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I've seen this several times in Florida (retirement capitol of the US). Often times it's couples trying to drive around doing deliveries. They don't even know what a GPS is so they take forever and a day. But then they finally arrive and your anger turns to sorrow when you see these frail old people just trying to survive.
I've noticed that more and more seniors are entering the labor force after retirement and it doesn't have to do with keeping busy. One of my local grocery stores had a woman who would work a few days a week but she quit during Covid. Ran into her on another occasion. She said she quit because she was just doing it to keep busy and she wasn't going to work if she didn't have to. I don't see that anymore. If I make a comment about "keeping busy" to anyone who says they're retired they admit they can't keep up with insurance or property tax increases without working. We're going to see more and more of this as social security dwindles and prices continue to increase.
Maybe I'm a bit of an optimist but my grandpa does door dash too, not necessarily for the money because he was lucky enough to have a good retirement net, but just because he fucking hates retirement and is so bored now that hes not allowed to do handyman things anymore (doctor and grandma said he's too old to be running a table saw or climbing a ladder) so he does door dash.
We did make him go pass a driver's test before we let him though haha
People choosing to stay in the workforce until they almost tip over is great if that's what they want. There's definitely something to be said for keeping some sort of structure. If seen retirement degrade way too many people.
Being forced to stay in the workforce needs to die a swift death.
And that's why the elderly have become the largest and fastest growing segment of the unhoused
as social security and welfare are dismantled before our eyes (across both Dem and GOP administrations), homelessness will certainly rise especially among the elderly. i for one won't let my parents die in the street but caring for them full time means never having time or money to have children of my own.
capitalism has taken so much from us.
In an ironic kind of way, I'm glad my parents abused me. I don't have to feel guilty about letting them rot. Sure, I have lifelong mental illness, but at least I'll have a bit more money to spend on therapy for it.
This is going to be even worse if/when Musk and trump dismantle Social Security. The adult middle class will collapse entirely when their seniors will lose their homes and food, and their children are still at home because they can't afford to live on their own.
Couple this with smaller family sizes, this could mean two single child adults might have to support four living senior citizens (both sets of parents) while also raising children of their own.
This is called the sandwich generation (when you have to take care of both adults and kids on your own). It's a thing!
Yeah, my mom grew up in a house with her parents and a grandparent of two. And her cousin. That was the 60s and 70s. Guess we're bringing it back!
Back to when things were great!
Kinda like how The Great War was great, right?
I fucking feel this.
I'm in a situation where in my family I'm the one who's going to be taking care of my parents as they get older because my only sibling (older) is entirely unreliable and financially unstable.
Then my fiance is ALSO being expected to take up that responsibility because all her siblings went and had 2-4 kids and "can't afford" or "won't have time" to help take care of her mother who is already aging.
So we're having to plan ahead as 25 and 30 year olds to be able to help and support 3 elders. This basically defaults us to not being able to have kids.
My girlfriend is taking care of her parents with her father having a couple of weeks to live and her mother being so anxious that she can't be trusted to take care of him (give him morphine, start preparing a second dose thinking she didn't give him his dose yet, change his fentanyl patch and doesn't remove the old one)... Her sisters are pretty much nowhere to be found, as if their boyfriends were unable to take care of the kids for one fucking evening.
They'll let their father die a painful death without seeing him, but at least they will have enjoyed the last few days of the ski season!
Fuck thats grim. I assume home nursing is not a financial possibility? I'm really sorry to hear about yours and hers situation.
Then my fiance is ALSO being expected to take up that responsibility because all her siblings went and had 2-4 kids and “can’t afford” or “won’t have time” to help take care of her mother who is already aging.
Your fiance's siblings are stupid for turning down the free live-in childcare.
An elderly person verging on disabled and one day probably will be, also with what looks like developing early onset dementia probably doesn't make for good childcare
You are very optimist people will still have kids in this situation.
pregnancy prevention is expensive and abortions are becoming illegal i think we'll see more kids
We had a blanket ban on abortion/contraception in the 60s in Romania and while initially there was a boom in newborns, it eventually reverted to the norm even if the ban wasn't lifted. So I'm not so sure about that.
birth rates might go up because times get harder and abortion is illegal... but childhood/infant deaths, deaths from preventable communicable disease, and deaths from exposure to occupational hazards and accidents will all go up
deregulation, dismantling EPA, FDA, NIOSH, medical and scientific research, education. and most importantly, reducing the federal workforce by a couple hundred thousand people who work directly on keeping Americans healthy and safe... is going to have consequences.
I suspect life is going to get much more brutal and short for the next couple generations, assuming we survive that long amidst climate multi crises and wars for resources that are increasingly more expensive to find and extract. so while some people might have a few more kids to work in the slave pits, the life expectancy declines among the 99% is going more than counter act it.
besides, the population growth in America is expected to go net negative by 2033 without sustained immigration, and is rapidly decelerating globally.
Romania tried that already. Decree 770. There was a bump in number if children. After that, pregnant women and childbed mortality went up, kids were neglected or dumped in orphanages. In the end birth rate dropped anyway.
Also a lot of people who are against taking away choice from society don't consider abortion an option for themselves personally. There will always be accidental pregnancies that result in children that people struggle to afford to feed, house and care for.
"Couldn't even tip I was so upset"
Haha I was going to comment the same thing. Delivery took too long 🤣
For the OGs here, this is what George W. Bush would call "uniquely American" with pride. The rest of us...not so much pride.
We are into shit stage capitalism.
And for some reason people still refuse to unionize :(
As if there was ever a time where there wasn't someone who was too old working to earn some money. United States has never properly taken care of its populace why are we pretending that they used to.
Hurry up nan me foods gettin cold
I'd blame a lot of this on the destruction of our communal living patterns. We used to live in extended family groups. It was reasonable and expected to live with your parents and siblings. If you did leave the family home it often was just to build a home on the same property.
But then the idea of the nuclear family was popularized, probably to make more money and sell house, and here we are.
To be clear since what I said has been immediately misinterpreted, family centric living patterns were torn apart by capitalism. It heavily favors capitalism when we are separated from each other and lose community. This wasn't a benign social shift
This is nonsense.
In Western/Central Europe and Scandinavia, smaller families are the norm, yet nobody sees 80 year old people working.
This is entirely the fault of unchained capitalism, corruption and half a century of lobbying against the working class.
Sweden (I'm using them as an example) has a comparable employment rate at every age group than the US?
In the US about 41% of people 55 and older are working, compared to almost 38% in Sweden.
Edit: I did my math super wrong. Sweden doesn't have "much more" people at that age working, they have slightly fewer.
Let's not be unreasonable, there can be multiple causes and multiple solutions.
Those countries also used to have a more communal structure amongst families and that still was dismantled.
But they actually implemented social programs and living wages making it not an issue.
Also yes it is capitalism fault. It all is, including the dismantling of our communities to favor more isolated living. It's design to separate us and disempower the worker.
We have something called pensions.
For what it’s worth, I agree with you.
But I still don’t want to live with my narcissistic MAGA parents, so…evidently things have gone really far sideways and it’ll be hard to rebuild that social fabric.
I don't want to live with my autistic parents either
Honestly same. I haven't spoken with my dad in months thanks to his MAGA views. I blame this "fuck you I got mine" as a result of community destruction
Isolation must decrease empathy for others. Being around the same group of other people a lot increases your empathy for them, which makes it harder to hurt them. We don’t have that failsafe anymore.
More productive generating more money than ever before.
