This day, this age

I notice how disposable we become culturally, after a certain age.

We draw the social security we have earned over decades — yet we are not currently working a 9 to 5 to pay into that same system. In the last ten years, I have sensed a kind of cavalier attitude among some health care industry workers and a shoulder-shrug mentality from a younger demographic.

I’ll take being invisible any day, over being targeted as one of Kissinger’s “useless eaters, sucking the system dry of resources”, now that we cannot demonstrably earn the right to take up space.

It is a jarring realization, this.

And it plays directly into a silent narrative that we hear like a dog whistle, signalling the unimaginable.

Sages?

Dispensers of wisdom?

We have become goods and services, babysitters, perhaps keepers of a will naming family members as heirs. Not everyone experiences this. But those who do, know the sinking sensation of “aging out of the system”. No one really talks about this, because like many things, we have absolutely no control over how we are large-scale perceived.

We know how to power-walk; we had not counted on running a marathon

-J