Due to COVID-19, all of us are experiencing the isolation many older adults experience every day.
In the span of a few short days, millions of Americans of all ages have gone from our often-harried daily routines to living and working at home. Many of us are experiencing this change not as a liberating day off or a snow day, but as an anxiety producing semi-or full isolation. There is one silver lining to such an experience, however: It can serve as an exercise in empathy (albeit an imperfect one), permitting younger people to appreciate some of what many older adults go through every day—even on a good day, in the absence of pandemic disease.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab, which I founded and lead, has been in the empathy game for quite some time. We developed AGNES, aka the Age Gain Now Empathy System, a suit that replicates physical limitations that can occur with age. AGNES lets students, researchers, designers, engineers, and others open packaging, prepare meals, use consumer tech, and navigate built environments despite diminished vision, strength, flexibility, and balance. The tool provides users with personal, unfiltered insights into some of the friction, frustration, and fatigue that many older people feel as they manage the challenges of daily life.
MIT AgeLab's Age Gain Now Empathy System, AGNES, enables users to experience selected physical ... [+]
The necessary clampdown on social interaction that many of us started in the past few days will provide weeks—perhaps more—of empathy training well beyond what our tricked-out empathy suit can provide. Many younger and middle-aged people lucky enough to work a job that can be done remotely still found themselves setting up shop at home with a suddenness that bordered on jarring. Professional connections were severed, or at the very least, attenuated. And although the reason for this separation was clear, many of us still found ourselves struggling to process what was happening. As a colleague in the financial services industry remarked, “I feel like I am watching a scary movie…but I am in it!”
As abrupt as this transition has proved, older workers do something quite like it every day. Retirement can feel just as sudden: On Friday you were working; on Monday, you are not. Colleagues, friends, clients that were part of everyday life suddenly vanish. Now you are home: out of the stream of your daily life, out of the water you swam in for years, maybe decades. For the first time, finding a way to overcome social isolation becomes a concern worth thinking about—one that often becomes more pressing as the years pass, mobility becomes a challenge, and social circles shrink.
To be sure, in the new social distancing era, technology keeps us connected—to a degree, anyway. With countless apps, videoconferencing, texting, and other communication tools, work goes on. Even highly tech-savvy users, however, are finding themselves momentarily thrown by the plethora of new videoconference tools and chat apps that have suddenly become an unavoidable fixture of work-from-home. This experience, too, is similar to an (often unfair) stereotype about old age: diminished confidence using technology.
As it turns out, few of us, at any age, are the power users we think we are; just because you’re a master at Excel or SPSS doesn’t mean you’re a wizard at WebEx or Zoom. Worse, now that we’re living on our own personal islands, there’s no IT department down the hall to turn to when questions inevitably arise. (Plus, you can forget about going to the Apple store for the near future.) Suddenly, the stereotypical image of one’s older relatives having trouble setting up their DVD player begins to make more sense. It was an unfamiliar technology for them, just like WebEx may be to you. And anyway, who were they supposed to call when they hit a snag? It’s not as though there’s a hotline for this kind of thing.
COVID-19 is also changing the national discussion in ways that illustrate what older people put up with conversationally. Right now, if you’re not talking about health, you’re not talking at all. The government, media, employers, friends, and family are all telling you stay healthy and to watch out for certain symptoms. “Are you eating right?” “Do you have all your medications?” “You are not invincible.” “Watch your stress levels.” “Be careful—remember, you have (insert chronic condition here).”
Older adults live this narrative everyday. In phone calls and visits, well-meaning adult children and friends often find ways to steer the conversation to matters of health. To an older loved one, the words “How are you?” can feel less like a friendly greeting and more like the overture to a doctor’s physical. While vitally important to discuss, such matters as blood pressure readings, glucose levels, and medication adherence don’t exactly amount to engaging conversation topics.
Then there’s the matter of home logistics. Runs on toilet paper and milk may be making headlines today, but the fact that home logistics has become more problematic for everyone is a window into everyday life for the oldest old, who may drive less or not at all. Shopping for groceries, running to the pharmacy, and other activities that many of us have long taken for granted as easy have become something that has to be carefully planned and scheduled.
In these dangerous times, it’s essential that anyone who can hunker down at home does so—for the sake of themselves, and also certainly for older people and those at high risk of serious illness due to coronavirus. In a very real sense, the best way to show respect for one’s elders is to give them as much space as possible. Fittingly enough, however, in so doing, you may very well gain a measure of respect—for the challenges that older people face every day. It is difficult to imagine anything good coming out of this global crisis, but a little empathy for one another may be one powerful exception.
