Don't waste your old age on yourself

We all get old, but we have to choose to be elders

Credit: Paramount

Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. If you will one day be an old person, subscribe!

This month, I read with interest a CNN piece about a 70-year-old American woman who moved to France. Apparently she was living on a rented horse ranch in Georgia, but decided there was more to life and relocated to a town called Fontainebleau.

There is no one in the world more sympathetic to this than me. I am not 70, but I do want to move to France. I have spent so much time reading about it on the internet, that my entire Facebook feed at this point is mostly just real estate listings for affordable French castles. Truly, I understand the appeal¹.

But reading the CNN piece reminded me of one of my favorite posts I’ve written for this blog, which was titled “Grandparents have a job to do.” The argument was that older people have traditionally served as elders in their community, providing support and instruction for younger generations. A grandma might pass down family recipes or lore. A grandpa might teach his grandkids leatherwork or post driving. Elders may help co-parent, sure, but it’s a lot more than that. They might open professional doors for younger family members. They teach values. Getting old is inevitable, but being an elder is a proactive job. To be an elder is to assume the duty, responsibility, and shared obligation to hold the village together².

But the reason I wrote “Grandparents have a job to do” is because I frequently get feedback from readers telling me that they don’t have an older generation filling this role. The elders are missing.

You can see this play out in the CNN piece, with the lady featured in the piece moving to France against the initial objections of her adult daughter. The daughter does eventually get on board and tells her mom to “go do what you want to go do.’” The mom replies, “‘Hey, that sounds good to me.’ So that’s what I did.”

The comments capture a kind of “Eat Pray Love” worldview that prioritizes personal desire, self interest, and individual fulfillment. It’s a philosophy that looks awesome from the perspective of the eater, pray-er and lover. But if you’re someone who gets left behind — say, an adult child — the eater, pray-er and lover starts looking a bit like a deadbeat.

Of course, not everyone who neglects their duty as an elder flees to another continent. My original post on this topic pointed to the Villages, a retirement community in Florida. And it sounds nice enough if you only look at the people playing pickleball all day. But if you think about the networks the Villagers abandoned it starts to look like an entire community of absentee elders.

This is a relatively common phenomenon, and for whatever reason I have recently seen an outpouring of people lamenting the lack of elders in their lives. Here, for example, is a woman who posts frequently about her mom’s lack of involvement in her kids’ lives.

Here’s a guy saying his kid’s grandmothers (on both sides) never visit despite easily having the ability to do so.

Here’s a guy lamenting that his parents “suck” as grandparents and act like it’s the “olympics to watch our child for an hour, two hours, three hours.” He adds, “Our parents had a freedom that they don’t provide to their children.”

And here’s the writer Stephanie H. Murray observing on Substack last month that one of the reasons so many parents and kids are addicted to technology is because they lack a village.

“To a great extent, tech (be it a snoo or a tablet) is being used to fill in not for absent or detached parents but for an absent and detached community,” Murray wrote.

I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting all grandparents, or older people generally, are dropping the ball. Some are doing fantastic things. Nevertheless, there does appear to be a very large cohort of younger and middle aged parents who are saying the older people in their lives are too focused on themselves to become elders.

Unfortunately, for a lot of folks that’s probably the end of the story. I cannot think of many ways to persuade people that spending time with loved ones is better than endless pickleball or whatever. If that is not self-evident, it’s a lost cause.

But I can prepare myself to be a better elder than those I see people complaining about on social media. One of the founding ideas of this blog was that I waited to have kids for more than a decade after getting married because I enjoyed my fancy-free urban professional lifestyle. Then when I finally had kids, I realized I had made a mistake by waiting so long, ultimately wasting many of my best years on superficiality and self-centeredness. I have lived two different lifestyles and found one of them — the one focused on family, duty, and community — to be superior.

At least for me, then, I hope to avoid the mistakes of my youth during my golden years. A move to France is tempting, but when I’m an old person I’ll have a job to do. And that’s why I’m writing this. Unfortunately, sometimes the only way to get a village is to start from scratch.

I understand that this may sound grim — who wants to do a “job” — and that’s probably why some push back. Here, for example, are a couple of grandmas arguing against the idea of familial obligation and duty. Many of the comments on these types of posts suggest that the idea of obligation to one’s juniors is a form of entitlement. I think this argument misses the core complaint people are expressing, which is often less about specific tasks (eg babysitting) than about isolation and community breakdown.

But more importantly, it fails to recognize that duty is a two-way street. You don’t invest in your village just for some abstract idea about what’s right or wrong. You invest in the your village because someday you will need that village. I saw this first hand when I had a weak village around the time my wife and I started having kids. I saw the fruits of my (in)action. I suspect I’ll need a village even more when I’m old, and I sure hope when that day comes some younger person feels a sense of obligation to keep me company. But I don’t see anyone jumping to do that labor if I’ve been too busy eating, praying and loving to assume the role of an elder.

Anyone is of course free to disagree, but I think the CNN article captures a likely outcome of a life sans obligation. It concludes by telling us that the lady who moved to France spends her time facilitating a “group focused on topics such as aging, being separated from families and grief.” The article also mentions that she started a YouTube channel to give herself a sense of purpose, because the alternative was playing with her dog and watching videos on YouTube all day.

This is all great stuff, and she’s probably making a positive difference in people’s lives.

But the image that I got from these details was not one of a person actually eating, praying and loving, but rather of someone who is spending much of their energy trying to abate the loneliness of a life spent doing “what you want.” Maybe that’s the best any of us can do. But for me, I’ll accept more obligation and less of what I want if there’s a chance doing so might mean I’m surrounded by the people I love.

Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. If you’ve enjoyed this blog, consider sharing it with a friend.

1. It kills me that there are entire castles listed for the same price that Zillow thinks I could get for my unremarkable old house in Salt Lake City. Here’s one, for example, that’s listed for roughly the same price I paid for my house five years ago. Here’s one for less than Zillow thinks my house is worth now. If you are a member of my extended family, I implore you once again to trade our overpriced little houses for literal castles in France. We can bring our entire village to somewhere more awesome.

2. I also wrote a companion piece arguing that non-old people also have a job to do, and that one of the reasons many of us lack the villages we desire is because we have failed to adequately invest in them. The point again being that duty is a two way street.