Youth 50 plus

The generation from 45 to 60 years old is the most depressing and most worn out in the country

I am the target audience. Facebook informed me about this by sending me an invitation to a city festival for people 50 plus. Codenamed Young Old (hardened, old, worn, lived, dilapidated, experienced - translation options for the word old). Young old is, it turns out, about me.

No, I have no illusions about this. But my age is the age of maturity, not "young old age", no matter how creative my age limit in English presentation may sound.

However, away with stylistic quibbles. I went to the festival with a feeling of skeptical but trembling anticipation. What will they tell me and show me on the large platform of the ZIL cultural center that I myself do not know?

As expected, they mostly talked about prospects, joys, new opportunities, difficulties, crises, challenges of age and overcoming them. Everything is on topic. Sometimes it was interesting, sometimes not so much. But overall it was a great event. New, modern format.

But the sediment remained. Its presence in me personally is by no means a claim to the organizers of the festival. This is a claim to the state trend, which imposes a substitution of concepts and deftly manipulates the most complex social problem, placing its solution solely on a citizen who has entered the “survival age”. (I love this term used by the FIU, which means the number of years you will live after retirement).

This is very similar to the situation when a person who is mired in deep depression, which is a clinical diagnosis, is being cheerfully advised: “What are you up to? Well, pull yourself together, let's go eat-drink-have fun. Look what a sunny day it is, you fucking hypochondriac!” (versions of the text of encouragement may be different). However, these well-wishers will never offer to go to the doctor and start taking medication.

The state initiation of optimism in people of pre- and retirement age, which arose as a trend right after the pension reform, looks cynical precisely because it does not offer a person any other resources than the mantra “old age will not find me at home”.

Responsibility for a happy old age (the main message of the festival) is the work of the aging themselves with an average national pension of 15,000 rubles.

This amount, apparently, should fit (except for banal survival) and yoga courses, and travel to other cities and countries, and new hobbies, and the realization of pending dreams.

Meanwhile, the ideologists of the Russian trend of optimizing the retirement age are silent about the fact that in Russia, as nowhere else in the world, the model that sociologists call the "sandwich" generation is widespread. The sandwich generation is 45-60-year-old people who simultaneously bear material and other responsibility for their grown-up, but not yet completely independent children, and for old, sick, but, thank God, living parents. That is, they work on two fronts, and in the provinces often on three - this is when a young grandmother also raises her grandchildren while their parents leave to work.

This generation, according to experts, is the most depressive and the most worn out in the country. They don’t just think about “new opportunities”, they somehow master chronic loans for the rest of their lives.

A mature person can master the new realities of age only when age, in addition to physiological problems, also gives a sense of freedom. Freedom from obligations, from routine work to wear out, from chronic restrictions. Let's be honest: freedom with a holey pocket is an illusion. Even in teenagers it ends quickly.

Therefore, do not inspire us with this illusion. Better help financially.

However, the state promised to help me personally. In a few months I will receive a pre-pensioner's social card and I will ride the subway to my heart's content. For nothing.