The Great Retirement Racket. It Could Be So Goddamn Different...

It should not be the Great Conveyor Belt to death. It could be The Great Conveyor Belt to Community and Utility, and Purpose.

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My neighbor, Stu (I’m assuming it’s really Steward, but I don’t really know, so Stu it is) retired last Friday. He was a lawyer at an insurance company; a man who spent decades parsing fine print so his employer wouldn’t have to pay a dime more than required.

I had invited him and his soon-to-be wife for dinner. She is Chinese, and our conversation meandered through one of those instant translation apps. I’ll admit, I was in awe of the technology (and yes, at 67 it doesn’t take much to awe me), but still , remarkably, we managed a real conversation with someone whose English runs from “thank you” to “goodbye,” while our Chinese vocabulary doesn’t even clear that bar. The fact that the four of us could toast, laugh, and talk at all felt like some small miracle of the age.

After a few Scotches (I know I shouldn’t, but fuck it), the conversation wandered, as it does, from discussing classic convertibles toward remembrances of our parents. Inevitably, it veered into the subject of retirement homes, because that’s the beginning of the Great Conveyor to the Sky. What struck me (and it happens every time I have this talk with friends) is how quickly the horror stories bubble up.

The brochures promise “community” and “peace of mind,” but the lived reality always seems to reek of bureaucracy, loneliness, and liability waivers. We were promised comfort, dignity, and a touch of pastoral charm.

Brooksby, near Boston, looks like a fine place for your mother-in-law to spend her later years. Friendly staff at the front desk, cheerful brochures with watercolor renderings of people gardening or playing bridge in pastel sweaters. Until, of course, she got sick. That’s when the paperwork emerged like a hydra, each page designed not to soothe her but to shield the corporation from liability. The smiling staff still smiled, but the policies revealed themselves for what they were: guardrails to keep the company safe, not the resident. Once, she had someone completely strange to her live with her, in her tiny apartment, “to keep an eye on her.” Imagine my MIL’s mindset, with the onset of dementia, to live with a complete stranger in your own apartment, 24 hours a day, for 2 weeks, just to please the corporation… Don’t tell me it was for her comfort.

Cross the Atlantic and the scene doesn’t improve. Antwerp’s Hof de Schelde, where my mother went after her stroke, proved that bureaucracy is the only truly universal language. Short on staff, short on sense, long on rules. She couldn’t move her left arm, so naturally they placed a steaming cup of coffee in her good-but-shaky right hand. A minor detail, that she might spill it. Which she did, of course, burning her thighs. When I asked if she could at least go for daily walks with an outside service, some fresh air, some human dignity, I was told with Teutonic firmness, “That is not what we do.” Apparently what they do is trap you inside and ladle hot liquids onto people who can’t hold them. To top it all of, I was accused, me, who grew up in goddamn Antwerp, of being an annoying Anglo-Saxon”. I kid you not.

And here’s the question that keeps circling back like a vulture: why do people who grew up in the 1960s, the generation that marched, protested, dropped out, tuned in, and swore they’d never trust anyone over thirty, why do they shuffle so meekly into these institutions, filling out forms and nodding politely as administrators explain that daily walks are against policy? Was Woodstock just a weekend pass from conformity, after which everyone went home to buy insurance policies and worry about their cholesterol?

The deeper answer, I suspect, is fear. We are terrified of what happens when the body fails. So terrified that we outsource the whole messy business to corporations and their laminated policies. It’s easier to believe in “procedures” than to demand actual care. Easier to nod at the brochure than to imagine yourself in the locked ward.

But here’s the uncomfortable bit: twenty years from now, it will /might be our turn. And the question is: will we sit quietly with our tepid soup and spongy toast, or will we finally call this system what it is: a racket, built on fear and inertia, wrapped in fake smiles and liability waivers? Will we demand retirement homes that feel like homes, not holding pens with landscaping? Or will we just accept another burned thigh, another “that’s not what we do”?

It doesn’t have to be this way. A community could be built around life, not liability. Imagine places where exercise, art, and joy weren’t “optional programs” but the point. Where rules bent toward dignity instead of shielding the board of directors. Where the people who once believed they could change the world finally decided to change their own aging.

And would it not be super nice if somehow we could create an environment that invited young people, just starting out in life and their careers, to interact with us retired folks? Not as caretakers or as charity volunteers, but as equals in the grand exchange of life. Picture something akin to an elder council. We’d sit in armchairs not to watch reruns of Murder, She Wrote, but to dispense the kind of advice you only earn by screwing up three marriages, buying two houses at the wrong time, and surviving four recessions, along with all the wrongfully promoted idiots at work that ruled our lives?

The younger generation could wander in after work, caffeinated and confused, looking for guidance on mortgages, children, bosses, wives, the world, or simply how to keep from losing their minds. In return, their energy, chaos, and questionable fashion sense could rub off on us. They’d teach us how to use whatever app replaces TikTok, and we’d teach them how to read a bank statement, roast a chicken, or know when someone is trying to sell them snake oil.

Imagine retirement not as a holding pen but as a buzzing agora; wisdom flowing down, energy flowing up. Instead of rules that forbid daily walks, rules would require conversation, laughter, and maybe even a bit of mischief. We would not be inmates but elders, and instead of being warehoused, we’d be woven back into the fabric of life. Maybe that’s naive. But then again, so was believing that music and love could topple Nixon. And for a brief moment, it almost worked.

So maybe, just maybe, we can reclaim that spirit. Build a future where our last chapter isn’t written by corporate lawyers but by us, insisting that old age is still worth living, not just surviving.