Translator: Theresa Ranft Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
It's really nice to be with you today.
I was pretty excited to be invited to join you.
You know, this kind of opportunity doesn't come to my kind very often.
I'm a physician, but I specialize in the care of older people.
And we geriatricians, we are a pretty rare breed.
You might not realize it, but the United States of America
has only 6,000 geriatricians in a nation of 300 million people.
Even worse, that number is not going up, it's going down.
So, for a lot of you, this actually might be
the only time you ever get to see a geriatrician ...
(Loudly) ... live, and in person!
(Applause) (Cheering)
Take pictures if you want.
(Laughter)
And while you do, I'm going to ask a question.
Why would an aging society
have a shrinking number of doctors prepared to take care of older people?
The answer actually comes in just one word:
agism.
You know, if you go around making jokes based on another person's gender,
that's sexism.
If you make jokes about another person's race,
that's racism.
But if you joke about somebody's age,
that's called situation comedy!
(Some chuckling)
And if you keep watching television, the next thing you'll discover
is that all the leading voices, all the experts on aging,
are all anti-aging gurus.
And this is true even though in the entire history of the world,
not one person has ever grown young.
Even though our aging is actually hard-wired into our DNA,
we persist in thinking of aging as if it were a technical problem.
It's not a technical problem;
it's a design problem.
And here's the magic:
Unlike all other living creatures on this Earth,
human beings exert conscious control over their life cycle.
Around the world and through history,
human beings have given that delicate arc that stretches from death to birth
a myriad of forms.
When Shakespeare looked at the world, he saw a life in seven acts.
In our society, we are presented with and compelled to accept
a life with three stages:
childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
And these life stages, they're not just labels,
they're incredibly powerful filters
through which we put all of our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and sensations.
In large part, who we are and how we are in the world
is defined by our statuses:
children, adolescents, or adults.
And this is actually part of the problem.
You see, we inhabit our life cycles so fully and completely
that we've missed a radical change.
It turns out that as all of us have been moving through the life cycle,
the life cycle itself has been changing.
Here's how it worked:
About 60 years ago,
an enormous generation was born into American society.
It was so massive and dense that, really, from the very beginning
this baby boom generation
actually had the power to bend our culture.
It was like a massive, cultural neutron star.
And not only could it bend culture, it could magnify the stage of life
as the boomers occupied it.
I can give you a pretty dramatic example of how that worked.
In the 1950s, adolescence was seen as kind of a quirky little period
where people had little teenage problems before they grew up.
I mean, everybody has seen Happy Days, right?
Well, what happened 15 years later
when that massive generation slammed into adolescence?
I'll tell you what.
They set off an earthquake
that just pegged the cultural Richter scale.
I mean, if you have one teenager,
she might [sneak out the house to buy a cigarette].
If you have millions and millions of adolescents
all pulsing with countercultural fervor,
they're probably going to surround the Pentagon and try to levitate it.
(Laughter)
In fact,
as the boomers emerged out of childhood and slammed into adolescence,
they created their first generational crucible,
and it almost set America on fire.
Now, the good news for all of us, personally and culturally,
is that adolescence does not last forever.
And as the boomers began to exit adolescence and discover adulthood,
all of the sudden, youthful rebellion didn't look quite so nice.
Playtime was over.
All those humdrum virtues
of predictability and reliability and performance,
all of the sudden, they were magnified.
And they became [counter]cultural virtues.
You can see this by looking at America's bookshelves.
In the 1960s,
they were loaded up with titles like "Be Here Now" by Ram Dass,
and "Steal This Book," by Abbie Hoffman.
But 30 years later,
when the boomers were actually inhabiting the center of adulthood,
you know what?
They became massive consumers of efficiency porn.
Oh, you know what I'm talking about.
That book you read on the plane about [have unlimited] defectiveness.
The book you see in the bookshop that says
there's only 86,740 seconds in a day
and you don't want to waste a single one.
"Multitasking made easy."
What happened is that we enlarged and magnified and accelerated adulthood
so that real adults take pride in how damn busy they are.
"Whoo! You wouldn't believe my inbox!"
"I have no time, I'm so busy!"
That's not a complaint, that's bragging.
(Laughter)
Now, I'll say this on behalf of the adults in the room.
You know, we adults, we love the smell of electrons in the morning,
'cause they smell like victory!
We've got a hypercaffeinated, hyperactive,
hyperconnected adulthood.
If the only problem was that the people living in the middle of it
couldn't see that there is something wrong with that!
If that was the only problem, I probably wouldn't be here today.
But ... we've also grown adulthood across the lifespan.
I want to talk to the people in the room
who are the children of the baby boom generation.
You know who you are.
Your generation, unlike almost all other human generations,
experienced a childhood that was significantly different
than that of your parents.
For the most part, in most cases,
your parents experienced childhood as a kind of safe harbor,
a lacuning of time and space
that was generally set aside for growth and development.
You experienced childhood
as a staging ground for an assault on adulthood.
(Laughter)
You had more leagues and lessons and more tests
and more productivity-based evaluations of your performance
than was really right or good.
Your childhood was worked
by the incredible cultural power of your parent's generation.
You lived an adultified childhood.
