This weekend I presented my work for the first time, at the annual conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, a group of social scientists and practitioners whose work I greatly respect. The title of the talk was “The Value of Work in Late Life,” but I pulled a slight bait-and-switch, because it turns out that this project isn’t about work any more. It's about ageism, starting with our own internalized biases.  Here’s the ten-minute talk I gave:

I'm still figuring out the structure of the book, but I know what I want its message to be. Here's a draft of the new Introduction:

The demographic good fortune of the baby boom generation has its dark side. Privileged and powerful, Americans came of age in an era of youth movements (never trust anyone over 30!) and we’ve worshipped at the shrine ever since.

That’s Truthdig’s headline for Ellen Goodman’s column, more moderately titled “The benefits of working longer” in the Boston Globe. Goodman points out the mixed message going out to older Americans:  keep working to lighten the load on the next generation / retire to make room for the young. While it’s true that workers in their 20’s are most vulnerable to layoffs, the notion that the employment of one group comes at the expense of another is a fallacy - and a persistently ageist one.  Furthermore, as recession looms, the notion that older workers are at liberty to choose whether or not to keep working on feels almost quaint, akin to the presumption that working mothers bail on bottle duty on a whim rather than out of economic necessity.  Goodman shrewdly calls out the policy-makers “revving up generational conflict” and calls on the baby boomers to “to make a virtue — or a revolution — out of the necessity of working longer.”  That’s doable.

Maybe we think it’s like teeth: if the first ones don’t fall out on schedule, there’s no room for the second set. Or like the forest canopy: there’s only so much sunlight and an awful lot of leaves. Is the number of good jobs fixed? Do all ages compete for them?

“The people of early America exalted old age; their descendants have made a cult of youth.” That history, and its social consequences, is the subject of David Hackett Fischer’s terrific book, Growing Old in America. It’s always seemed a bum deal that aging Americans face a double whammy: physical decay coupled with social invisibility.