A less lonely elderly | Hacker News Reader

A less lonely elderly

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30 pointslenkendall14 comments

Our society is deviant if not sick in the way that we push old people to the side and avoid them instead of honoring them. It seems related to our worship of youth and fear of death.

I remember hearing an interview with a Canadian researcher who went to Cuba to study how they did something (I forget what, perhaps health care). While visiting a seniors' centre, she saw a bunch of 10-12 year old kids playing checkers with the old people in a common room. Later, she asked the director how they had come up with so successful a program to pair kids with seniors. "What program?" was the reply. "They just come in off the street."

Such a thing is unthinkable where I live. That says a lot.

Cuba has more then a few things going for it - namely relative cultural and linguistic homogeneity. My Spanish-speaking Mexican grandfather has a home in a historically German suburban neighborhood full of English-speaking Polish people.

There's just not a whole lot of context for community building. Interactions happen only when they're necessary, meaning mostly to resolve some kind of conflict, so there's rarely a positive context. People are just sort of averse to talking to each other and building any kind of neighborly relationship.

I spent a lot of time with the elderly as a kid due to my community structure. Somewhere into becoming a teenager your interests change and playing checkers isn't interesting anymore but I still consider those who are alive as good friends and still visit when I can. I have often grown angry seeing the modern community detach the children from the aged, as doesn't it seem that we developed as a human society exactly with the help of our elders to take care of children, as the youthful were gathering/hunting/building? Some of the most functional families I know live closely with the grandparents who are secondary caretakers. Of course a time comes when one's age doesn't allow you to chase 2 year olds, and that's where I don't know how modern society can 'resolve' this without care facilities as we're not willing to expand our family sizes, large families being who traditionally cared for the elderly.

My hope is that I'm able (though technology and/or social change) to remain truly helpful and connected to society as I become elderly. Playing games with young kids is great, but I'd also want to be able to pass along wisdom to teens and twenty-somethings. Elderly people have started businesses, spent decades in romantic relationships, raised children, attained their goals, lost it all, achieved self discipline, found personal enlightenment, gone through major illnesses and seen how all these parts of life can or can't be balanced. Popular culture gives young westerners a very unrealistic portrayal of what life will be like. Having access to real experience seems vastly undervalued in our current culture.

I'm fortunate that I'm able to email and skype with my 90 year old grandmother.

I do think it's interesting to see how this will play out with people who are used to being online. My grandmother is probably able to function online at the level she does because started on AOL 15+ years ago. Of course she still uses an AOL email address. So in someways she's ahead of the tech curve, but in others, she's quite behind. I'm sure this will be much the same story when we are that age.

Well that was a bit depressing to read.

I wonder how expensive it would be to make simple games that can be shown on the "community" TV in old-folks homes with a hardware component that fosters some discussions / interactions.

For example, a simple multiple-choice trivia program ("Which famous movie started with the word 'Rosebud'" etc.) with simple remotes with 4 buttons that they can use to play, like you find on airplane entertainment systems sometimes.

Thinking about it the Wii would make the perfect platform for an "old folks home" entertainment system, just needs the software.

>the perfect platform for an "old folks home" entertainment system

This was actually a subplot of Million Dollar Maybe, a 3-year old Simpsons episode :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Dollar_Maybe

Sounds like the hardware we used in my high school for Quizbowl. I imagine someone talented with Arduino could hack together a working solution on the cheap in no time (if it hasn't been done already).

It's called Tuesday Night Bingo.

Tuesday night bingo:

* Requires preparation and organisation each time.

* Requires people to actually run it.

* Is not done often (Once per week if we take your naming of it into account).

* Cannot be done whenever the residents feel like it

* Is one thing (Bingo)

To be blunt, your comment added nothing to the discussion so why bother posting it.

The question at hand is addressing loneliness: creating a computerized gaming method for the elderly may be a nice thing to do, but Tuesday Night Bingo creates a community event that can be looked forward to. So to add to your comment, I can see some kind of computerized gaming method being made quite interesting by adding in remote collaboration and guest MCs.

> Our society is deviant if not sick in the way that we push old people to the side and avoid them instead of honoring them.

The way the US treats old people isn't exemplary, but reading Jared Diamond's "The world until yesterday" has kinda opened my eyes a bit - in some societies old people are abandoned, or just killed outright

Imagine how much less lonely many elderly today could be with a cheap laptop, skype and social networks. Is the pain of learning new technology really so much greater than the pain of loneliness? Is there something else at work?

Not only that but there must be ways to monetize the upcoming baby boomer generation that will be retiring en mass

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