00:07:43.180I simply wondered, where's the elderhood function to be found? Because early on, that was my first
00:07:48.900take on it, that elders are not personality types. You know, they're not in nice gowns and, you know,
00:07:56.100nicely coiffed hair or no hair at all, depends on your style and things of this kind, that they're
00:08:01.480not in fact, elderhood doesn't really have much regard for or use for, or maybe even ways of
00:08:07.800employing particular personality types. But maybe it's a function instead of a person. Maybe it's a
00:08:15.480way instead of a thing done. That's what I started to wonder about. So needless to say, I looked and
00:08:21.920I looked and I looked in vain for something like a concerted, ongoing, recognizable elder function
00:08:31.640in the culture and here's the irony i came upon very very quickly we no news to anyone listening
00:08:39.040to this or yourself this is an aging population in north america and for the next i don't know
00:08:44.72015 or thereabouts years that will be the case that the lion's share of the population will be over
00:08:50.880i don't know 50 whatever the numbers are you would think then let's do the obvious math on it
00:08:57.520If you have more old folks per square foot than you've ever had before, which we do numerically and as a ratio of the population, it would stand to reason then that we would have more elders than ever before.
00:09:20.280I could simply ask you, is it your experience that the culture that has given you your education and your concerns and your style options and everything in between has provided you with so much elder presence in your life that you actually need a break from it because you're forever guided by its presence and its affable wisdom and its time-tested abilities and its sustainability?
00:09:50.280I mean, I'm asking this somewhat in jest because I'm guessing you wouldn't even have this podcast and you wouldn't be having me on it if that was true about your life personally, that you were awash in the presence of elders in your life.
00:10:06.100So how can this be then that we got more old people than ever before and we don't have a commensurate presence of elders in that demographic?
00:10:18.380Well, it's in the reasoning where you look for the gap or the shortfall.0.68
00:10:22.960You don't look for it in the old people per se.1.00
00:10:33.080Does it come from the sort of cumulative sort of blunt force trauma of the thing that we call experience? Is elderhood an inevitable consequence of an aging population? And I think the answer to all those questions is no. It's none of those things.
00:10:51.940As it turns out, our reliance upon experience as the midwife of elderhood has put the emphasis on the wrong syllable, culturally speaking, because it imagines that sheer endurance confers wisdom.
00:18:50.100you have a clear sense of that not a lot of fun at parties and of course i don't get invited to
00:18:56.340them anyway but um not that i'm asking i'm just observing that well here's the thing first of all
00:19:03.800you're kind enough to ask me to appear on your program but this does not confer upon me
00:19:08.360or anything i say some kind of timeless sagely um i get it i've got it don't worry i'll let you know
00:19:17.500kind of status at all. It's really important to keep saying this over and over again,
00:19:21.920because in a time of phantom talking heads and so on, if you make it to the airwaves,
00:19:28.140you're already trafficking in this idea that you've got something fundamental to say. I don't
00:19:33.900accept that assumption at all. So I have to earn my way towards being listened to. I don't assume
00:19:41.020it by any stretch of the imagination, right? That's the first thing. So the second thing would
00:19:45.820be this. I don't have a plan. I don't have a scheme. I don't have the answers. I don't feel
00:19:53.300any obligation to have the answers. I think that is a seduction at least as fierce as anything that
00:20:01.060comes from the marketplace. You asked me about the youth culture, I think, earlier. A little bit
00:20:07.060of the new book has leaked out. In fact, I think I leaked it, but I forgot. But it's out there a
00:20:12.600little bit, and there's already been responses. And as I predicted in the book, and as I've said
00:20:19.400whenever I've taught this material, the lion's share of the volatile reactivity against what
00:20:25.840I'm talking about comes from people my age and older. It's quite interesting. It's very important
00:20:32.760to observe it because, ostensibly at least, I wrote a book about elderhood for those people
00:20:38.820who are demographically in the ballpark, you see, not as an instruction manual, but as a plea.
00:20:48.160I'm pleading for them to reconsider what the latter half of their life is for.
