-
You know me.
-
I am in your friendship circle
hidden in plain sight.
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My clothes are still impeccable --
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bought in the good years
when I was still making money.
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To look at me you would not know
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that my electricity was cut off
last week for nonpayment,
-
or that I meet the eligibility
requirements for food stamps,
-
but if you paid attention,
-
you would see that sadness in my eyes --
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hear that hint of fear
in my otherwise self-assured voice.
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These days I'm buying
the $1.99 trial-size jug of Tide
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to make ends meet.
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I bet you didn't know
laundry detergent came in that size.
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You invite me to the same
expensive restaurants
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the two of us have always enjoyed,
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but I order mineral water now
with a twist of lemon,
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not the 12-dollar glass of chardonnay.
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I am frugal in my menu choices.
-
Meticulous, I count
every penny in my head.
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I demur dividing the table bill evenly
to cover desserts and designer coffees
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and second and third glasses
of wine I did not consume.
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I am tired of trying to fake appearances.
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A friend told me that I'm broke not poor
and there is a difference.
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I live without cable, my gym membership
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and nail appointments.
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I've discovered I can do my own hair.
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There is no retirement savings,
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no nest egg.
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I exhausted that long ago.
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There is no expensive condo to draw equity
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and no husband to back me up.
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Months of slow pay and no pay
have decimated my credit.
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Bill collectors call constantly,
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reading verbatim from a script
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before expressing
polite sympathy for my plight
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and then demanding payment
arrangements I can't possibly meet.
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Friends wonder privately
how someone so well educated
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could be in economic free fall.
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I'm still as talented as ever
and smart as a whip,
-
but work is sketchy now,
-
mostly on and off consulting gigs.
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At 55 I've learned how to fake cheeriness,
-
but there are not many
opportunities for work anymore.
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I don't remember exactly when it stopped,
-
but I cannot deny now having entered
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the uncertain world
of formerly and used to be.
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I'm not sure anymore where I belong.
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What I do know is that dozens
of online job applications
-
seem to just disappear into a black hole.
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I'm wondering what is to become of me.
-
So far my health has held up,
-
but my body aches -- or is it my spirit?
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Homeless women used to be invisible to me
-
but I appraise them now with curious eyes,
-
wondering if their stories
started like mine.
-
I wrote this piece a year ago.
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It's a composite of my story
and other women I know.
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I wrote it because
I was tired of pretending
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I was all right when I wasn't.
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I was tired of faking normal.
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I wasn't seeing myself
in the popular press.
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Nobody I knew was traveling the world
or buying a condo in Costa Rica.
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Very few of my friends
had set aside the 15 to 20 percent
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experts tell us we need to maintain
our standard of living in retirement.
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My friends, many in their 50s and 60s,
-
were looking at a downward mobility,
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a work-for-life proposition,
-
just a job loss, medical diagnosis
or divorce away from insolvency.
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We may not have hit rock bottom,
-
but many of us saw a sequence of events
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where rock bottom
was possible for the first time.
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And the truth is,
it really doesn't take much.
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The median household in the US
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only has enough savings
to replace one month of income.
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Forty-seven percent of us
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cannot pull together 400 dollars
to deal with an emergency.
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That's almost half of us.
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A major car repair
and we're standing on the abyss.
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You wouldn't know it to look around you --
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I'm not the only one in this situation.
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There are people in this room
who are in the same predicament,
-
and if it's not you,
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it is your parents or your sister
or maybe your best friend.
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We get good at faking normal.
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Shame keeps us silent and siloed.
-
When I first decided I was going
to come out with my story,
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I did a website
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and a friend noticed
that there were no photos of me --
-
it was all kind of cartoons like this.
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Even as I was coming out,
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I was still hiding.
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We live in a world
where success is defined by income.
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When you say that you have money problems,
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you're announcing
pretty much that you're a loser.
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When you're a graduate
of Harvard Business School as I am,
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you're some kind of double loser.
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We boomers hear a lot about
how we have underfunded our retirement;
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how it's all our fault.
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Why on earth would we draw down
our 401(k) plan to cover the shortfall
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on our mother-in-law's nursing home care,
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or to pay for our kid's tuition,
or just to survive?
