Yes, I am valued. I recently hired two guys to do some stuff at the property I’m selling. I just don’t have the time to do this. My knees are going and I don’t have the strength I once did.
“It’s in my shed” became a common response from me. Because I have pretty much any type of tool or construction material… In My Shed.
I ended up giving these guys $600 worth of scaffolding, two extension ladders, a NEW Stihl chainsaw, a 1/2 inch drill (I don’t need three of those) and a nail gun.
All of it is worth at least 2k. I got $100 off my bill. Whatever. I’m not gonna fire up that Stihl in my new suburban neighborhood. I’ll use my SawzAll with a wrecking blade.
I have a very nice set up now though I still have about 100lbs of nails that I don’t know what to do with.
I am working on living up to this song by Utah Philips:
I have lived a good life full of peace and quiet
I shall have an old age full of rum and riot
I have been a good lad, careful and artistic
I shall have an old age coarse and anarchistic
Once I paid my taxes and followed every rule
Banker boss and bureaucrat thought my a willing tool
I voted Democratic and paid the Church its due
All those swine will have to find some other chump to screw
Of interest, banks and credit, Insurance, tax and rent
Of lawyers, agents, generals and clerics I repent
With this [extended middle finger] for corporations and scorn for those elected
I will be an old bum, loved but unrespected
I’m also valued because my co-workers are scared of me leaving. Well, get a proper headset for meeting so people can hear you for one. Stop doing them on one laptop with 3 people. My now bosses nickname was ‘The Mumbler’. Yea, that laptop mic doesn’t work very well.
In two words. ‘Grow Up’ You’re professionals, act like it. Get the proper equipment, the department will pay for it. Hell, I WILL.
Turned 78 a couple of months ago. I frequent this board for various reasons, but a big one is that the anonymity allows one’s opinions to be respected. Age doesn’t enter into it, only content.
Now, IRL it’s a different story. I live in a 55+ apartment building where most of the residents are even older than I am, some by a wide margin. While my opinions are respected by other seniors, it’s a different story for the staff. There have been many times when I’ve felt like I’ve received a pat on the head instead of being taken seriously. Whatever my shortcomings may be, I was good at what I did in the working world and I don’t appreciate being dismissed because of my age.
I truly miss my workshop in Oregon and I actually miss doing home repairs and tending to the garden with my wife. I used to grab discarded furniture off the street and refurbish it for fun. Making a bench for the deck made me feel good, as did remaking the herb boxes that hung off the deck rails. I don’t have that outlet any longer.
Daddy was an honest man, paid his bills on time
Lived his life for Momma and for me
And if he could see me now I guess he’d shake his head and sigh
At the kind of man his son turned out to be
I’m a man for those easy roads
Call me when it’s time to travel on
Hear the call of those easy roads
Wake up one fine morning, I’ll be gone.
(etc) Can be found, amongst a variety of other stuff, on my YouTube channel…
That feeling of invisibility can be pretty great sometimes. Take going to the gym. When I was younger, I was embarrassed about my out-of-shape self, figuring the beautiful people saw me with contempt. They probably did, but now, they literally don’t see you at all. Their eye may land on you for an instant if you cross into their visual field; brain registers OLD and just bounces right off. No contempt in the least, because you don’t exist. So even though I look worse than ever before, I feel better about myself.
I’m 42 and I have a lot of friends in their 50s and 60s which suits me just fine. Most of them have grown children and remember those days when their children were young. It’s nice seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
I’ve always seemed to prefer the company of people older than me, even when I was a kid. Maybe it was precocious only child syndrome.
A friend recently pointed out how many older friends I have. I suppose since I don’t have parents, this is the closest I get. A lot of Dopers are paternalistic toward me, which I find sort of comforting. I value a lot of you.
My grandparents are getting old old, both 86 and still trying to do things the way they’ve always done. I think it’s important to meditate on mortality and the reality of aging. It helps me know what to expect if I ever make it that far. One thing I’ve noticed is a significant uptick in anxiety, even from my grandpa who never worried about anything. Some people deal with the losses better than others. My grandma recently made me tertiary beneficiary when she dies. She gave me all of her (seriously classy!) jewelry. She is 100% clear-eyed about where she’s headed.