00:20:55.380And they might say to me, who are you? And I say, well, I can answer the question,
00:20:59.580but it's not that relevant. Who am I to do such a thing? But I waited, frankly, for somebody else.
00:21:05.940and I stopped waiting and I just decided well I'll just I'll kind of wade into this thing
00:21:12.420and one of the most relied upon offenses is this allegation about youth culture now I'm not
00:21:22.300pretending for one second that there's not such a thing or that it's it's the sexy beast and has
00:21:28.040been well since I was young myself probably you know youth in and of itself is a value
00:21:35.360today. It's absolutely bizarre. And it's everywhere. I grant all of that. And it's
00:21:41.740pernicious in how it leans upon aging people. And it leans upon people who begin to look their age0.97
00:21:49.260when that is no longer a compliment. If it ever was a compliment to say to someone that you look
00:21:55.800your age, you don't look your age is more often a compliment. But for all of that, I would like to
00:22:01.800raise the ante about it all and say, I don't think it is in the realm or in the job description
00:22:09.640of being an elder to be thwarted in your elderhood by the dominant culture worshiping youth.
00:22:18.900Straight up, that's what I'm saying. I am laying the gauntlet down before all the older people who
00:22:25.440feel discredited by the youth culture, and I say, it's time to grow up. That's not a good enough
00:22:33.140reason, okay, to take your marbles and go home, or stay inside the gated communities, or just stick
00:22:40.920with your own age group, or whatever else the decisions might be that ensue from that, or the
00:22:46.540offense, or the hurt, or the feeling that you enjoy at best a kind of liminal status that nobody has
00:22:53.520any recourse to you anymore, that you've become, sorry, I forget the word in manufacturing terms
00:22:59.840when the item is no longer necessary. It's been, you know, co-opted by the latest new version of
00:23:05.840things, whatever the word is. It's just not enough. It's not good enough. And here's why.
00:23:11.480Because the subtitle of the new book is The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble.
00:23:16.860That's a very important thing for me to put in there. Because it is one thing to talk about,
00:23:21.460quote, elderhood in the abstract, although I don't think there is such a thing as elderhood
00:23:26.700in the abstract. It's another thing entirely, though, to wonder about what has become of
00:23:32.700elderhood in a time so utterly threatened and threatening, so utterly endangered and endangering
00:23:41.320that the ante is upped on us all, because the time will come. It's already emerging,
00:23:49.520But the time will come when someone one half your age, even one third your age, will ask you in one way or another, when you were my age, they'll say to you, did you know what was happening?
00:24:03.520Now, with all of the information out there, how could you possibly say that you didn't know what was happening?
00:24:10.820And yet, you know yourself that it is more than possible, quote, not to know what's going on.
00:24:19.520You could be looking in the wrong places. You could be listening to the wrong things. You could be not listening. You could be deciding that it's too late, that there's nothing to be done, that you're tired, that you worked already for 40 years in the marketplace. You don't need this, whatever it is.
00:24:34.700Okay, but that doesn't mean the question is not going to come. And it doesn't mean at some level, that person one third your age doesn't deserve an answer for the likes of you, once you hit your 60s, or your 70s. So what are you going to say? Because whatever you and I are doing today, will contribute to whatever answer you have to give, when that day comes.
00:24:59.800So somewhere in there, the answer is going to come to something like this.
00:25:04.240If you're willing to be really candid and not defend yourself, it might sound something like this.
00:25:09.880Well, everybody who wanted to know what was happening when I was your age could have known there was enough ways of finding out if you were brave enough and if you're heartbroken enough, you could have found out.
00:25:26.580But the truth is that when I was your age, not everybody wanted to know what was happening.
00:25:46.400And not only did I write the book with those two questions ringing in my ears, but I'm speaking to you now with those two questions ringing in my ears.0.98
00:25:55.220And I can't imagine looking someone your age in the eye and saying, you know, it's just such a drag that everybody's worshipping youth. I just feel useless. And I take it as a personal insult or tragedy or worse. And I'm defeated by it.
