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In last week’s thread there was extensive discussion on the retirement home employee shortage in the US. It made me ask myself: is it fair to say that elderly care in the US and Western countries in general is based on the unstated rule that you as a frail and elderly person pretty much only deserve to have a quality of life worth a damn if you have loving, caring children and grandchildren living nearby, visiting you regularly and looking after you if needed? That is, whatever system of care that is set up is not designed and should not be designed to basically prop you up and coddle you otherwise? It may sound cynical or too far-fetched to say it out loud, but looking at this issue from the outside, it’d explain many things. I imagine this is a general rule most Boomers also take as given, as they grew up in an age when childlessness and family dissolution/dislocation was much less normal than today.
I'm grateful that India has largely avoided the dissolution of the extended family and the associated problems that Westerners have been grappling with for the past, let's say 70 years or so.
It's not that it isn't happening, far from it, but most parents and grandparents can trust that they'll likely have a home with their children when they're too old to take care of themselves. In turn, obnoxious practises like kicking your kid out of the house when they turn 18 to fend for themselves would be considered scandalous here, you're expected to support your children till they have completed the lengthy period of schooling and higher education required for them to maximize their potential productivity (not that I don't think parents shouldn't have the right to do so, I simply think that's a terrible idea that should deserve scorn).
Of course, every week I encounter an elderly person wasting away, their children having abandoned the nest and flown off to fairer shores, worst case leaving this benighted land for the West. It's still not the expected outcome by an means. Even then, at least low skilled labor is cheap enough that most of them can afford attendants or caretakers.
Personally, while I come across as unabashedly pro-West in most regards, I find myself bound to criticize the most pernicious practises. Living with a large family can be stifling, but it has great benefit in terms of pure peace of mind. If you need to leave your kids at home, they usually have an uncle or aunt to keep an eye on them, often a grandparent or two, and cousins their own age to keep them company. If you fall sick, or lose your job, you know your kin will bat for you. Then you save money on buying a house, since a sufficiently large one can have room for an extended family to shack up together, though that's getting rarer as home ownership is increasingly a sign of personal status. (Once again, I'm not claiming any of this is utterly foreign in the West).
My grandpa, as healthy as can be possible at the ripe young age of 95, has been immensely lucky to have his kids and grandkids living with him for most of his life, despite the usual expectation that both of his daughters would eventually marry and move out to live independently if not with their husbands. I can't imagine he'd have lived this long if that wasn't the case, little can be more corrosive than loneliness. This is still unusual, it required son-in-laws who are uncommonly accepting of living somewhere where they're not the nominal head of household, even if nobody has ever brought that up as a negative where I've heard it. Maybe it was more uncommon a decade or two back.
Even as I prepare to leave myself, it eases my pain to know that my parents, while not as healthy as can be desired (mom's liver is on the way out, and I pray the sheer horror that is a liver transplant doesn't make me shy away if I'm the one who needs to donate)*, they're well educated doctors who can look after themselves for the next decade or two without me needing to lose sleep over them.
On the other hand, rearing kids as two working professionals in the UK fills me with a different kind of dread, and I have jokingly suggest that I drop them off shortly after birth with my Indian family until they're semi-autonomous. How the fuck do people manage that? I'm willing to take the blow in terms of lifestyle and free time that having kids requires, even two or three of them, but it's still daunting to the max. Oh well, at least I know I don't need to save for their college fund..
At any rate, this is all temporary. Our medicine is at an awkward stage where we can treat or mitigate many individual illnesses that would once have shuffled the elderly off this mortal coil, without being able to fix the underlying problem of aging. This has always been a doomed endeavor, akin to never doing preventive maintenance on an old beater and then replacing parts as they fail. Eventually it all catches up and the whole thing falls apart no matter how many times you change out the oil and put on a coat of paint.
I doubt we're solving aging in the remaining time till superhuman AGI, which ought to solve that problem shortly, even if only by killing everyone so there's no one around to grow old and decrepit, but steady advances in consumer robotics suggests that in a counterfactual world where we don't have a full blown Singularity in a decade or two, we're likely still not going to have the shortfall of people willing to accept shit wages for a shit job. Maybe we'll find other ways of improving the QOL of the elderly short of reversing their age, but I'm confident this state of affairs won't last, even if it's only going to get worse over the next few years.
*Scott's donation of a kidney appears trivial next to that, the odds of death are uncomfortably high, as are the sequelae, despite the liver being the only major organ that regenerate
This isn't the literal worst idea. If they are UK citizens and you don't want to pay extra to live near a good school it makes sense to send them back home to live with your parents for their primary education once they hit the age of 5 or so. Your parents would probably be made very happy to have little children running around the house they can play with. And this way you also avoid all the woke BS being spoonfed to your children in schools in the west.
Hence half jokingly! It might even be the best decision at the time, but it's hard to be sure until I'm a wage slave in the NHS. Childcare costs are exorbitant, until it's factored in from schooling.
While my parents currently declare (performatively) that I and my brother were enough to handle and they won't be saddled with more, well, evolution will have the last word when they're cooing and cawing over the grandkids haha. I just hope they're healthy enough that they can feasibly take that on.
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