October 23, 2025

By Jamie Towey

Apparently mental math practice is an effective way to stave off cognitive decline. So, let’s do a math exercise together.

Imagine two groups of people. In the first group, each person puts $10 into a pot. The second group then takes that pot of money and divides it evenly amongst themselves. Let’s take a look at three scenarios and determine which one results in the most money per person in the second group:

In Scenario A, the first group has ten people and the second group has five people.

In Scenario B, the first group has ten people and the second group has ten people.

In Scenario C, the first group has five people and the second group has ten people.

Which scenario results in the most money per person?

Easy, right? Scenario A.

75 years ago, Scenario A or B is what America thought elder care would look like; Scenario C is what we’re staring at within the next decade.

You don’t need to be a demographer or a mathematician to see our nation’s current social welfare programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are rapidly becoming unsustainable and very soon, insolvent. The number of young people in America is imploding and the number of seniors is exploding.  In 25 years, America’s median age will be 41 years old! (For a riveting, but sobering documentary describing the population cliff we’re facing, the Netflix documentary “Birthgap” is on YouTube for a limited time. Watch it here.)

No matter what solutions are proposed, the math ain’t mathing, as Gen-Z would phrase it. Dramatically increase taxes? The government would financially cripple the younger generations and still fall short. Cut benefits?  Benefits are scarce to begin with; additional cuts would leave millions of our elderly destitute. Politicians avoid hard choices because they’re politicians.

Government programs aren’t the entire answer, and they never can be.  I think there’s another, better solution: us. We can each accept our responsibility to care for our country’s aging citizens in a personal, human, tangible way. And we can start in our own communities.

We have so many abandoned and unaccompanied elderly and we currently don’t have enough nurses and hospice workers to manage the coming influx of patients.  So we must extol the beauty of service to others so that one day they can take on the challenge of caring for the elderly of the future who have no children. If we’re young, we must take our responsibility seriously as married couples to be fruitful and multiply. Medicare and Medicaid will remain obtuse and inefficient, so we must support local shelters, charities, and houses of worship that support the solitary shut-ins and the disabled.

What will happen if we don’t? I recently was discussing with someone Albert Brooks’ 2011 novel, 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America. It’s a satirical work of dystopian fiction, but one of the key plot points is a growing hatred of “the olds,” which metastasizes into a wave of hate attacks by young people on the elderly. Satire, yes, but I see in my peers a growing resentment for the Baby Boom generation. The Internet is awash with “Okay, Boomer” content reframing the typical postwar American success narrative as mere Boomer pablum. There is real anger fueled by a narrative that the financial and cultural difficulties facing Millennials and Gen-Z now were deliberately engineered by their parents’ generation. We can argue all we want about this, but all it does is pit one group against another and get us nowhere.  The answer is in simple human connection.

You can’t see someone as a villain if you’re by their bedside extending care. If we want to keep this demographic wave from unmooring our society, then young and old must clasp hands and see another person yearning to be loved. True compassion will shift our focus from a utilitarian one that charts dollars and cents to a community where we value the social ties that bind us with one another, where we respect each person’s innate dignity.

(The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Aging with Dignity and/or its Board of Directors.)