Being dependent is humiliating
Bibliography
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737: The Daily - This American Life (2021). Available at: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/737/transcript (Accessed: 22 June 2021).
There is this thing that undergraduate students do in their second semester, when everyone is tucked into the college social customs and starts to talk and behave like all the other people on campus. It begins with language, then it encroaches into everyday conversation. Finally, by the second year, one will have asked this question so frequently that they will start to believe this is the sole objective of their academic career.
So what is this mind-boggling, corporate-borne question that kisses our lips at least once a day? The one, the only: "Have you been productive today?". It is infuriating to catch myself saying this and – usually – it is too late to take it back. This question often comes out of my mouth unconsciously, pour parler. Yet, by a certain age, it becomes the main unit to measure if we are performing life up to expectation. Whose expectation, I am still trying to understand.
We live in a world in which we must be productive until the very last neuron in our bodies is able to function. Physically, we are pushed to take less risks and live less instinctively if our insurance does not cover the expenses of a potential injury. Mentally, we are expected to be happy at all times, even though circumstances might demand a quieter and reflexive state of being. We must grow, achieve, and celebrate every moment of our existence.
If, for some reason, we are unable to live up to this image of health and toxic-positivity, then we become unpleasant and unfit to exist openly in society. The ostracization of the unhappy is not only a fact, but also a clear pattern that the Western paradigm cannot hide after this pandemic. In fact, the loneliness of lockdown was exhibited on every social platform (This American Life, 2021) even by the youth: the demographic that should be the most productive and positive of all.
The pandemic was a startling, abstract, lethal experience of time. Yes, also for us young people. It is hard to accept humanity's defeat when the enemy is invisible and navigates so gloriously in our fragmented and imperfect way of life. Covid-19 inserted its tentacles right into the cracks of the capitalistic paradigm and, with a quick flick of the wrist, cracked the surface of our Everyday. We transitioned from a work-oriented, partying, consumeristic life, to a sedentary existence in which daily commutes, binding conversations and schedules dissolved. During the lockdowns, being productive did not really matter anymore given the sudden fragility of life, nor did it matter what time we woke up, when we had meals or if we performed our daily tasks at all. One could schedule a meeting for the following week, but wake up the next day having covid symptoms and not even be able to predict the curve of the illness. For the first time, business had to wait and one was legitimately excused from any type of social or professional engagement. And, for the excitement of the Marxists out there, tracking time became truly unnecessary for a while, even for fully employed citizens.I, myself, intentionally stopped checking the time in spring of 2020.
So, as time, value and money were disentangled from mid 2020 to early 2021, people began to rethink productivity. For once, people were caring for themselves, doing the things that had sparked curiosity in the past but that they had never made time for. In place of deliverables, care became the main goal of our everyday life. Learning to care for the mind, the body and the connection to friends and family was something that my generation was distancing itself from, as expected in the journey into adulthood. But the pandemic stopped this process just in time for Gen Z to realize that the Western support systems are not fit for the demands of a changing climate. We inherited a paradigm that does not accommodate for the type of needs that warming biomes are challenging us with. Pandemics, extreme weather fatalities, health issues and diseases are and will be the new normal for us. Yet, we are stuck with a broken healthcare system that is unable to address grief, isolation and negligence.
I do not have enough fingers to count the number of peers or grandparents of mine that passed away in the last year not due to the virus. These casualties are called excess deaths and are related to the environmental stress that the Covid-19 pandemic caused. When the elderly did not succumb directly to the virus, they were consumed by loneliness and medical negligence (Kasar et al., 2021)
The way we care for the elderly is, indeed, one of those aspects that Covid-19 exposed. We do not have a system in place to safeguard the older generation from the lifestyle that capitalistic economic growth expects of us. We move our grandparents into nursing homes or hospitals when they are not fit for this world, and hope they will be taken care of with love and respect by strangers on a pay-roll. However, the emotional burden of having to see them deteriorate physically and spiritually in these sanitized, bleach-smelling wards is often too much to bear. So, for as painful as loss can be, we hope they pass in their sleep and head to
a more loving place than the one we placed them in. Grieving a grandparent, nowadays, is a lighter burden to bear than endangering the crystallized structures we live in.
Age, in the Western context (the only one I feel comfortable speaking about due to my cultural background), is also an economic burden (Brooke, 2020). Being old and unproductive is a cost to the state, to families and insurance companies. Using the words of Sandy Grande (Grande, 2017): "the aging body is prefigured as a crisis of decreased labor power and increased social expenditure". The elderly are seen as a surplus, a bad investment, and are therefore valued unworthy of governmental spending. And certainly, being alive and old also becomes a stigma for those who have limited means of self-sufficiency.
In recent conversations with a few elderly people, including one with a woman that I will refer to as Jeanine, a very significant concern emerged. I could tell the weight of the topic given the emotional tone with which this worry was confessed. "The humiliation of being dependent is what I fear the most about getting old. Moving into a nursing home implies that I am going there to die. I am not ready for that". It seems that when people begin to need help physically, emotionally and financially, they lose their social respectability. As a consequence, not only is the confidence that they have built up throughout the years annihilated, but they also lose any sense of purpose in life.
I believe that because of the ideas of constant growth, productivity and increasing returns, we have made aging a shameful, painful, if not even a tabooed process. Everyone knows that there is no pill able to avoid the inescapable pain of aging, thus channeling funds in the care of the elderly is the worst investment a country could make. Old people, in truth, are often the unworthy poor of our society. Yet, I think that if we are willing to be serviceful towards children and expect no return from them – even knowing their (still) limited cognitive capability – we must also do the same for the elderly. “The beginning of life and the end are so similar,” said Francesca Arnoldy, the lead instructor at UVM’s End-of-Life Doula program.
Death doulas are only a small example of what a country can put forward as an institutionalized service for those who are processing their own death process. The New York Times recent article by Abby Ellin (Ellin, 2021) reads: "Unlike hospice workers, doulas don’t get involved in medical issues. Rather, they support clients emotionally, physically, spiritually and practically, stepping in whenever needed (...) keeping them company, listening to their life stories or helping them craft autobiographies, planning funerals. Prices range from $25 an hour on up, although many, like Ms. O’Hara, do it voluntarily". Death doulas, as many other non-clinical services that exist in the world, can be more beneficial to a lonely old person than an additional dose of analgesics. Caring for the elderly is not only about the accommodation we can set up for them, it's about the company and human proximity we can and want to offer them.
The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the lack of human infrastructure for end-of-life situations. The simple fact that the passing of elderly citizens from isolation was thrown into the category of "excessive deaths'' supports this statement. However, this year has also witnessed the passing of young or healthy individuals. And we also had no support for them, especially because no guests were permitted to access the hospitals. In contrast to their grandparents, the youth that fell victim to the virus were part of the "economically worthy" demographic as they had potential to be productive individuals in the workplace. Thus, after this pandemic, it is about time we learn to think beyond the productivist logics of capital and allow ourselves to imagine life beyond neoliberalism and ‘productive’ societies. With new extreme living conditions that climate change will bring about – pandemics being one of them – more people will be made disposable because of health concerns, frailty, and economic insecurity. We will make up new categories of eligibility to treatments, making it more and more difficult to seek medical attention. Hence it is necessary to rethink the foundation of our Western society and reset priorities. The need for improved emotional support in our healthcare system is the first aspect to keep in mind. Understanding how globally encompassing loss and grief will be during the peak of the climate crisis is the second.
Written by Giulia I. Rubin