30 May The Upside of Aging

I read an interesting article today on Reuters.com titled How an Aging Population Could be Tonic for the Economy. It caught my attention and after several read throughs, I was encouraged.  I’ll provide the synopsis or you can read the article for yourself here.

The number of working people between the ages of 65-100 is expected to increase sharply over the next few decades and while this has caused alarm for economists, there are still some that have positive things to say about an aging population. Paul Irving, President of a non-partisan think tank focused on public health, is convinced there is many opportunities in these findings.  In his book, titled  The Upside of Aging: How Long Life is Changing the World of Health, Work, Innovation, Policy and Purpose he says, “It’s not that aging doesn’t pose some major challenges to overcome…So often the framing is negative, but there are some very positive potential outcomes of an aging society.”

“That is an opportunity for people to have longer productive working lives, and it should drive economic growth as new products and services are launched to serve an older population…. It’s critically important to encourage and enable people at all levels of the economic pyramid to continue to work. It might be that someone does a physical job that becomes very difficult to do in his fifties, so we should make it easy for that person to be retrained and find new opportunities.”

It’s all about embracing the possibilities of a graying society and adapting with the change.  Shifting the stigma from “Getting old is bad or dull” to “Getting old is the next phase of life”.  If we don’t adapt, we could very well miss out on the potential.

So whether you’re 35 or 65 , let’s all change the way we view aging.  Let’s all find the upside.