Many of us will be pushing banks of trolleys around supermarket carparks in our 70s, trying to top up pensions we thought would be enough to live off when we started working. Poverty which led to the original old age pension at 70 in the early 1900s was literally about old people freezing or starving to death because their children, if they had them, had pre deceased them.
Many poorer older people were supported by their children in return for housekeeping and childcare for as long as they could do it. Rural and urban living would have been hugely contrasting. In the country, growing your own vegetables and picking hedgerow fruit, keeping a few chickens and frugal home economics would be the difference between absolute misery and basic existence for many. We rightly expect so much more now - protein with meals, holidays, more than one pair of footwear. But I suspect poverty will change to become much more about the most basic levels of survival rather than doing without treats and buying clothes in charity shops. I don’t mean to downplay what poverty is and how crippling it is in todays society but it isn’t the same as it was when the foundling hospital was set up to take dying abandoned babies off the streets of London.
We cant look back for the answers, we need to look forward. Backwards into history was much worse and the bit in the middle, post WW2, simply isn’t sustainable.
Good co-living schemes to mix the ages into a new type of ‘family’ which use solar power to put excess clean energy back into the grid, a complete change in thinking around how to ensure no one is malnourished through knowing nothing but cheap addictive food. The food which is creating a generation of really unfit and expensive older people. Schemes to use gardens and public spaces to grow food so we can raise the healthy life expectancy and cut huge social and health care costs. A role for older, retired people to support the younger ones to work and to care for each other when needed.
And a sensible prioritisation of where we spend money as a nation. I don’t care how bad it sounds but my late 90s mum hasn’t known who she is or had any quality of life for years, costs thousands and thousands a month in care (her money runs out soon and then it’s the states cost) and would have hated this. She’d have HATED it. It was her ultimate nightmare that she’d go on and on living in a twilight world of confusion and blankness.
She would have far preferred the state money to go on supporting disabled people to have meaningful work or better schools, or better health care for younger people.
We are living in a world which is like a huge dog covered in fleas who needs a BIG shake up and a sustainable care plan. This can’t be anything but incredibly painful.