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The interesting thing is that my grandmother doesn’t even understand what I do -- a common issue for people who age and lose connection to the workforce. In fact, we had a running debate on whether “blog” was a real word since it wasn’t in her dictionary. Finally, she saw a reference on CNN to Larry King’s blog and then an article in her Readers Digest about blogs, and she conceded that I was not making up this work I claimed to do. Since my grandmother has never been on the Internet, I can understand why blogs don’t seem real. And thought it’s easy for me to say I’ll commit to staying current on the ways people work, I do wonder how hard that will be once yet to be envisioned tools are created by those generations younger than I.
All this made me pleased to discover the blog, “Staying Vertical: Dispatches from the Old Old on Work and Happiness,” relating to a book in progress by Ashton Applewhite (hat tip to Deborah Siegel for turning me on to Applewhite’s work.) Applewhite says she is looking at both paid and volunteer work done by the very old, and she says it hasn’t been at all difficult to find octogenarians at work.
The inspiration for Applewhite's project came from her in-laws, Ruth and Bill Stein, a couple in their mid-eighties who work as entrepreneurs in book sales, a career they both started in their mid-fifties. (Listen to the recorded interview of the Steins for a quick dose of inspiration).
Applewhite is exploring fascinating questions like “Will your job do you in or keep you going?” (Sounds like work can keep us going, but only if it’s the right kind of work. Enagaging but not relentlessly boring or too physically taxing.)
What are your thoughts about working into old age?
