by Steve Szilagyi
My friend Ian worked hard all his life. In his seventies, he bought a big house and moved his son’s family in with him. It’s the classic multigenerational setup, and it seems to be working out. Only one thing bothers him—the zombies.
“My son and his kids love the whole zombie thing,” he says. “They watch The Walking Dead and play video games where thousands of zombies come right at ’em, and get blasted to smithereens.”
“Those games can be violent,” I say, as the young waitress pours our coffee.
“It’s not the violence. It’s the zombies. You ever watch a zombie movie?”
“Sure,” I say. “Shaun of the Dead. I love those Edgar Wright-Simon Pegg movies.”
“Did you like it?”
“Nah, I hated it.”
“Why?”
“Zombies,” I shrug. “They’re old people. They’re us.”
The secret message. Ian nods sadly. Ian knows old people. His retirement job is managing a nonprofit apartment complex for the elderly poor. He and I sometimes disagree, but on the subject of zombies, we’re on the same page.
What is a zombie? A stiff-limbed, shuffling figure in out-of-date clothes. They have thin lips, yellow teeth, staring eyes, and gaping mouths.
Sitting a booth at the diner where Ian and I have lunched for many years, I look around and see dozens of people just like that—seated around us or struggling to make their way to the toilet.
“The secret message of zombie movies,” I observe, “is: ‘Old people want to devour your resources. God gives you permission to destroy them.’”
“The way they walk,” Ian says. “You ever been in a room full of Parkinson’s patients?”
“Let me refine that,” I say, talking past him in the annoying way old people do. “‘God gives you permission to destroy them, and if they scream and blow up into bloody pieces while you’re doing that, it’s okay to enjoy it. They’re not really human.’”
Now I recall what is generally recognized as the most disturbing scene in Shaun of the Dead. A zombie epidemic has broken out, and the townsfolk are all turning into walking dead. The main characters are being stalked by their former-friends and neighbors. Eventually, Shaun encounters the figure of his Mom, now a zombie, shuffling toward him. And in an unbearably poignant moment, we see him forcing himself to overcome his natural sentiments and destroy her.
A royal pain. By the mid-2030s, the majority of U.S. baby boomers will be in their 80s—possibly 6-10 percent of the population. We will be a royal pain in the tuchus, descending into dementia, slowly dying of chronic disease, suffering from arthritis, becoming paralyzed with neurodegenerative diseases, losing our memories, getting cancer, falling, and needing physical attention in a thousand different ways.
Whenever the media publishes charts of what will be the most in-demand jobs in the coming years, one category always tops the list: caretakers for the elderly—geriatric nurses, home health aides. These are not easy jobs. They pay little and rank near the bottom of the status ladder.
Tolerating old people takes a lot of patience. Age, transient ischemic attacks, depression, and pain can make them querulous and obtuse. Selfish, too.
It takes a special kind of person to work with old people, especially old people with infirmities, which is most of them. You require a rare set of personal qualities: patience, empathy, conscientiousness. Basic intelligence. If you are trainable and possess these traits in any small measure, you can probably get a better-paying, higher-status job than taking care of old people.
The current cost of paying someone to take care of you—even badly—when you’re old is scarier than any zombie movie. And it’s going to get worse. There are whole subreddits devoted to middle-aged children complaining about their boomer parents’ wealth being drained by nursing homes, memory care, and home health care. The redditors’ livid fury at being deprived of inheritances does not reflect well on the human race.
The coming new consensus. Society’s respect for individual lives waxes and wanes with circumstances. The archeological record is littered with mass graves. Elevated talk about euthanasia has grown in proportion to the greater awareness of the elderly care crisis ahead.You can see and hear society talking itself into a new consensus on how we should approach old age, infirmity, and when and how to end life. Doctors are writing about how they would prefer not to receive extraordinary care at the end of life or be kept alive by expensive procedures when it’s clear there is no hope. More and more ordinary people echo the same sentiments in daily conversation. “Just put a bullet in my head” is a common, half-facetious refrain.
Meanwhile, actual euthanasia is legally available in many places—and even depressed young people are taking advantage of it. Moralists who warn of a slippery slope are often dismissed by euthanasia advocates. A minority of the latter may even welcome the fall of religious and ethical constraints that hold us back from smothering the old and sick with pillows.
Clogging up the world. “You know what it’s like to be stuck behind old people in the supermarket,” I say. “Or in a ticket line. Or, heaven help us, in traffic. Multiply that by millions and make a whole society put up with it. That’s the future. Our generation will be clogging up the world, shambling around, getting in everyone’s way—eating up resources like a zombie eats brains—”
Ian signals his reluctant agreement. Ian is a kind of saint. He works hard managing his old people’s apartment complex and doesn’t take money for it. Thanks to his efforts, it’s a safer, more comfortable building than most others of its kind. I like to hear his stories about his tenants: their quirks, weak brains, petty quarrels, and occasional charm. He loves them and has dedicated more than his share of time and resources to these people and their well-being than they deserve in any system not overseen by the benevolent Deity he believes in.
As everyone knows, America’s Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid systems are scheduled to go broke sometime in the 2030s. If this happens, it will make many of the conditions described above far, far worse.
I once wrote an article about a veterinarian who worked at an inner-city animal shelter. When I came to interview him, he had just finished the daily task of euthanizing 30-some cats. There was a frantic look in his eyes. “I hate what I have to do,” he said. “Please tell people what it’s like. My whole job is dealing with this … mountain of cats.”
Who’s going to take care of this mountain of elderly? The normal job market will not be able to supply enough people with the emotional stamina to adequately care for, much less tolerate, the multitudinous old. The young and middle-aged are gonna wanna kill us. They’ll shoot us down like the hordes of living dead they have blithely massacred in a thousand video games.
Put us to sleep. Of course, it won’t be that violent. They will probably put us to sleep like cats. They’ll be darn sad about it, but the best minds of their generation will fill their Substacks with rueful justifications for what is taking place—if anyone admits it’s happening at all.
And maybe it will be for the best. You can’t expect ordinary people to make the extraordinary sacrifices that taking care of old people requires. My friend Ian is able to do it. But then, as I said, he’s a saint. It would take a million saints to put up with all of tomorrow’s old people and their pains. And from what I’ve seen of the generations X, Y, and millennials—saints they ain’t.
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