00:26:13.120And given everything that's going on in this world right now, I'm afraid that that defeat is indefensible. It might be accurate emotionally and psychologically and spiritually accurate, but is indefensible given the troubled times that we're in.
00:26:30.060So last thing I'll say on this subject, then you could imagine or reimagine that elderhood's function is not a universal function nor an eternal function, that the ways and means of elderhood are purely and properly a consequence of the times in which the elder finds himself or herself.
00:26:54.840In other words, your understanding of elderhood is dictated to you by the times that you occupy.
00:27:04.800So elderhood, first and foremost, is both a child of its time and in some way a redemption of its time.
00:27:13.640And it takes enormous courage of the heart and enormous discipline to take what you know about what's happening in this world
00:27:21.940and translate it to a purposeful or a purpose-driven life,
00:30:43.800I was leading some workshops last year with a dear friend, Nidia Alicia, and I remember
00:31:06.820her saying to this group of people, she was speaking as if she was the future generation,
00:31:13.800back at us when we're in our grandmother states and she said as as the grandchild what did you do
00:31:21.440grandma what did you do elder when you knew this was happening and she would always say
00:31:26.320look at these scars look at look at this worn body you know when I found out I gave my whole self
00:31:36.180And I think it's such an important place to put ourselves in for those of us who are still in this youthful millennial state of how are we going to answer the future generations when they ask us, what did you do when you learned?
00:31:56.460And I think being able to stand in honesty, like you were mentioning, and maybe the answer is, I didn't want to know. I didn't have the courage to know. I didn't choose to look in the places that had the answers because, of course, we're in a time of so much information and this headline culture that it's coming at us at all moments of the day.
00:32:20.700this information becomes debilitating is one word but desensitized
00:32:26.540thinking about that can you interrupt you just for a second yes please please don't forget what
00:32:34.240you're about to say now but just on on the matter of too much information consider the real
00:32:39.220possibility that what information is today is what consumer goods were 15 or 20 years ago it is the
00:32:47.940current consumer good it's the principal consumer good it's what you can buy thinking that you're
00:32:55.680not even paying for it right and the total exposure that you have to this stuff is no different from
00:33:03.260walking down the main street of any town and being exposed to stuff and it is as you say
00:33:09.780desensitizing in the extreme don't think for a second that that's not in the the scheme or the
00:33:16.740design, because it would appear that more information is giving you, quote, more choices.
00:33:23.260That's exactly what a consumer culture tells you about the number of brands of cola available to
00:33:28.940you at Walmart. It pretends that's a choice. And it's the same thing with this information. You
00:33:34.220know, the information in and of itself is a stillborn proposition. It has no inherent consequence
00:33:42.540at all. But one of the first consequences I see is that people are awash in impotence the more stuff
00:33:51.380they hear about. This is an absolutely staggering arrangement because it is so
00:33:56.820widely distributed now. It's not just in your generation. It's across the board that the more
00:34:02.880things that people quote unquote know, the more stymied they are. So one of the principles that
00:34:10.980we engage here at the school and on the farm is put that damn thing away and don't take it out0.98
00:34:16.900while you're here and you see people get the shakes because they're uh it's like cold turkey0.97
00:34:22.980on cigarettes it's worse cold turkey on crack that's what it is and it's staggering to see
00:34:29.100what it's done to people in such a short time because the allegation is you're learning you're
00:34:35.020not learning by turning those things on and finding out what happened in the ukraine today
00:34:39.560you're not learning but if you are you're learning a kind of program of impotence that is intensely
00:34:48.360information fed it's so ghoulish it's so demonic in its fashion and it shows absolutely no sign
00:34:58.920of doubting itself never mind reversing itself so it's a very important and i'll please let's go
00:35:05.960back to what you're going to ask. But it's very important that people begin to seriously question
00:35:11.560to the point of undermining the assumption that more of anything grants you greater opportunity
00:35:18.500to respond, to react, to have a fulsome, heart-engaged reaction or response to anything at all.