Now, I mean, I happen to be a geriatrician
so it turns out I'm also interested in aging,
and it turns out that older people also know
the whetted lash of adulthood.
In our society, older people are constantly measured by
and diminished according to that ugly five-letter word:
still.
The adults in the room all know how to play this game.
You can play with me, we'll do it together.
Oh, yeah. My uncle Max, wow!
Ha-ha! He's 86, and he ...
(Audience) Still!
... drives!
(Laughter)
Ho! You don't think that's something, you know.
Ha-ha! My dad, he's 87, and he ...
(Audience) Still!
... works every day.
Oh, [that's nothing]!
My great grandpa just got back from climbing K2.
(Laughter)
He's 96.
Hey, he's in Florida now because he ...
(Audience) Still.
... loves to water ski,
(Laughter)
barefoot,
(Laughter)
in the nude!
(Laughter)
Older people have a standing in the American society
only to the degree that older people can do the things that "young" people do.
And what happens to them if somehow they can't still do what young people do?
They disappear.
Or more accurately, they are disappeared.
Our society operates
a vast archipelago of old-age institutions.
Believe it or not,
America has more nursing homes than Starbucks coffee shops.
1.6 million people are confined to those institutions right now,
and you know what?
Their only crime is frailty.
And despite this, most of them are serving life sentences
without the possibility of parole.
We've been told, we've been instructed,
that the problem is aging,
but that's wrong.
Aging is not the problem.
It's our obsession with youth,
our excessive devotion to the virtues of youthful adulthood.
It is youth that is throwing our lives out of balance.
It is adulthood that is sucking the pleasure
and the joy out of our daily existence.
We are living in a society afflicted by a malignant enlargement of adulthood.
But I'm not worried.
You know, America might have more anti-aging gurus - I'm sure it does -
than geriatricians.
The anti-aging movement
might completely dominate the media and publishing -
I think it does.
The anti-aging industry might pump out billions of dollars of profit,
but I'm not worried.
I actually accept aging.
I embrace aging and I endorse aging
because it is aging that is going to save us.
I've spent most of my adult years in close company with older people,
and in those years,
they've taught me one single iron truth that is just beautiful.
It's this:
Every day we all wake up one day older.
What? You're not impressed?
(Some chuckling)
This is unbelievable!
This law has the power of water over stone.
This law literally cannot fail.
I'm actually excited about aging
because aging is going to work a piece of magic on our society.
You see, the boomers, even though they like to think
they don't always have to follow the rules,
they have to follow this rule.
And every day,
the members of the post-war generation wake up one day older
and one day farther removed from the epicenter of adult power.
Hmm!
Every day, the boomer generation wakes up one day closer
to a radical reconsideration of youth and adulthood.
Every single day American society moves closer to a collision
between the post-war generation and the end of adulthood.
And let me tell yer - grab the popcorn!
Because we haven't seen anything like this
since the first crucible years when the boomers entered adulthood.
I'm telling you, what's going to happen?
Millions of people are going to try to deny the reality of their own aging.
Millions of people are going to be burning with desire
to avoid life's next great developmental challenge.
But still, it will come.
I'm really glad about that.
The reason I'm glad
is that as the post-war generation begins to leave adulthood,
they're going to open a passage
into something that the people in this room
barely believe exists -
we are going to begin finding out
that there's life beyond adulthood.
(Whispering) Oh, yes.
There is life beyond adulthood
and it has a name.
Its name is elderhood.
And I stand before you today as its ambassador.
Listen to me.
Trust me.
Elderhood is real.
It is rich, and it's deep,
it's meaningful, and is ancient,
and it can be yours ...
(Some chuckling)
... if you're willing to outgrow adulthood.
You know, when a person is unable to leave childhood
and enter into adolescence and adulthood,
we say that that person is developmentally disabled,
and it's really true.
We're at risk here - I just want you to know -
of seeing a massive outbreak of developmental disability
as the post-war generation struggles out of adulthood
and into elderhood.
They need help.
And one of the ways we can help them
is to begin deflating adulthood,
to being to rebalance the human life cycle.
Remember at the beginning when I told you
that this is really a design problem?
The key to our future happiness
is to use our skill and our minds and our hearts
to redesign the human life cycle,
to build a new life cycle that is better balanced,
less adultified.
We need to do this because our society needs elders.
We need them more than ever before.
We inhabit a society that's run by adults without elder supervision.
That's got to change!
Now I want to say one last thing, and I'll leave you.
I know perfectly well
that there are people in this audience who are going, "Wow! Embrace aging?
Not sure I can handle that."
And there are people who think maybe I'm discounting the difficulties of age,
not being honest about them, and I'll tell you this:
Perhaps more than any other person in this room,
I understand the difficulties of aging.
I am intimately familiar with them.
But I can also tell you aging is good.
So when you think about my talk and you think about what I've had to say,
remember this:
I did not come before you and promise, as others have done,
that you would live a thousand years and be young on the day you died.
Instead, I came before you and reminded you
that our aging and our ultimate mortality are cornerstones of our humanity.
Now is the time for us to begin rebuilding our life cycle.
I am the ambassador from elderhood,
and I came here today to remind you:
We are all elders in the making.
(Applause) (Cheering)