-
We're accused of being
poor planners and deadbeats --
-
all that money we spent
on lattes and bottled water.
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To shame and blame
is so deliciously tempting.
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Many of us don't even wait
for others to do it
-
we're so busy doing it to ourselves.
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I say let's own our part:
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we all could have saved more.
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I know I could have saved more,
-
and if you were to rifle through
my life over the last 30 years,
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you would see more than one
dumb thing I have done financially.
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I can't change that now
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and neither can you,
-
but let's not mix up
individual, isolated behavior
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with the systemic factors
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that have caused the 7.7-trillion-dollar
retirement income gap.
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Millions of boomer-age Americans
did not land here
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because of too many trips to Starbucks.
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We spent the last three decades
dealing with flat and falling wages
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and disappearing pensions
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and through-the-roof cost
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on housing and health care and education.
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It used to not be like this.
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We all remember the three-legged
retirement income stool
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which had the savings
and pension and social security.
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Well, that stool has gone wobbly.
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Take savings -- what savings?
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For many families,
-
there's just nothing left to save
after the bills have been paid.
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The pension leg of the stool
has also gone wobbly.
-
We can remember
when many people had pensions.
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Today only 13 percent of American workers
are employed by companies that offer them.
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So what did we get instead?
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We got 401(k)-type plans
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and suddenly responsibility
for retirement planning got shifted
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from our companies to us.
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We got the reigns
but we also got the risk,
-
and it turns out that millions of us
just aren't that good
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at voluntarily investing over 40 years.
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Millions of us just aren't that good
at managing market risk.
-
And really the numbers tell the story.
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Half of all American households
have no retirement savings at all.
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That would be zero.
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No 401(k), no IRA, not a dime.
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Among 55-to-64-year-olds
who do have a retirement account,
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the median value of that account
is 104,000 dollars.
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Now, 104,000 dollars
does sound better than zero,
-
but as an annuity,
it generates about 300 dollars.
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I don't have to tell you
that you can't live on that.
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With savings down,
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pensions becoming a relic of the past
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and 401(k) plans
failing millions of Americans,
-
many near-retirees
are dependent on social security
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as their retirement plan.
-
But here's the problem.
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Social security was never supposed
to be the retirement plan.
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It's not nearly enough.
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At best it replaces
something like 40 percent
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of your pre-retirement income.
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Things have changed a lot
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from when social security
was introduced back in 1935.
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Then, a 21-year-old male
had a 50 percent chance
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of living until he was 65.
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So he retired at 60,
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did a little fishing,
kissed his grandkids,
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got his gold watch --
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he'd be dead within five years
of receiving benefits.
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That's not the pattern today.
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If you're in the your late
50s and in good health,
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you're going to live easily
another 20 or 25 years.
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That's a really long time
to make ends meet
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if you are broke.
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So what's the play if you've landed here
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and you're 50 or 55 or 60?
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What's the play
if you don't want to land here
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and you're 22 or 32?
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Here's what I've learned
from my own experience.
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The cavalry's not coming.
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There is no big rescue,
-
no prince charming,
-
no big bailout in the works.
-
To have a shot at something other
than being old and poor in America,
-
we're going to have to save
ourselves and each other.
-
I've had to come out of the shadows,
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stand here openly,
-
and I'm inviting you to do so as well.
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I'm not going to tell you
that it's not easy.
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I ventured though to tell my story
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because I thought it would make it
a little easier for people to tell theirs.
-
I think it's only through
our strength in numbers
-
that we can begin to change
the national "la-la" conversation
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that we are having
on this retirement crisis.
-
With so many of us shell-shocked
and adrift about what has happened to us,
-
we're going to have to build up
from the grassroots,
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forming what I think
are resilience circles.
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These are small groups
of people coming together
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to talk about what has happened to them,
-
to share resources and information
-
and to begin to figure out a way forward.
-
I believe from this base
that we can find our voices again
-
and sound the alarm --
-
start pushing our institutions
and policymakers
-
to go hard on this retirement crisis
with the urgency it deserves.
-
In the meantime --
-
and there is an "in the meantime" --
-
we're going to have to adopt
a live-low-to-the-ground mindset,
-
drastically cutting back on our expenses.
