Vicki Robin of Your Money or Your Life is right about responding to Covid-19 if you’re financially independent:
I wake up every morning asking, “What can I do for others to ease their material or psychological pain as Covid-19 upends our lives?” and “How can I use my leadership in communities of influence to increase vigilance where people are slack and calm where people are freaked?” The privilege of financial independence is the ability to serve.
Great advice on the right way to handle fall risk for seniors. Includes an excellent video.
Elliott Royce takes practice falls at least five times every morning. He doesn’t just practice; he preaches, too. He goes to assisted living centers, senior centers and community centers to talk about how to prevent serious injuries if you take a tumble.
Perhaps because I’ve reached an age where I might be considered a senior my own self, I’m becoming increasingly annoyed by the way public health advisors infantilize seniors.
It’s most obvious with fall risk, where “don’t fall” not only is repeated constantly, it almost always comes with a particular sort of blame-the-victim advice—remove tripping hazards, wear supportive shoes, be careful on wet or icy surfaces, always use your assistive devices (canes, walkers, etc.)—the implication being that if you fall it’s your fault for not having made your environment sufficiently fall-proof.
This advice is not merely useless or insulting; it is actively harmful.
It’s harmful first of all because it conflates “senior” with “frail” in a way that will inevitably lead the public to harass seniors just like the public feels free to harass fat people, smokers, pregnant women (especially those with the temerity to drink alcohol), or anyone who isn’t conforming with whatever the current public health fashion is.
Inevitably too, it will have that effect in the minds of seniors who will start to think of themselves as frail simply because everybody says so.
More to the point, it’s is precisely backwards for what you want if your goal is (as I think it should be) to prevent frailty.
Wrong: Remove tripping hazards. Right: Use pillows, empty boxes, rocks, sticks, 2x4s, and whatever else you have handy to make a little obstacle course on which you can practice navigating tripping hazards.
Wrong: Wear supportive shoes. Right: Wear the least supportive shoes you can handle and do foot exercises to gradually strengthen your feet.
Wrong: Be careful on slippery surfaces. Right: Pay attention to the surfaces you’re walking on and exercise due care on all of them.
Wrong: Always use your assistive devices. Right: Work with a physical therapist if necessary, and then do exercises to make yourself strong enough to obviate the need for an assistive device.
This is perhaps not as harmful as the infantalization of children and youth, which works extra harm because adults have more power to impose their conditions on children, whereas seniors mostly have enough autonomy to ignore inappropriate advice. But it hurts seniors in exactly the same way it hurts children, reducing their ability to become or remain robust actors in the wide world.
Now, I don’t want to fall into reverse-blaming the victim. If you are frail, then taking steps to reduce the risk of injury just makes good sense. My go-to activities to prevent frailty might well put an already frail person at serious risk.
I use the weir across the little creek behind Winfield Village for balance practice, when it’s dry and clear of debris.
I try to resist the urge to suggest to seniors that they should do hazardous activities in the name of preventing frailty. But the advice I see from professionals (and random strangers) goes too far in the other direction. Following it is going to doom already frail people to becoming steadily more frail.
I have always been an optimizer. I spend way, way too much time, energy, and attention optimizing things. Which is, you know, fine, even though my net benefit is small or zero, largely because I don’t focus my optimization efforts in places where I get the biggest payoff. (I’d say that I don’t optimize my optimization efforts, but I don’t want to tempt my brain into trying to do that. It would not end well.)
One place where my optimization efforts did end well has been in optimizing things for life under late-stage capitalism.
I was helped by a couple of lucky coincidences and a bit of lucky timing.
Purely because I enjoyed doing software, I became a software engineer at the dawn of the personal computer era, which gave me a chance to earn a good salary straight out of college, a salary that grew faster than my expenses for most of the next 25 years.
Whether because of my upbringing or my genes (my grandfather was a banker), I liked thinking about and playing with money, which meant that I was doing my best to save and invest during a period when ordinary people could easily earn outsized investment returns.
It worked out very well for me. I’m as well positioned as anyone who isn’t in the 1% to do okay in late-stage capitalism. (Frankly, better positioned than a lot of the 1%, who find it easy to imagine that they deserve the lifestyles of the 0.1%, and if they live like they imagine they should will quickly ruin their lives.)
This whole post was prompted by a great article that looks mainly at the efforts women make to optimize themselves under the overlapping constraints of health, fitness, appearance, and financial success in the modern economy. Highly recommended—insightful and daunting, but also funny:
It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible…. But today, in an economy defined by precarity, more of what was merely stupid and adaptive has turned stupid and compulsory.
One focus of that article is on “fitness.” I put fitness in quotes because of the way, especially for women, so much of fitness is actually about appearance. Perhaps because I’m not a woman—also perhaps because I’m already married, and because I’m older—my own perspective on fitness has gotten very literal: I want my body to be fit for purpose—fit for a set of purposes which I have chosen. I want to be able to do certain things because I have found the capability to be useful. (I also want to be able to do certain things that I can’t do, because I imagine that the capability would be useful, and much of the exercise I do now is intended to achieve those capabilities.)
In a sense, optimizing for fitness is really neither here nor there as far as optimizing for late-stage capitalism, which is mostly about money. And yet, really it is. My fitness suffered during the period I was working a regular job. Getting fit and staying fit takes time. To a modest extent, you can substitute money for time—you can pay up for the fancy gym where the equipment you want to use is more available, or take a job that doesn’t pay as much but allows you to squeeze in a midday run. But now we’re right where we started: optimizing for life in late-stage capitalism.
I should say that I’m delighted with how well my life has turned out. If I’d had any idea how little I could spend and still have everything I really want, or how early I’d have saved up enough money to support that modest lifestyle, perhaps I could have avoided a lot of anxiety and unhappiness along the way. But who among us has such luck? And more to the point, maybe some of that anxiety and unhappiness were crucial to my making the choices I did that got me to where I am.
I worry just a bit about my irresistible impulse to optimize, but like everything else about me, it got me to where I am. And, as I say, I’m delighted to be here.
I used to make fun of our culture’s weird fixation on dangers from ordinary things, but now that I’ve seen it have its effect on Jackie’s mom (labeled a “fall risk” at the hospital and now confined to a wheelchair), it’s not so funny any more.
My theory is that this phenomenon has its roots in how safe daily life has gotten: Eliminate any particular danger and there’s always the next most dangerous thing.
I have been predicting for years—only partially tongue-in-cheek—that we’re dangerously close to feeling like it’s a “reasonable” precaution that everyone wear a helmet while taking a shower, because bathroom slip-and-fall injuries are probably the greatest non-motor-vehicle risk that ordinary people face.
Hospitals’ fear of elderly people falling is so great that they are preventing them from walking, reports The Washington Post. This is ostensibly for the patients’ own good — yet not getting up for even just a few days is crippling them…
Just as an aside: One thing about this that drives me crazy is that safety advocates have pushed for all sorts of changes to cars to make things safer for drivers and passengers, but I’ve seen almost no push to make cars safer for bicyclists and pedestrians. If you want to make things safer, there’s a place to start.
While @jackieLbrewer was working at the bakery there was a cash register glitch. For several days they took credit card payments on paper, writing the number down by hand, and then entering them manually at the end of the day.
Those customers would have been totally secure from being able to buy bread.
