Reply to Dinner party in Europe: Americans look older, more tired, are more unhealthy

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Pretty sure if you have a dinner party of 55+ aged Americans they would be similar. Relaxed, looking forward to retirement, focused on family, talking about travel, etc.

If you speak to, especially French, people in their late 20s-early 30s they are they have the same burdens as Americans. Work, pension age keeps rising (did you see Paris burning this summer?), access to good health care, complaining about politics.

It is more generational than anything else. In fact it is pretty amazing how similar the generations are even though their nationality is completely different. [/quote]

Uh, emphatically no. At least not 55+ Americans on the East Coast. We’re still working so hard to pay insane college tuition, to fund our pension-less retirement. We’re sandwiched between college-bound kids and managing  declining parents who need a high quality assisted living they cant afford and need meds they also cant afford and Medicare doesn’t cover.

Maybe we just got right- sized out of our pension-free job and still need to work but know we won’t get hired at the same salary because of rampant legal age discrimination.

We might be estranged from a sibling or two because of their illness that we euphemistically call a “mental health issue”   One of our young adult kids likely suffers from this, too, and that continually gnaws at us. Their treatment has been spotty under our abysmal mental healthcare framework that has no available beds or providers — just pills

Notice that my hypothetical 55 year old isn’t herself sick or facing the consequences of a lifetime of bad lifestyle decisions. She’s buffeted on all sides by features of the American experience and it’s stress-inducing and unhealthy [/quote]

It's eerie how spot-on this is for me. [/quote]

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