Our society is aging along with us. Are we ready for what lies ahead?

Here’s a bit of stunning news that may have escaped your attention: According to the New York Times, “Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time.”

That may be good news to everyone who has worried about population growth’s impacts on a finite earth, but it also presents new challenges to humanity: “The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old.”

Here in Thurston County, we still expect significant population growth in the next 25 years, but our age distribution is already changing: Demographers forecast that 1 in 4 of us will be over 65 by 2045. Currently, it’s less than 1 in 5.

Even now, Senior Services for South Sound struggles to meet the needs of older people in our communities. Sixty percent of its revenue must be raised from private donations.

Declining federal revenue from the Older American Act now pays for less than half of the food costs for its Meals on Wheels program for low-income seniors who’ve been locked out of in-person meals because of the pandemic. That program, which served about 250 people before the pandemic, now serves 450 people in Thurston and Mason counties with some paid staff and a dedicated corps of volunteers.

Brian Windrope, Senior Services’ executive director, says it’s long since outgrown its space in The Olympia Center. They need much bigger kitchens and food storage capacity in Lacey, Shelton and Yelm as well as in Olympia. They need more space — and more money — for activities, day programs, and staff.

Windrope emphasizes that Senior Services serves everyone, from every income group. He points out that affluent seniors are at least as vulnerable to isolation — perhaps more so — than those from low-income families who are more likely to live in larger, more inter-generational households. And people from all walks of life need help coping with dementia and the years-long burden of caring for someone who suffers from it.

If we are already struggling to keep up with growing demand for these basic elements of human need — not to mention housing, health care and a growing shortage of underpaid caregivers — it’s time for the lights to start flashing red about how we will deal with all these needs in the decades to come.

This is not an easy problem to get our arms around. We live in a society in which the norm is for young people is to move out of their parents’ houses, and often to relocate far away. In the course of human history, Windrope notes, this is a recent phenomenon. Our society has failed to adapt to the change. We need to find ways to rebuild what Windrope calls “the web of connectedness” that all of us who survive into old age will need to have meaningful, satisfying lives and to ensure that our basic needs are met.

Windrope also points out something else that’s new in human history: the phenomenon of young people believing they know more than their elders about how the world works.

“We used to rely on elders to pass on their knowledge about where to hunt and gather, how to grow food, and a host of other life skills,” Windrope says. “But now, because of their fluency with new technologies, many young people think they have nothing to learn from older people.”

That, he says, is a pretty limited understanding of how the world — and human relationships — actually do work. And it’s an attitude that is toxic to older people.

If you are 40 this year, you will be 65 in 25 years. Will you be ready? And will the world around you be ready for you as you age? If you find yourself living alone, will you be satisfied with an animatronic pet to assuage your loneliness?

If you have a job with no pension — as more and more people do — will you be able to count on Social Security and your own savings to support you when you can no longer work?

These are economic, systemic problems, and questions about the nature of our humanity and our culture. As Windrope says, “None of us is responsible, but all of us are responsible” for how we address them.

We need to think about all of these issues more deeply and with a much greater sense of urgency. And while we’re thinking about them, we need to do all we can to support Senior Services of South Sound.

This story was originally published May 30, 2021 at 5:00 AM.