00:35:26.320It's demonstrably, in your generation, no longer true. If it ever was true, it's not true anymore.
00:35:34.320I'm so happy that we're on this topic because I am somebody who was just consuming information.
00:35:45.660And it was almost like this addiction to a type of suffering of trying to take in as much bad news as I possibly could.
00:35:56.140and that's actually why I created the podcast because at that point five years ago I was just
00:36:02.020in a state of just pure saturation and it did lead me to this place of how do I possibly
00:36:10.100move on from here where do I go from here and I think I'm learning and perhaps this is one way but
00:36:19.840I'm trying to think strategically, if we are to really shift circumstances, shift experiences,
00:36:29.120shift the way that this global corporate system is strangleholding cultures and Earth's ecosystems,
00:36:39.140it seems that we have to focus. We have to really focus and learn more deeply about
00:36:44.920certain topics the headline culture is really specifically how it came to be as it is
00:36:53.960if you're not careful this turns into yet another now you're going to focus on more stuff and that
00:37:01.560focus is going to help no no no no we could say it this way my parents came out of the depression
00:37:07.420now that might sound to you like about a thousand years ago but it's not that long ago and it had
00:37:12.300enormous consequence for that generation. Because when they came into their parenting time,
00:37:17.560they were desperate to see to it that their children had more in their childhood than the
00:37:24.300parents had when they themselves were children, right? Kids deserve more than I had when I was
00:37:30.120their age. That was a basic parenting strategy that was born out of trauma, the trauma called
00:37:36.000the depression. I mean, it suited a consumer culture beautifully, but it was almost a religion.
00:37:41.440okay so how do you call this into question and the answer is it's very dangerous to call a religion
00:37:48.640into question now you're asking for it but i would challenge deeply the idea that that you
00:37:55.800in your generation or your children in their generation deserve more of anything than you
00:38:02.880had when you were their age or that i had when i was their age in truth your children will deserve
00:38:09.700less of everything you had. Now, by deserve, I don't mean they will be punished for the excesses
00:38:18.520of your generation or mine, although I think that's probably going to happen. I mean instead
00:38:23.800by using the word deserve, I'm saying it is their proper birthright to not be inundated in the way
00:38:31.800that we were, that they'd be spared in some fashion the pseudo choices of more of anything.
00:38:40.820And if we have any respect for them, any love for them in principle at all, we will try our best to
00:38:47.820engineer a world in which there are fewer or less of everything than there was when you came on the
00:38:55.400seen or when I did. And that includes less frigging yammer. Okay, by which I mean,
00:39:03.400wouldn't it be something if this ludicrous idea that everybody has an opinion, a right to an
00:39:10.240opinion and a right to express it and to be heard was challenged fundamentally and held to a standard
00:39:17.780of something like discipline or learnedness or something like wisdom, where the idea would come
00:39:25.400around that maybe your right to an opinion has to have the consequence of deepening, feeding,
00:39:34.640sustaining the culture, not sustaining you, but the culture instead. You know, last thing about it,
00:39:43.100I'm asked fairly routinely now to lead people in various ceremonial endeavors.
00:39:57.020When I'm asked to do these weddings, one of the things you see is there's an understanding of a wedding ceremony that it's a rubber stamp upon how two people feel about each other.
00:40:09.900But that has never been what a wedding is. A wedding is to craft something that isn't there now, that isn't there as a result of cohabitation, for example, isn't there as a result of common law union, that there is something fundamental.
00:40:29.120the word used is matrimony, that matrimony happens as a consequence of people undertaking
00:40:36.100certain things, ceremonially speaking. Whenever I do these things, I see to it that symbolically
00:40:43.720and materially and in every other way I can think to do it, that I insert the culture and its
00:40:51.080problems and its betterment in between the two people that I am wedding. And I insist that it
00:41:00.180be there throughout the ceremony and after it. I literally put the world between these two people
00:41:07.140and their feelings for one another. My assumption being, at least, that how you feel about each
00:41:13.800other, if it passes through the world, you see, doesn't go directly back and forth between the
00:41:19.700two of you like a Pokemon game, but actually passes through the medium called the world,
00:41:27.040that the world is the beneficiary of your willingness to enter into this matrimony.
