you we are hitting a moment where the elder
boom it's not a trend it's actually a whole new way of life for our country
Robert Fulton is 64 years old go ho wah wah wah and instead of preparing for a
retirement shuttling his RV between vacation spots he drove his rig to North
Dakota for a new job harvesting beets and corn this job isn't just sitting in
the truck can be very physical at times and you just keep up the best way you
can after arthritis forced him out of his
job as a union lineman and the 2008 recession cost him his house Robert sold
off most of his stuff and got a loan for an RV for the last five years he's lived
on the road chasing seasonal work until his pension kicks in Robert and other
workers like him are up ending old ideas about retirement and giving us a window
into the future of Aging at a time when the world is about to get a whole lot
older lifespans are increasing birth rates are going down and by 2050 the
global population of people older than 65
will more than double there's a whole bunch of these guys and we've maybe
tapped a new market already millions of people are crossing into a period that
used to be retirement but they're not retiring they're working longer in many
cases because they want to but in many cases because they have to which means
that reaching your 60s in the 21st century may look vastly different from
this my first project was to do absolutely nothing this is the light
although it was never a reality for all workers the mid 20th century American
model of a generous retirement underwritten by government and corporate
pensions is becoming a vestige of the past some economists say we're starting
to see the fallout from changes made in the 1980s when pensions started giving
way to 401 k s-- which are less secure and more prone to the highs and lows of
the stock market and more and more people are relying on Social Security to
help fund their retirement so anybody now who's living a middle-class life
faced a very high risk of being poor when they retired and that's new one
study projects that 40% of older middle class workers will have incomes below or
near the poverty level when they retire and researchers have found that the
percentage of people filing for bankruptcy who are over 65 has increased
fivefold since 1991 this is a situation that the boomers parents and
grandparents did not face this is a real reversal of what it means to age in
American society
growing numbers of older Americans are facing harder and harder choices it's
the sort of story that Jessica brooder routinely heard while researching her
book nomadland she followed a growing cohort of nomadic seniors who are mostly
white largely male but with increasing numbers of women and these nomads have
found an extreme solution to dwindling retirement savings and the rising cost
of housing and health care I met people who had lost their small businesses
people who had lost their homes people who had lost all their savings in the
2008 collapse people who were never able to put enough away because they were
stuck on a low-wage treadmill I can't afford an apartment on my Social
Security it couldn't happen you can come out here and eat if you want come on I'd
rather have my little van with my little space my dog in the desert and perfectly
happy with it I'm seeing my role is moving away from the man who does it too
the facilitator that puts you together and that's the whole thing I'm trying to
do Bob Wells created an annual gathering for the nomadic workers and he's become
a bit of a guru for people looking to live off fixed incomes in vans and RVs
there just really aren't any good options but the one everyone hopes for
is low income or senior housing and yet the waiting list for those is typically
very very long years and years and so I had found a solution and I felt like I
had an obligation to tell people there was a solution hey folks welcome back to
our next video this is going to be a series of ten jobs for nomads I think
it's important to learn from this group because these people are facing
financial issues that will be impacting everybody becoming nomadic is just one
hack that people are using I designed this so that I would have a stove in
here I do have running water hole build and van and everything so far has been
right around $3,000 if the going is getting harder for more of today's
retirees prospects maybe even worse for younger workers who face the twin
challenges of paying for longer lifespans while working jobs with fewer
guaranteed benefits if the near-future of aging is filled
with a lot of middle-class workers becoming poor elders then the future of
Aging for Millennials is going to be even worse so I think now the new
reality is a lot of people I know expect to work until they die which is hard
because bodies give out if people are going to be working for
more years that's going to mean finding jobs they can actually get our economy
is still set up for a younger workforce so a lot of people as they age are
facing ageism in their workplaces I grew up to don't trust anyone over 30 we've
all been trained to discriminate against our elders I mean since I was a child I
remember all the images of elder people were making fun of them and prospects
aren't always great in the sectors that are looking to hire home health aide and
personal care jobs for example they're hard to automate and the elder boom
means demand for this kind of work is rising fast but these jobs have low
wages and few benefits a lot of people ask me our robots gonna take care of
Grandma and I just don't see it happening anytime soon
these jobs have historically been low wage poverty wage jobs predominantly
women a majority of whom are women of color and immigrants so they've been
extremely undervalued so now is the time for us to actually invest in this
workforce care jobs or jobs of the future we have a tremendous opportunity
to reimagine what these jobs are transforming the work place looks to be
even more necessary as many healthy people we want to find a way to stay
productive especially during the nearly 20 years we've added to our lifespans
since the 1930s when I used to think 65 and 70 was old now I'm in that group and
it doesn't seem as old as I had thought this age is a lot better than I was
expecting the idea that 65 would be sort of the
end of your career and the sort of end of your work life just seems ridiculous
at this point both from an economic standpoint and from a cultural and human
standpoint people want to contribute for as long as possible and some students of
this change believe redefining what it means to be in your 60s could mean the
invention of an entirely new stage of life adolescence was a creation of the
beginning of the last century when we had a proliferation of young people who
weren't children they weren't adults and so we created a new stage of life took
50 years till the word teenager even caught on and I think the same thing has
happened today in that period that used to be occupied by retirement it doesn't
have a name but it in fact it's a new part of the life cycle our cultural
disposition towards aging is fear and denial people growing older is not a
crisis it's a blessing we forget that ages to live with studies predicting
that babies born this century will increasingly live for a hundred years
significant hurdles will need to be overcome and it's not only jobs that
will need to be rethought this is a permanent reality so it means that we
have to redesign our housing our infrastructure our economy to actually
support people to live an average of 20 years longer than when most of our
systems were put into place will we end up being able to make the adjustments
that will turn the aging society into the ageing opportunity
and right now I think that the answer to that question is an open one
you