10-minute interview

Author calls ageism ‘unremitting and global’

February 25, 2011 Susan Pigg
LIVING REPORTER

Ted Fishman is a veteran journalist and baby boomer who started giving a lot of thought to aging while in Asia researching his 2005 book, China Inc.

“There was this huge divide in the country, where you had these very young, vital cities and you had a countryside where the older population was stranded,” says Fishman.

Out of that curiosity came Shock of Gray: The Aging of the world’s population and how it pits young against old, child against parent, worker against boss, company against rival, and nation against nation.

If you think the title is daunting, so is what he found — that age discrimination is “massive, unremitting and global.” And it’s bound to get worse as the first wave of baby boomers tips the scales in countries around the world from predominantly young to old.

Fishman, 52, believes the communities that will thrive are those, like Sarasota, Fla., that remake themselves to ensure that they offer lifelong jobs, amenities and facilities for all ages.

He spoke to the Star from Chicago:

You describe ageism as “omnipresent” and say the old are treated like lepers. Why is that?

I think it’s fear and some despair — despair that we don’t really know how to spend the added third of life we now have (thanks to medical advances that have extended human lifespans), and the terror of infirmity.

It sounds like where you live is going to have a big impact on how you age. Where is the best place to grow old?

It’s not about geography — where the sun shines or doesn’t shine — it’s where you feel you have the most robust network of friends, where you’re familiar and comfortable with your environment and where you can stay active.

I was surprised to read that living in big cities can actually prolong your life.

Some of the best cities to age in the world are the most densely populated — Tokyo, New York, Toronto. They tend to be places where knowledge workers congregate, where people are well educated and have higher incomes, where you can walk to the store, get on public transportation, walk through parks, get together with your friends and stay engaged.

You talk about the coming “epidemic of solitude,” which has already hit home in Japan, the “oldest” country in the world. How is it playing out?

In a way that is enormously sad. In Japan there are four million elderly who live alone, quite distant from amenities and their children. When you combine that with a society in which infirmity is a source of shame you get a dynamic that isolates people to the point where they are dying alone and there’s a suicide epidemic.

So much of the burden around aging is falling to women in their 50s who raised kids and are now caring for ailing parents. Do you foresee a day when women rise in revolt?

They already are. In the countries that put the most demand on women to take care of children and elders, family size has declined most dramatically.

You say that life after retirement is ripe with opportunities for reinvention.

One thing we’re seeing is a surge in volunteerism among older people, not just to give back, but for the very same reasons that young people do — to network, gain new skills and perhaps work their way into a new job.

Scientists everywhere are working on a “cure” for aging — including researchers at Stanford University who have found that old mice spring to life after being surgically co-joined with young mice. Can you see this work ever being applied to humans?

I think that work can be applied to humans, but there are already many examples of human beings using other people as instruments to their own vitality. There’s a lively trade in body parts, often from low-income places to higher-income places.

There’s been so much written about the huge gains in life expectancy over the last 100 years, but you say today’s teenagers stand a good chance of having shorter lifespans than their parents.

That’s because of the huge epidemic of obesity, diabetes, strokes. You’re seeing diseases that are traditionally diseases of old age — hardening of the arteries, heart disease — now afflicting people in their teens. Most of this is because of (poor) diet.

Remote monitoring has been touted as a fix for the coming “silver tsunami” — gadgets that will alert your distant kids if you took your pills or fell on the bathroom floor. Is this going to be enough?

It’s not enough, but it’s essential. There’s simply not enough money in the world for a comprehensive system of long-term care. You need to find economies of scale, and remote monitoring accomplishes two things: it allows you to cut down on labour, and allows people to age at home. But we will always need people as part of this.

Editor's Picks