A second-career gerontologist such as 70-year-old Marilyn Fedorow no longer is an exception as Southern Californians stay healthy and keep working longer than ever.
It’ll also mean more stories like Fedorow’s. She worked for decades in customer service management before going back to school to get a degree in a soon-to-be booming field – gerontology. She got her master’s degree at age 58 and, fairly soon after that, found satisfying employment helping older people navigate the country’s maze-like health care system.
Now, a dozen years into that second career, she’s pondering a slowdown from her job with the Council on Aging of Southern California, but not a full-scale retirement. Marilyn Fedorow, gerontologist and aging services professional with the Council on Aging-Southern California in Irvine on Thursday, September 22, 2022. “I guess is kinda in my head now. My husband is 80, and we both want to see and do a lot of things,” she said.And, in her experienced opinion, neither are a lot of people her age. The “new version of older person,” she said, will be one who continues to work at something, possibly for most of the years previously set aside for retirement. Part of that will be about desire. Everything from a decline in smoking to a rise in college degrees has created a world of people, like Fedorow, who will enter their later life with physical energy and intellectual skills that fetch money in the labor market. “Older people still contribute, already,” Fedorow said. “That’ll be especially true in coming years. They’ll want to.”Private pensions have dried up in recent decades. Real wages have stagnated. The gap between wealth and poverty has widened. And, going forward, there will be pressure on older people to stay in the workforce in some capacity, if only to support pay-forward social programs like Medicare. So, while anybody working in their 70s and beyond will be making contributions, at least some also will be filling a gap, the one that comes every month between their Social Security check and their rent. Fedorow, a gerontologist who lives in Anaheim Hills, suggests being old during the aging boom will be a mixed bag. “Health care will be hard. And housing. And there are a lot of people who never married or got divorced, sort of elder orphans, and there’ll be questions about who will care for them,” she said. “But there is also more recognition of those needs, too. And more people willing to meet them,” she added.
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