alone. You are not worthless. You Are Loved. [1]
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Left-Tell-Discovering-Rwandan-Holocau...
Life is generally worth living. You can have loving family. But you can also be doing nothing but waiting to die in a retirement home away from friends and family, in pain and hopped up on drugs.
It’s really not an empathetic thing to assert that people who are comfortable with the end of their life must believe they are not loved. Ending your life does not have to come from grief. It is BETTER to have acceptance and die than to die alone in fear. It is BETTER if people talk about this difficult subject rather than stave it off as long as possible. People will be happier if they can do this.
If your doctor tells you that you’re going to have an uncomfortable 3 years, it may make sense to you to just say no thanks and have an honest good bye with your family, saving you and them from the uncomfort to come.
It is ok to die. Even without (but for 99% of people only with) medical circumstances.
Dying is the one part of life we are guaranteed - I absolutely agree with you that it is okay to die. I also agree that you don't need to take extraordinary means to preserve your life - you don't have to take the chemotherapy, for example, or have your heart kept active after all other vital signs have ceased.
I also know that our lives our not our own. We do not choose to pick them up and we may not choose to lay them down ourselves. People are happier when they accept this (I assert, as an _ad contra_ to your assertion).
Why do you say that "for 99% of people only with medical circumstances is it okay to die"? Is it just that you think most people _will not_ choose death? Or that they _should not_ choose death?
I think it depends on how you view the importance of your feelings. Dying of a heart attack on the toilet is pretty common (I think?) and probable majorly sucks. But... you also die immediately after so you don’t really dwell on it. Conversely dying peacefully surrounded by friends and family with a celebration of your life is pretty cool. One could argue that the moment of death doesn’t matter because it’s shortish and final, or you could argue that your final thoughts are going to be important to you and thus desire for them to be controlled. I’m going to bet that while people generally want to maximize time alive, they also like the idea of a warm and peaceful exit- and would value that over the assumption that you will have more days of life but a sudden and frightening exit.
And while I think your point of view is also reasonable, my contention is that nobody has the ability to pick my point of view.
> Why do you say that "for 99% of people only with medical circumstances is it okay to die"? Is it just that you think most people _will not_ choose death? Or that they _should not_ choose death?
I’m saying 99% of people would probably not choose to end their life without a medical problem as the alternative. But there’s nothing saying you can’t decide you’ve had enough while healthy. Differentiating this from impulsive decisions made in stress and grief.
Edit: I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. This seems like a good post.
Completely agree. The question is, "should the point of view matter"? In general, in morals, we distinguish between that which is acceptable to have differing opinions on (having red shades in your bedroom) and that which it is _not_ acceptable to have a differing opinion on (killing Gypsies because they are Gypsies). Morally neutral vs. morally charged.
You seem to be of the opinion that killing oneself is a morally charged act, but that it can be morally good. I agree with you that it is morally charged. I hold that it is always morally evil. We do not receive our life freely and we may not let it go freely. It is ours to put in the service of others, even at the possible expense of it, but not to reject.
Suicide's main issue is the sudden and unexpectedness of it all for those that remain. We like to say that there is help, that we need to talk, but every time someone like me reaches out, the ones that espouse the most of saying life is worth living, that there's someone willing to listen...are often the ones that swiftly step back when they realize that execution is more costly then rhetoric. If you're lucky you find only silence, if unlucky, becoming ostracized from people that cannot or do not want to understand.
A medically program would help would negate this. Being able to say definitively that you're going to kill yourself with an open way of doing it means that at least the family has some time to prepare themselves. And perhaps bring some comfort in a person's last minutes; the moment of dying is terrifying, even against the greater fear of living.
And as to your last point... it's a nice thought. But for many that simply is not true. There are people's who's lives have no value, even to their family. There are people that die without any to mourn them, even among the very young. You never see them because they are often invisible unless you look carefully; the one looking tiredly out the window of the bus, or the one shuffling down a street asking for change. And the systems that collects the unmourned dead is rarely ever thought of by the living.