00:41:33.180Not the two of you, the world that has granted you virtually everything.
00:41:39.080So this is my way of holding even the public yammer and my participation in it to some
00:41:45.100kind of standard that can have deep efficacy, that I'm not sitting here, listen to myself talk,
00:41:52.740admiring the sound of my own voice, even though clearly I talk a lot. But I'm trying to speak in
00:41:59.220such a way that I would tend eventually towards silence, which I understand the responsibility
00:42:05.260of any elder to do is to work themselves out of a job. You see, if you're doing the work,
00:42:11.980you are less and less mandatory in the arrangement if you're doing the work they'll need you less
00:42:19.180and less and i learned this when i was in the death trade people would ask me all the time
00:42:23.980oh so you were there at the moment of death of all these hundreds of thousands of people i said no
00:42:29.220no i wasn't there there is that many people that i was involved with but if i was there at the end
00:42:35.600man that's a little ghoulish isn't it that i engineered an arrangement in which i was needed
00:42:41.440up to the point of death and even beyond. When in actual fact, if I'm serving these people at all,
00:42:48.320should I not be coming more and more obsolete in that function? Should they not be able to turn
00:42:54.600to each other and to their circle of companions and so on in their lives? And this death wisdom
00:43:01.180become democratic instead of more specialized, which is what's happening. It's becoming more
00:43:07.460specialized. It's no surprise. The dominant culture has a remarkable capacity to not change
00:43:14.440while appearing to change. And you are seeing that happen in this parallel universe now of
00:43:21.760these alternative death practitioners, the death doulas and all that. If you pay close attention
00:43:26.980to what they say that their job is, you will find it's another iteration of the job that's already
00:43:34.640there to help somebody die. But it never wonders what happens when the somebody in question doesn't
00:43:41.980want to die, refuses to die, won't understand themselves in those terms even. Who are you
00:43:48.040helping now? And what's your repertoire for being helpful and comforting and all the rest? That's
00:43:54.860what I called into question in that book, Die Wise. And this new one, I guess I'm calling into
00:43:59.980question the very notion that older people simply by their presence should be quote reassuring
00:44:06.560unquote there is a quote from the book that's handy in my mind right now so i'd like to tell
00:44:11.900you because i'm proud of it proud of that i came up with it and it said something in the order of
00:44:16.800this elders call still water to rise when the people have forgotten their thirst
00:47:03.700I've been thinking a lot about the disparities between what we say we want as these children
00:47:14.420of the dominant culture and what we actually want in movements for social and environmental
00:47:20.000justice per se. And I see true equity as being unachievable and not even just true equity. I
00:47:29.320I mean, all the things you've been talking about is unachievable as long as there is capitalism and addiction to consumption and addiction to staying alive and youthful and so on and so forth.
00:47:42.820For example, even if racial fissures and economic fissures were equalized or healed in the United States, the surface of long lines of slave labor and earth suffering would barely be scratched globally.
00:47:57.300So I wonder, what are your thoughts on equity, fairness, and freedom for humanity as realities
00:48:05.140versus idealistic illusions that just make us feel better when we say we're fighting for them?
00:48:14.540This is a very well-wrought question, and it's a bit overwhelming. You know, anybody who leaps
00:48:19.760into the fray with a ready answer to the question that you've just asked is not to be relied upon.