-
And I don't mean
just living within our means.
-
A lot of people are already doing that.
-
What is called for now is to,
-
in a much deeper way,
-
ask ourselves what it really means
-
to live a life
that is not defined by things.
-
I call it "smalling up."
-
Smalling up is figuring out
what you really need
-
to feel contented and grounded.
-
I have a friend who drives
really beat-up, raggedy cars,
-
but he will scrimp and save
15,000 dollars at one point
-
to buy a flute
-
because music is
what really matters to him.
-
He smalled up.
-
I've had to also let go
of magical thinking --
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this idea that if I just
was patient enough
-
and tightened my belt
-
that things would go back to normal.
-
If I just sent in one more CV
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or applied to one more job online
-
or attended one more networking event
-
that surely I'd get the kind of job
I was used to having.
-
Surely things would return to normal.
-
The truth is I'm not going back
and neither are you.
-
The normal that we knew is over.
-
In this new place that we are,
-
we're going to be asked to do things
that we don't want to do.
-
We're going to be asked
to take assignments
-
that we think are beneath
our station and our talent
-
and our skill.
-
I have had to get off my throne.
-
Last year, a good friend of mine
asked me if I would help her
-
with some organization work.
-
I assumed she meant community organizing
-
along the lines of what
President Obama did in Chicago.
-
She meant organizing somebody's closet.
-
I said, "I'm not doing that."
-
She said, "Get off your throne.
Money is green."
-
It's not easy being part
of the advanced team
-
that is ushering in this new era
of work and living.
-
First is always hardest.
-
First is before there are networks
-
and pathways, and role models ...
-
before there are policies
and ways to show us
-
how to go forward.
-
We're in the middle of a seismic shift
-
and we're going to have to find
bridgework to get us through.
-
Bridgework is what we do in the meantime;
-
bridgework is what we do
-
while we're trying
to figure out what is next.
-
Bridgework is also
letting go of this notion
-
that our worth and our value
depend on our income
-
and our titles and our jobs.
-
Bridgework can look crazy or cool
depending on how you were rolling
-
when your personal financial crisis hit.
-
I have friends with PhDs
who are working at the Container Store
-
or driving Uber or Lyft,
-
and then I have other friends
who are partnering with other boomers
-
and doing really cool
entrepreneurial ventures.
-
Bridgework doesn't mean that we don't want
-
to build on our past careers,
-
that we don't want meaningful work.
-
We do.
-
Bridgework is what we do in the meantime
-
while we're figuring out what is next.
-
I've also learned to think
strategy not failure
-
when I'm sort of processing
all these things that I don't want to do.
-
And I say that that's an approach
-
that I would invite you
to consider as well.
-
So if you need to move in
with your brother to make ends meet,
-
call him.
-
If you need to take in a boarder
to help you pay your mortgage
-
or pay your rent,
-
do it.
-
If you need to get food stamps,
-
get the darn food stamps.
-
AARP says only a third of older adults
who are eligible actually get them.
-
Do what you need to do
to go another round.
-
Know that there are millions of us.
-
Come out of the shadows.
-
Cut back,
-
small up;
-
think strategy, not failure;
-
get off your throne
-
and find the bridgework
to get your through the lean times.
-
As a country, we have achieved longevity,
-
investing billions of dollars
in the diagnosis, treatment
-
and management of disease.
-
It's not enough to just live a long time.
-
We want to live well.
-
We haven't invested nearly as much
in the physical infrastructure
-
to ensure that that happens.
-
We need now a new way of thinking
-
about what it means to be old in America.
-
And we need guidance
and ideas about how to live
-
a richly textured life
-
on a much more modest income.
-
So I am calling on change agents
-
and social entrepreneurs,
-
artists and elders
-
and impact investors.
-
I'm calling on developers
and disrupters of the status quo.
-
We need you to help us imagine
-
how to invest in the services
and products and infrastructure
-
that will support our dignity,
-
our independence and our well-being
-
in these many, many decades
that we're going to live.
-
My journey has taken me
from a place of fear and shame
-
to one of humility and understanding.
-
I'm ready now to link shields with others,
-
to fight this fight,
-
and I'm inviting you to join me.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)