Prove it.
With current societal trends, I suspect that human interaction and emotional labor will become quantified and decoupled from the health care sector. A large fraction of the population - from children, to teens, working adults and the elderly - need more face to face interaction. Volunteer organizations, social clubs and other forms of physical 'social infrastructure' (parks, libraries) need additional funding to help fill the gap in so many of our lives.
He talks at length how he was struck by American's social connections. Everyone was in at least one social club. Organized for every purpose conceivable. Some were purely social, others were for some political advocacy. One huge difference between this and the medieval guilds is these associations weren't (near as I can tell) exclusive. People might belong to several.
It sounded a bit ... intense, but I do think we've lost something in the intervening centuries
https://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/805328.html
One aspect of the problem is face to face interactions can be tedious and boring. E.g. if you have a particular interest, you can easily find a virtual community with people from all over the world, but you may not be able to find people close to you.
If that's the case then you may think you'll go to some local organized event for more face time with people, but if you are not interested in that activity then you'll just hang around bored.
That's why virtual connections are so rewarding, because you can easily find people with similar interests, and also you can be there whenever you feel like it, unlike in real life when you can't just leave the group for several hours, returning when you are in the mood, like you can do with an internet forum.
A generation or two ago, family was everything. Today, less so. My grandparent's entire social circle was their family, children and grandchildren. My mother was half and half. My entire social circle is made out of people I met through speciality interests and made friends with (board games, videogames, engineering meetups, etc).
I'm honestly at capacity: I could not really afford to keep touch with any more people than I actually do. But unlike family, those people are "replaceable". Don't read this as "disposable". Rather, with family, if they move away or die, you can't (easily) get more. With friends though, you always can.
If you have extensive channels to tap for to meet more people and potential friends, you'll never be lonely against your will. The new generation is more and more that way, and there's a clash with the old one. Once the majority's like that though, it won't be an issue. The old people 30-40 years from now will be playing MMORPGs, board games and going to Pax together when they need to see friends. It's already happening.
If the only thing you live for is going out to the local bar's happy hours with the bros, yeah, you probably will have some social issues later down the road.
But church leadership would rather spend their resources waging a war against people’s sexual choices and getting involved in political positions. It’s sad to see religious resources so widely unused to help those in society in this time of need.
I wonder if you or the grandparent happen to know of some convincing evidence of this that I'm not aware of?
I often wonder when I read claims like this if they are fact-based, and to what degree (usually never mentioned), or if they might instead be examples of the propogation of memes, similar to those related to race.
The Salvation Army has been given a special status as provider-in-chief of American disaster relief. But its work is being augmented by all sorts of other groups. Almost all of them have a religious origin and character.
Notable by their absence are teams from rationalist societies, free thinkers' clubs and atheists' associations - the sort of people who not only scoff at religion's intellectual absurdity but also regard it as a positive force for evil.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/12/religion.uk
https://www.kiva.org/teams?queryString=%28A%2B%29+Atheists%2...
The Atheist team is one of the top donors. There has been a significant surge in secular charity work over the past decade.
I posted elsewhere that my first date with my now wife was volunteering at a hospice care center to provide some company to an elderly lady; she ended up dying before our eyes within a few hours. We spent another hour comforting her husband.
Sidebar - sometimes it makes me sad to see people stereotype people so easily online. Kind of feels like I have to carry the weight of and associated judgment of all those who did bad things in God's name or whatever. This is probably how good police officer, teachers, oft criticized good public servants feel.
Oh well, we all do what we can do. Thanks to all who continue to serve.
It's almost a little strange from my perspective how many churches are now almost secular in nature. Yes, they talk about god, good and evil, and read scripture. But it's much less prescriptive than it used to be and almost sounds like a pep-talk about being a good person, good spouse, and a good parent.
Obviously this is from the rare interactions I have with churches -- usually in support of extended family.