00:48:26.580necessarily. And so I don't have a one size fits all, don't worry about it kind of response to
00:48:34.600that. I would say that confoundment that you described is a mandatory confoundment to have
00:48:41.520when faced on the one side with the systemic deep injustices that you've identified. Yes,
00:48:50.260indeed, historically and in a contemporary way, the dilemmas that you've articulated about
00:48:56.080deep inequity. Our systemic show no sign of backing off and bedevil and bedraggle any attempt
00:49:04.520to wrangle any other kind of fundamental change. Absolutely true. All I would say in support of
00:49:12.700your confoundment would be this. One of the things that really concerns me about people
00:49:19.440coming to me with this kind of global-scaled conscience
00:49:24.560is that they tend, from what I can see,
00:49:29.640to be in some fashion both enraged and paralyzed simultaneously
00:49:35.540and without realizing that one begets the other,
00:49:40.340that the rage, as understandable as it is,
00:50:32.100The people that you would want to, quote, free from the shackles are also beneficiaries of the arrangement that you've articulated.
00:50:42.740So you're not going to get a lot of takers as soon as you try to operationalize this kind of paralyzed conscience, kind of macro level insight thing.
00:50:55.640The principal reason being that our take on what constitutes human has been really compromised by the dilemmas you've described.
00:52:15.600You know, when this person was dying badly and they finally opted for euthanasia and they lived in a jurisdiction where it's legal and they had recourse to it and they did it, quote, successfully.
00:52:26.440Can you do the math on what the learning consequence is for the younger people in attendance at that event?
00:53:04.080When you opt for euthanasia, you are reinforcing the idea that death is unendurable, unendurable. That's one of the inadvertent consequences of this pseudo revolution in the death trade of people having control over their own endings.
00:53:25.280didn't we say at the beginning of our conversation well i did i guess that one of the signal features
00:53:31.320of elders is that they are crafted by the troubles of their times and that our shortage of elders
00:53:37.840is directly traceable to our shortage of limits our unwillingness to be limited okay then go back
00:53:46.100to euthanasia and ask yourself is this an exercise of limit or is this a way of pushing the limits
00:53:51.780ever further away from us so that you don't even have to die. No, I'll say it differently. So that
00:53:58.480there's no longer any such thing as your time to die. And there isn't. That's happened during your
00:54:05.960lifetime. And it's not coming back. So what God of life are you serving when you decide you'll die
00:54:14.000when you want to die, not when you're dying? What God is being served? Well, you know which one.
00:54:20.800the marketplace God, same old God. And by the same token, to take this confounding understanding
00:54:27.340to the dilemmas that you've described, I really want to say I support enormously anybody wrangling
00:54:35.140this thing and being utterly defeated by it from time to time. Because the young people who come to
00:54:40.900me have two things in their hands. One is impotent rage. And the other one is this kind of mangled
00:54:49.260conscience. It's a kind of anxiety conscience masquerading as a conscience. It's like a
00:54:57.520program of being undone, imagining that this isn't a deeply achieved thing. Some people think that
00:55:05.520that's what I'm advocating. All I'm talking about is learning how things got to be as they are
00:55:10.920and having your peace of mind, your sense of well-being take a more or less permanent hit
00:55:16.440by virtue of being willing to learn this stuff, then and only then do you begin, I think,
00:55:23.300to craft the possibilities of a, quote, change. I'm not sure I'm someone who trusts
00:55:30.740programmatic, large-scale, prescribed change, frankly. I don't know why, but I just don't.
00:55:39.520Instinctively, it seems to me that the principal responsibility for a changed world lies with the
00:55:46.000people who are this world's beneficiaries. Not the bosses, the leaders, not the new leaders,
00:55:52.580not the leaders who claim they aren't leaders, not those guys, but the rank and file people.
00:55:59.020And, you know, I just have to say it, and it's going to sound a little cynical,
00:56:02.300but good luck appealing to people to try to change the world who are just making it through.
00:56:09.180Well, thank you so much, Stephen, again, for spending this time with me and with all those
00:56:15.240who will listen and the mind takes a deep sigh, a deep breath, and rearranges all of its little
00:56:26.440tracks that it makes, which I'm very grateful to you for. You've definitely given us a lot to chew
00:56:32.740on. Thank you for the invitation, and I'm honored by it as well. So let us continue as best as we can.
00:56:45.240Thank you for listening to For the Wild podcast.