Geezer Chat
I learned one of the more depressing truths about human social interaction from my mother more than 40 years ago. My parents, both retired, were living together in provincial England, Mum in her 60s, Dad in his late 70s. Mum had been a professional nurse all her life, employed in every kind of hospital and clinic. She was a kind and loving woman, but had that blunt, realistic attitude towards health matters that decades of daily association with medical professionals will bring you to. I lived far away, phoning in occasionally to keep in touch.
Talking to Mum on one such call, I asked about Dad. How did he occupy his time? “Most days he plays cribbage with [next-door neighbor geezer],” she said. “They sit there in the living room playing cards and talking.”
“What do they talk about?” I asked. “They talk about their bowels,” she said.
There is the depressing truth. Elderly retired men with no child-raising or duties of paid employment to occupy their attention will obsess over their health. Samuel Johnson famously observed that “when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.” Likely that is still true in the lower-age cohorts, but as a suburban American geezer myself, I can testify that in this demographic today, while an opening reference to the weather might still be made, chat will quickly move on to matters medical.
Nor is it just the bowels in play: prostate issues loom large (as, of course, does the gland itself). A geezer neighbor of mine will, with no prompting at all, pull out his smartphone and show you a screen with his latest PSA count. “Look at that—just 5! This time last year it was 12!”
I find these lapses into health talk among my coevals tedious. Raised listening to Mum’s nursing stories, I am a health fatalist with less than average trust in doctors and pharmacies. I therefore note with relief that, over the past year or so, a different topic has come up in geezer chat, one I find more interesting than blood thinners, joint problems, and PSA counts. It seems to be on every elderly American’s mind.
What is it, this new topic taking over geezer chat? It is pity for the young adults of today, pity tinged with guilt that we had things so much better when we were their age. The guilt is, of course, irrational. No one can help the society he’s born into; there is no shame in taking lawful advantage of what that society has to offer. I can sense the guilt, though, when my geezer counterparty starts talking about the obstacles to a happy, stable life that Millennials and Zoomers face.
Two subtopics in particular soon come up: housing and employment.
“The kids can’t afford to buy a house!” is a staple comment in today’s geezer chat. The facts bear it out. Mortgage interest rates of 6 or 7 percent don’t help, of course; nor do high levels of immigration; nor the big financial institutions purchasing new-built houses by the streetful for renting out. The fundamental problem, though, is that ordinary middle-class incomes haven’t kept up with house prices. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) publishes reports on this sort of thing. The latest one tells us that only 21 percent of recent house purchases were for a first home; the norm was 40 percent before the 2008 recession. The median age of first-time buyers is 40; in 1980, the NAR report says, it was 29.
Britain has followed the same path. In 1970, 10 years before that last statistic, my girlfriend and I—working-class kids two years out of college, with middling desk jobs and no savings—co-purchased a house in London. In London! Today, London house prices look like phone numbers. No twentysomethings in circumstances like those we were in back then can even think of buying. Our generation sure was a lucky one.
And then, employment. If you follow the news at all, you will have seen stories about the difficulties young adults face. Labor economists categorize the extremes in their field of study as “job hopper” and “job hugger” economies. In the former, jobs are so plentiful that a worker can hop cheerfully from one to another. Don’t like your job? Quit, you’ll easily find something better. That was the labor market I joined in the late 1960s. Today’s economy is job hugger: never mind how you feel about your job, just hold on to it for dear life.
Artificial Intelligence may be dragging us into a zone where hugging no longer helps. Rikki Schlott wrote a good summary of the situation in the Nov. 11 New York Post. From which:
Over the last two years, the number of people spending six or more months searching for a job has increased by more than 50%. Young people feel like collateral damage in a cataclysmic economic and technological shift beyond their control.
All this, and exit poll results from recent elections, suggest that class warfare as a factor in our politics is about to be superseded by age warfare. That geezer guilt I sensed: might it perhaps be not guilt but fear? “Please, kids, don’t be mad. We sympathize with you, we really do.”
I would think that possibility through more methodically, but I’m too distracted by this nagging arthritis pain in my right shoulder…