My mom does volunteer to spend time with people in nursing homes via the local Parish, but a once a week visitor isn’t much. Many of the people tell her that their kids rarely visit (or are too far away to visit) and their friends are also not mobile or have passed away. Even if the Parish had a mountain of volunteers, to visit everyone in even one 90 person home 3 times a week for an hour means 270 hours. That is a part time job for 10 people and that is only one small nursing home!
It's interesting to look at Jesus's actions in the area. A mob brought him a woman caught cheating on her husband. Asking, should she be put to death? They wanted to trap Jesus: if he said "Yes", he would violate Roman law, if he said "No", he would violate Jewish law. Jesus said, "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her." (John 8:7). After that disbursed the mob, Jesus told the woman: "Now go and sin no more."
There's nothing harder to convince a man of than the fact that he's a sinner. And yet, when I finally realized that fact and asked Jesus for forgiveness, it was more liberating than anything else in this world, more liberating than I could ever have possibly imagined. When you experience something like that, you realize: the kingdom of heaven is near.
I guess it depends on what you define conversion therapy and other 'bible camp' type activities.
In the future, things you and I do today will be considered as barbaric as the intolerant things you're talking about there. Also, in the future, things will become accepted which you and I today think are barbaric.
None of Jesus's disciples do a good job of following Christ's teachings such as "Judge not, lest you be judged" (Matthew 7:1), myself included. Discipleship is a lifelong process. Now as for myself, I love LGBTQ people, and because I love them, I hope and pray they too will know the joy and love of Christ as I know it. Some of them may be offended when I say something like that, and we Christians should try (although it is difficult and we often stumble) to continue to love them even in spite of their taking offense at our loving them.
The very first Christians were told the same 2000 years ago.
I wonder what they would think if they were told that they should wait at least 2000 years.
When asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, "The kingdom of God will not come with observable signs. Nor will people say, 'Look, here it is,' or 'There it is.' For you see, the kingdom of God is in your midst." (Luke 17:20-21)
Your comment would have been fine without the second paragraph.
Well, grow a community. Your community is what you make of it!
The community you need might not thrive right now where you live, so look around and move to where you find real genuine happiness
I wrote in some details about the challenge, the U.S. faces, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20557757
Then, design a type of self-governing community 'constitution' that would direct operation of the community by the community. An expanded home owners association of sorts.
The community would be funded by the social security income of the residents. All residents who are still able work in some capacity to offset the costs of operation. Those who are no longer able to work would still remain and be assisted by other members and skilled nurses.
Professional services such as legal and counseling can be provided on site. Perhaps add a medication dispensary.
A single community could have, I don't know, 1,000 people? The average social security benefit in 2019 is $1,461. This would yield a $17,500,000 annual budget for the community to operate [3].
This is a similar concept as a Kibbutz, which works as an organizing approach in Israel [1]. One difference is that this community would be primarily funded by social security receipts, rather than industrial or business activities. Many costs of operation can be offset by growing their own food, making their own beer and wine, doing their own maintenance, managing the finances using standard corporate control policies.
Such an arrangement would have all the opportunities that seniors need: Social engagement, valued work, friendships, privacy when they want it, people watching out for each other, a feeling of contributing.
More importantly, it would be available to seniors who hit retirement with no wealth, and no income other than their social security check. There are 25 million Americans in this situation today [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz
[2] https://www.ncoa.org/news/resources-for-reporters/get-the-fa...
[3] https://www.aarp.org/retirement/social-security/questions-an...
You cannot force people to like something: for any initiative to be successful long term, it has to be accepted naturally and organically.
What you are proposing, your idea of a community, counseling, engagement, friendships are very good and a natural way of living life - that's how it used to be forever and still remains to this day, across most of the world where people live truly fulfilling and meaningful lives.
Except mostly for the U.S. and the countries that try to emulate it.
I wrote in some details about the challenge, the U.S. faces, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20557757
Communities arise spontaneously when a group of people find themselves together with a common purpose, common values, common moment in time, or they just enjoy each others' company. If those elements aren't present, you just have a bunch of individuals sharing space. If they are, a small group forms, they invite others who share their values, and the community grows organically. The physical plan and organization can affect whether a community develops, but nearly all interventions appear to be negative. You can kill community, but only its members can grow it.
