Originally published 8/14/2019
Over 65! Not only the "experience" it is the real expertise of having done more, spent more time thinking, building, creating.
Big thanks to the MIT Technology Review for publishing this lengthy, informative and well written article. Download the PDF by clicking here.
Inside Senior Planet, the tech-savviest retirement community on earth.
“All these microaggressions people talk about?” Tom Kamber says. “Just imagine what it’s like when you’re 75.”
But listen in. Tom Kamber is getting into ageism—“the last ism,” as he calls it—and Tom Kamber has a lot to say about that.
“When you live in an ageist society, your dreams, which might seem totally normal to you, are a threat to other people,” he warns. He’s speaking not only in rapid-fire sentences, but in paragraphs now. “People are trying to hold you back—because they’re afraid of their own aging. Or because you’re competing with them economically. Because they don’t want to have to introduce somebody else’s ideas into their young-person culture,” Kamber continues, his holy roller sermon coming to its emotional peak. “People are a pain in the ass!”
That’s why Kamber created Senior Planet, a tech-themed community center that preps seniors to hack their way through a world conspiring to keep them sidelined. The glass door reads “Aging with Attitude.”
The post-60 set is here for many reasons.
By and large, they do not want your wearable panic buttons and fall detectors, thankyouverymuch.
They’re here for the free classes and camaraderie, to learn to find the photos their daughter is putting on Facebook, to grok the smart lock system their apartment building is installing whether they like it or not (and mostly not). They want to plug back into a world in which “technology has run them over,” as Kamber puts it.
Roughly one in five arrive wanting to use technology to work and make money—whether because they’ve gotten bored with retirement or to turn a passion into a side hustle.
They want Etsy and Instagram, Google Suite and Microsoft Word.
They want to process payments on PayPal, and build a Wix website, and email video clips for acting auditions.
They want to open stores aimed at older people like themselves, and launch magazines for curvy women, and drive around Harlem in their own dog-grooming van.
They may want to reach their goals even more than younger folks do, because when you get to a certain age, “your horizon is shorter—your dreams become more critical and urgent,” Kamber says.
More older people than ever are working: 63% of Americans age 55 to 64 and 20% of those over 65.
Yet it’s unclear whether they are doing so because they want to or because they have to. The age for receiving full Social Security benefits is rising to 67 by 2027. Americans are entering retirement with more debt and less in savings, and the Great American Pension has become a relic of another era.
On the brighter side, people are living longer, and a growing body of research makes the point that work—at least some of it, on your own terms—makes those extra years more enjoyable.
For example, researchers at UCLA and Princeton found that seniors who rarely or never “felt useful” were nearly three times as likely to develop a mild disability or even die during the study.
The ageism of the era is perhaps best exemplified by Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous assertion back in 2007 that “young people are just smarter,” but it’s not just anecdotal: in a 2017 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, researchers invented résumés for fictitious applicants of various ages, and sent them in response to real-life ads for janitors, salespeople, and security guards. They found that in nearly every job category, the older applicants got fewer callbacks than the middle-aged applicants, who got fewer than the young ones.
The drop-off was particularly marked for older women; the researchers speculated—depressingly, but not surprisingly—that women’s physical appearance is more important in service-related careers, and women’s physical aging was judged more harshly than men’s.
I found Michael Taylor in the Wix class. Taylor looks like Samuel L. Jackson, with a white-flecked mini-fro. He’s a 71-year-old who could pass for 45; he even once got accused of fraudulently using a senior card.
When he closed his antiques store in 2009 because of skyrocketing rent and dwindling sales, he didn’t want to stop working.
Still, he faced that familiar problem: “I found getting a job is not that easy if you’re not the 20, 30, or mid-40s candidates.”
So in his 60s, Taylor says, “I asked myself, what do I want to do when I grow up?” In 2010, he enrolled in the New York School of Interior Design, earning a bachelor’s and a master’s and sometimes marveling at his own gumption: “One day I was sitting there studying for a final exam, and I said to myself, ‘You’re studying when you should be worried about dementia setting in!’”
Kamber raised grant money, hired professional instructors, and spread the programming—all free—to 40 computer labs across New York’s five boroughs.
OATS launched the first Senior Planet space in 2013, a Manhattan hub of community and energy.
Kamber’s brainchild is expanding. OATS has opened centers in rural upstate New York, Maryland, Texas, and Colorado. There’s also a center in Israel, with talk of others in Spain and Japan.