I promised my grandfather I’d make sure my other grandmother (his wife) was taken care of. I won’t be taking care of my parents but my grandmother is pretty young and will likely need care in another 20 years or so. That’s what happens when a man marries a woman 20 years younger. He said to me, “I didn’t realize back when I married her that I would be leaving her alone.” I told him I would make sure she was okay and the most emotionally reserved person I have ever known actually teared up in gratitude.
I’m 70 now, recently divorced, and I’ve moved to a new small town three hours away from my ex . I have new neighbors and new friends I enjoy spending time with, but I also have the freedom to walk through downtown anonymously. The best of both worlds. Being old and single isn’t for everybody, but for some of us it’s a perfect setup for a long, happy, and stress-free life.
I just turned 60 in October and retired in June. I plan to start substitute teaching in the fall. Time will tell if I’m seen as a valued elder; I’m sure I’ll be in demand with 20 years experience working in schools.
Largely invisible, but that’s nothing new. I’ve mostly been at least moderately invisible since I ceased emitting unconfident victim-vibes.
I’m nicely appreciated by a minority of people who don’t find me densely incomprehensible and don’t get left behind when my mind makes weird turns without signalling.
This happened to my father, age 81 or so, when he was living, briefly, in a similar facility. He did not suffer it lightly, and after one too many of those kinds of encounters from staff, he picked up his marbles and left. He moved into a regular apartment and hired someone to come in and keep it clean. He could cook well enough to keep himself fed. He didn’t miss the other tenants either, as far as I ever heard.
As for myself, about to be 76, I seem to have different personas depending on what I am doing. Shopping? Big old person who seems to take up more than his share of space in the aisle (even though I don’t). Doctor and other medical offices? I am their meat, their livelihood, and they treat me politely, at a minimum. Volunteer work, for a non-profit run by people mostly in their 20’s? I am surprisingly reliable and efficient, but I choose to buck the system and work on my own, which is a little extra work for one or two of them, and probably feels anti-social (it isn’t). I have worked for them for over 10 years, and I have yet to appear (even in the background) in any of the social media publicity shots trying to lure in new volunteers. This is where I feel the most invisible, but I’m not surprised.
My husband and I are pretty sufficient unto ourselves, we don’t have people over any more, host visitors to our fair city, nor visit anyone in their homes. Occasionally we socialize at a restaurant. I have one outside friend who is almost a generation younger (and who seems to prefer the company of people older than herself).
Yup; also, general social invisibility hits earlier for women. Once you’re fiftyish, you’re part of the background.
As somebody about 5-8 years out from retirement I still have a substantial bit of responsibility and authority in the workplace, though I earnestly work to avoid “valued elder” status because my whole workplace philosophy is that institutions shouldn’t be depending on the embodied knowledge of the more experienced employees to know how to do things. Get that shizz written down, in user manuals, websites, policy papers, whatever.
Somewhere between “valued elder” and “occasionally irresponsible flake” in my research field; it’s a small field so we don’t write off our older colleagues until they stop participating due to health decline or literally end up underground (and not always even then, given the importance of posthumous completion and publication by colleagues of unfinished projects).
Not yet in anybody’s way, AFAICT, though maybe I just don’t notice? Not eager to transition to any kind of elder-living environment and thus be perceived as part of somebody’s workload on a daily basis.
I do try to make it easier on customer service folks by always specifying “adult” or “senior” depending on whether I’m eligible for senior discount on some purchase, so they aren’t in the awkward position of having to choose between (a) potentially offending me by assuming I’m older than I am, or (b) potentially offending me by charging me the non-discounted price when I’m entitled to the discount.
My neighbor, who is very nice, thinks we are about to fall over any minute. So I make sure to bring his cans to the house after trash pickup, just like he does for me.
For everything else I feel respected for what I do, not my age. I just got elected president of our writing club. I am also web and Zoom master, so I go against the old people can’t handle computers stereotype. I refuse to act like I’m 73, and people treat me like I’m a lot younger. So no complaints here.