Lots and lots of people have tried to engineer community, from everyone who failed at building a Web 2.0 social-networking startup to colleges that manipulate their housing & dining arrangements to apartment complexes with "community rooms" and scheduled events to the huge planned Chinese & Soviet megacities that were supposed to house millions but basically got nobody.
Community always starts with individual humans, authentic emotions, and a time and place. A lot of people think that by supplying the time & place they'll get the community, but it doesn't work that way. People and emotions come first.
Matrix is the result of paperclip optimization process on a retirement home concept.
If the community voted to sell at any point, then I suppose yes, they could wind up in The Matrix. Though, most of them saw the movies, so I’d guess they’d know to void that fate.
I'm not personally all-in on IRAs, but it seems like an accepted strategy.
Like over 75% of all full time workers in America. If you aren't living paycheck to paycheck you're much better off than the vast majority of the nation.
The median American has around $10k in savings and 30% of us have less than $1000. The median savings for people of retirement age is a mere $100k, which isn’t enough to live on for more than a few years in most cities. I’m not sure how self-funded retirement is really expected to work.
All of the people I know who are comfortably retired are on old school defined-benefit pensions. AFAIK 401k-dependent retirees have not yet hit critical mass, so we haven’t seen the financial catastrophe that may be coming.
The author was horrified when he found out that employers were then dropping their plans and moving employees to 401k-only.
That should tell you all you need to know.
There are end of life issues beyond languishing in retirement (or a lack thereof) and loneliness. No matter how much money you save or how well your physical body holds up, eventually your mind will dim. If you're lucky you'll just slowly fade away in pain that's really only obvious to those close to you, if you're not you'll go the way of the late Sir Michael Atiyah.
At least for me, spending time with people in the final stages of their lives has made me believe that euthanasia may very well be the more humane way to pass. The thing that was the actual person is very often long gone by the time their body ceases operations.
https://twitter.com/Drmarkredmond/status/1155399943831597056...
https://twitter.com/Glos_CareNHS/status/1079757130431893504?...
It's not a financial thing - I am generally quite frugal, have built up decent investments, and don't think I'll ever have to worry about food/shelter/etc. I am citizen of a country that provides free healthcare, so that's one worry off my mind as well.
But the past year or so, I have seen my 93 year old grandmother slowly lose all of her mental capacities and with it any trace of a personality. Her life now is spent in a barely conscious/awake state, and she can't even recognize those who gave her the most joy when she was younger.
Who would want 5, 10, 15 years of this? Of course I'd rather die peacefully in my sleep after a long day filled with things I loved doing, but that's not the case for many. Medical science has advanced to the point where we can take care of the human body way beyond what the human mind can follow.
In the years after my grandfather's death, while my grandmother's mental decline was beginning and she slowly became aware of it, she said that her only wish was that God would take her then. She lives in a country where legal assisted suicide is not a thing.
If I ever find myself in a similar situation (something not unlikely - people in my Mediterranean family tend to live well into their 80s and 90s), I hope I have the clarity of mind to end it on my own terms.
An easy thing to say when it is still some distant future event.
In Western cultures, people have become isolated and atomized - by trends such as technology, changing social norms (and family structures), diversification of demographics, and the gradual decline of social structures like religion - as a result, people feel more lonely and feel as if they have less support or purpose.
It seems as if people are more genuinely kind in places that are remote and not densely populated. Folks in cities have so many interactions on daily basis and see so many people (some of those people in dire situations, like homeless people or drug addicts) that they seem to become almost numb to it. If you fell on the sidewalk in New York City, how many people would step over you and how many people would offer to help you up and/or see if you're okay? Would this change depending on the age of the person who fell?
