Traditionally, old people spent their final years living with the same group, or (in a sedentary society) in the same settlement or even in the same house, in which they had spent their adult lives or even their whole lives. There, they maintained the social ties that had supported them throughout their lives, including ties with surviving life-long friends and with at least some of their children. They generally had their sons or daughters or both living nearby, depending on whether the custom of their society was for a bride to move to the groom’s parents or for the groom to move to the bride’s parents upon marriage.
In the modern First World that constancy of social ties into old age has declined or disappeared. Under our own custom of neolocal residence, bride and groom don’t live near either the groom’s parents or the bride’s parents, but they instead go off to establish a new separate residence of their own. That gives rise to the modern phenomenon known as the empty-nest syndrome. In the U.S. in the early 1900s, at least one parent of a couple often died before the youngest child’s leaving home and thus never experienced an empty nest, and the duration of the empty nest for an average parent was less than two years. Now, most American parents will survive to experience an empty nest for more than a decade, often for many decades.
Old parents left to themselves in our empty-nest society are unlikely to find themselves still living near life-long friends. About 20% of the American population changes residence each year, so that either old parents, their friends, or probably both will have moved repeatedly since childhood. Common living circumstances for old people are that they go to live with one of their children, but thereby become cut off from their friends because their child has moved from the original family house; or they live by themselves as long as possible, with some friends nearby but not necessarily with their children nearby; or they live separately from both life-long friends and from children, in a retirement home, where they may or may not receive visits from their children. This is the situation that caused my Fijian acquaintance whom I quoted in the first paragraph to upbraid us with the accusation, “You throw away your old people and your own parents!”
Another factor contributing to the social isolation of the modern elderly besides neolocal residence and frequent shifts of residence is formal retirement from the labor force. This phenomenon became common only in the late 19th century. Until then, people just worked until their bodies or minds wore out. Now, retirement is almost universal as a policy in industrial countries, at an age ranging from 50 to 70, depending on the country (e.g., younger in Japan than in Norway) and on the profession (e.g., younger for commercial airline pilots than for college teachers). Three trends of modern industrial societies joined to favor retirement as a formal policy. One trend is our increased lifespan, such that many people live to an age at which they can no longer continue to work. There was no need to have formal policies mandating retirement at 60 or 70 in an era when average lifespan was less than 50 anyway. A second trend is increasing economic productivity, such that a workforce composed of a smaller fraction of the population has become capable of supporting a large fraction of the population no longer working.
The remaining modern trend favoring retirement is the various forms of social insurance to provide economic support for retired older people. Government-mandated or government-supported pensions arose in Germany under Chancellor Bismarck in the 1880s, spread in the following decades to other western and northern European countries and New Zealand, and reached the United States in 1935 with the passage of our Social Security Act. This is not to claim that mandatory retirement is an unmixed blessing: many people are required to retire at an arbitrary age (e.g., 65 or 60) when they would like to continue working, are capable of doing so, and may in fact be at their peak of productivity. But there seems no reason to object to people having at least the option of retiring, and having the government provide a mechanism (based on their own earnings during their working lifetime) for supporting them economically if they do choose to retire. However, one has to recognize and solve a new problem created by retirement: the problem of severing one’s life-long work relationships, and thereby falling deeper into the social isolation already arising from neolocal residence and mobility.
Yet another modern institution that solves long-standing problems of the elderly while creating new problems is the specialized facilities where old people reside and are cared for separately from their families. While monasteries and convents took in some old people already in the distant past, the first known public old folks’ home was established in Austria under Emperor Maria Theresa in 1740. Such facilities are of various types and go under different names, including retirement homes, retirement communities, nursing homes, and hospices. All of those facilities serve to deal with the modern demographic realities of more old people alive, fewer adult children potentially available to care for them, and most of those adult children working outside the house and unable to attend to an old person during the day. When facilities for the elderly work well, they can provide a new set of social relationships to replace the life-long ones lost when the old person moves into the facility. In many cases, however, they contribute to social isolation of the elderly by furnishing a place where aged parents can be left by their children and have their material needs met with more or less adequacy, but where their social needs are not met because their adult children (knowing that those material needs are being met) visit variously once a day, once a week, once a year, or never, within my circle of acquaintances.
Looming behind this increasing social isolation of the modern elderly is that they are perceived as less useful than were old people in the past, for three reasons: modern literacy, formal education, and rapid technological change. We now store knowledge in writing, and so literacy has virtually abolished the role of old people’s memories as the formerly dominant means of storing knowledge. All functioning state societies support educational systems, and in the First World school attendance of children is nearly mandatory, so that old people as a group are no longer a society’s teachers as well as no longer its memories. As regards technological obsolescence, the snail’s pace of technological change in the past meant that technologies learned by a person in childhood were still being employed unchanged 70 years later, so that the technological skills of an old person remained useful. With our rapid pace of technological innovation today, technologies become outdated within a few years, and the training that old people received 70 years ago is useless. Just to mention an example from my own experience, when I was going to school in the 1940s and early 1950s, we employed four methods for multiplying numbers: memorizing multiplication tables, which we used to multiply small two-digit numbers and obtain exact answers; long-hand multiplication on paper to obtain exact answers, but tedious for numbers of more than four digits; slide rules, to obtain quick answers accurate to about three decimal places; and tables of logarithms, to obtain answers accurate to four or five decimal places fairly quickly. I became proficient at all four methods, but all of those skills of mine are now useless, because my sons’ generation uses pocket calculators yielding answers accurate to seven decimal places within a few seconds. My abilities to build a vacuum-tube radio and to drive a manual-shift car have also become obsolete. Much else that I and my contemporaries learned in our youth has become equally useless, and much that we never learned has become indispensable.