So does my Grandpa. He loves computers. Back when he was an engineer working at a power plant, he was the only one willing to figure out how computers worked. And he did. This was before you had to have a college degree to be an engineer. Today, at age 86, he is all too happy to pull apart a computer that isn’t working. Or a car. Or a washing machine.
He is having a lot of trouble accepting that he can’t do all the things he used to. What happens when you can no longer do things? In American society that’s a pretty quick route to feeling worthless.
Has anyone here struggled with a loss of autonomy? Not being able to be as productive as you once were? How have you coped?
I’ve been dealing with a little of this lately, due to a recent worsening of arthritis. It’s getting better now due to excellent physical therapy, but for a while I was wondering if I was going to become a semi-invalid, mostly housebound and out of contact. It was not a pleasant prospect, and that has served as an excellent motivator to keep me working on my PT exercises. If something like that does happen to me, and if I don’t get too depressed about it, I guess I would have to switch to less physical pursuits and interests. My husband seemed very eager to “do” things for me, and I had to push back pretty firmly on that too.
Yes, ISTM that that is a decades-old stereotype from the dawn of the digital age that’s becoming increasingly irrelevant. As a 60-something techie person, I started computer programming in my late teens (on a teletype terminal, no less!), and since then have worked with a very wide range of digital devices, operating systems, software packages, etc.
Often, just like anybody else, when I encounter some new technology feature I find it helpful to have somebody who’s more familiar with it explain it to me. But that’s a far cry from the old stereotype of grandparents in the 1990s needing their grandchildren to program their VCRs for them, because they just couldn’t grasp all this newfangled electronic stuff.
In fact, I’m starting to find that the traditional stereotype is reversing itself in real life, as young people’s experience with technology is ever more comprehensively mediated by specialized user interfaces. Most of my students understand much less than I do about, for example, what an operating system is, how to read code, what’s the difference between a modem and a router and a server and an ISP, what’s the difference between the internet and the Web, and similar sorts of structure-level knowledge.
From their perspective, they press a button on their device and interact with the UI, and something somewhere in the mysterious digital universe then makes it possible for them to watch something or play something. They are not really more meaningfully “tech-savvy” then their great-grandparents were thirty years ago.
The factory where I worked had one part of the building 75’ high, with a caged ladder to get to the roof of that part from the roof of the lower part. When I was, I think, 50, my friend and I climbed up there to look around. As I started back down (typically the most scary part of any roof climbing), I realized I was probably at the point where I should never do this again. And it got me thinking about the nature of ability and disability. This roof is a place where we employees are supposed to be able to go, if we have any business up there. Does not being able to amount to a disability? or just less ability? Are these two words opposite?
There are more and more things I won’t do. I hike a lot, maybe 15 or 20 miles a week, but I don’t scramble over rocks if they look scary, I don’t cross streams if they look scary, I even plan to have my car near the bottom of the loop so if I get too tired I’m mostly going downhill to get out of the woods. And I’m not hiking today because the heat forecast is dangerous. These are all things I would have been fine doing when I was 20 or 30 or probably 40, but not at 68.
My spouse is considerably less able, needs handicapped parking, and I’m working on changing access to our house so she can continue to live here. It’s been very front of mind.
Very well said. I’m 66, and still fully able. But …
I find my caution about physical hazards is slowly ramping up. Like you, I plan my walks / hikes so the harder half is done first. Even if that’s just a difference of into-the-wind versus with-the-wind. Lots of ways caution intrudes into what used to be wild abandon.
There is an old saying in aviation:
A superior pilot uses his superior judgment to avoid the need for his superior skill.
Which is actually simply a variation on the old “An ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure.” In my daily life I find myself exercising superior judgment more and more. And that superiority is increasingly cautious / conservative.
Said another way, there’s a lot more I won’t do than I can’t do. Disability? Sorta. We really need a better term for the spectrum from “able to do X all day every day” to “flat unable to do X ever”.
The hoary old “differently abled” is a PC attempt to sweep a qualitative difference under a rug of feigned equality for all. It’d be nice to have a term not saddled with that misleadingly euphemistic baggage. And more than a term, have the societal understanding and support for all that the term implies for each of us on our journey into infirmity.