I have a grandfather who is old enough to remember betting with friends on Nazi battles with the Soviets that were broadcast over the radio (details of the battles and the progression). So much has changed since he was a young man - I imagine it's startling and quite unsettling for older people. The rate of change seems now faster than it's ever been and they certainly can't keep up with it. I've talked with older people that simply feel like for this reason, among many others, they've been left behind and forgotten about. This could be a possible contributor to elderly suicide rates as well.
There needs to be a third place# where it's expected to have polite conversation and interactions that can lead to "being social".
In smaller communities maybe that's a town square or a park between things, but that just doesn't scale and can't cope with decentralization (which is one of the driving forces behind the tech revolution).
I don't really have an answer, but I do know that actual civic planning a re-organizing society so that we actually move towards having more free time and less "work time" will be beneficial to this and many other problems.
# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
Looming large is the idea that healthcare costs can burn down an entire lifetime of toil, saving, and planning in a matter of months. Some people would prefer to leave something of value to their survivors, rather than give everything that's left to their last physician, and then be a charity case or family burden for all their remaining days.
Gen X and Millennial cohorts are even less secure than Boomers financially as they age, so the problem will only grow worse. If you have a tiny nest egg, and a fixed income, it doesn't take much math to calculate the amount of time one can afford to continue to live, given a certain expense profile. When the choices come down to the number of additional weeks you can eke out by switching from Spam to store-brand cat food, it may also become attractive to look into eating a nice steak dinner, saving the last big chunk of meat to be aspirated, so your survivors don't know, for certain, that you committed suicide.
If you were staring down the barrel of a life where nothing joyful or worthwhile will ever happen to you again, and every day will be slightly worse than the last, and is marked only by the angle of the shadows and the color of the pills, with no hope of reversal, I can't reasonably argue against suicide. In that sense, denying the methods and opportunities for suicide without addressing the root causes of motive, as the facility is paid for every day the person lives, seems a bit like torture for profit.
I have personally changed domicile cities four times in my career, looking for gainful employment, and each time I came away with fewer people that would even notice if I die this evening. I expect that my children will soon leave me, hopefully to find work that allows them to support themselves, and if I don't die first, I will one day lose my spouse as well. I see no way to avoid this. I can't afford now to worry about whether I will be lonely later.
My lack of lifetime financial security has translated into a smaller social support network of friends, and has definitely resulted in choosing to have fewer children. And it has reduced the amount of time I can spend renewing family relationships. My parents see less of me when I am 400 miles away than they did when I was 150 miles away. I'm certainly not alleviating their loneliness. If either committed suicide, I'm not certain how I would even find out about it.
The rate is high, but the actual numbers are very low, because there aren't many people over the age of 85.
https://imgur.com/a/iktpfjS
This is an ongoing tragedy, but not because the rate is high. It's because suicide is mostly preventable, and many of these people will be in closer contact with health care providers. It seems like there are years and years where action could be taken.
I can't speak to the US's approach to suicide prevention (other than to say it appears mostly incoherent from outside) but they should be paying some attention to depression, social isolation, and suicidal thinking in older people, and I'd be surprised if this was absent from the strategies. But they will be putting it in context: not many people over the age of 85 die by suicide. Thousands and thousands of people between the ages of 25 - 50 die by suicide.
So, from what I can tell over the age of 80 there were about 2500 deaths by suicide in 2017. For the ages 45-49 it was over 4000 people. For 50-54 it was over 4000 people. And for 55-59 it was nearly 4500 people.
https://imgur.com/a/iktpfjS
One of the problems with suicide articles being posted to HN is that most people here have no idea how suicide is defined across the US, nor how it varies by counties and states. I certainly don't, and it makes talking about the data really hard.
It's honestly a very good way to keep your loved ones updated on your life and deliver some joy to their day. From experience, phone calls with my grandma before she passed away were much more interesting once she started getting regular photos too because we had new topics to talk about each time.
Want to be up front that I have no financial incentive to post this and am not involved with the product at all apart from helping to build the initial prototype. Just a proud of younger brother and happy customer.
They've introduced a novel banking scheme in which retired care volunteers “deposit” hours worked looking after elderly people. In return they can use any time saved up for their own care provision later in life.