Post #31 Soul-Searching before Searching

Baby Boomers need to reflect on how they want to live before deciding where they want to live.

Jun 22, 2025

The title of Post #28 was “Where do we start?” which was a conversation talking about how we begin the journey of change when we realize that we are getting older, that we may need some personal care, and ultimately may have to change our living situation.

I had said that before I spelled out the options, I urged you all to have a new mindset. That mindset was to demand that we continue living! That wherever we end up, living our individual unique life should come first, and the physical care and support we may need to continue living that unique life should not, if at all possible, be the dominant factor in our lives.

In other words, playing off an old saying, we don’t want the solution (the help we need) to kill the patient (our quality of life).

I call it living with assistance, rather than assisted living. I talk about this because people have taken the status quo of senior communities as a gospel of “the way things are,” when it doesn’t have to be that way. Unfortunately, many times in senior communities that provide care - assisted living, memory care, and nursing homes - the focus of the establishment is to first provide you the physical care you need, with much less emphasis on helping you live a unique and quality life, (as well as less emphasis on your mental and social health).

In fairness, the reason for this can be tracked back to state licensing rules and regulations which mandate certain levels of care, which then virtually force a senior community to put so much focus on getting the personal care right – with harsh penalties if they don’t - that there isn’t much time and energy to focus on each person’s humanity.

And that’s a shame. And that’s what we want to change.

However, now that you have that mindset, there is still one more step I strongly suggest you take before plunging into the minutia of deciding where you should live while receiving the care you may need.

I urge you first to do some soul-searching.

On the practical side, as in any decision, if you have a dozen possibilities for action, doesn’t it make sense to know what you value first before you make the decision? If you are buying a car, isn’t it important to know what your priorities are? Is it the look of the car? The safety features? How fast it can go? How smooth a ride it has? Does it have enough space for you? Otherwise, how would you know whether you want to purchase a red sports car or a grey minivan?

I suggest taking some time and thinking deeply about how you want to live your life in your last years or decades.

Here are some questions to ponder and to rank their importance to you.

1. Are meeting new people and making new friends important to you?

2. Would you rather spend your time in your own home, doing the things you like to do, even if it means you may be alone more or even a little lonely?

3. Do you need 24-hour supervision? Can you get by with 8 or 12 hours of someone being in your home?

4. How important is food to you? Would you rather have a stable, balanced diet, potentially of different foods than you are used to, or do you want to eat what you want to eat when you want it, even if it may not be quite as good for you?

5. Do you want to do new activities – some stimulating, some not so – or do what you want to do all day, even if that is not so much? In other words, would you rather stay home with limited activity possibilities (but they are yours) or have access to other things to do each day?

You can tell from these questions that I am describing the pros and cons of both staying in your own home if you can or moving to a senior residence. Both have positives and negatives. In some ways it is like choosing a high school or college to go to. Do you want the big school, where extroverts have it easier, with bigger and better sports, classes, amenities, maybe better teachers, or the smaller school, which is more intimate, more inviting for introverts, where you get more individual attention, but may not have all the classes or activities the larger school has?

Senior living can be like that. There are advantages to staying home (if you can afford it) - you get to do what you want when you want to do it; you get to bask the history of your home and every little thing in it in which you created over a lifetime; knowing your neighbors, knowing your garden, being in your groove. While at the same time you may be lonely, have less socialization, less choice of activities, less choice of food, and have more responsibility.

Conversely, a senior assisted living residence offers 24-hour supervision, personal care whenever you need it, three meals a day (of varying quality) activities throughout the day, and lots of old people to hang out with. These are good things for some people, not so good for others.

It takes some soul-searching to decide how you want to live.

Seniors have never lived in a time like this before.

Here is another important point to consider. No senior has ever lived in 2025 before with the current technology we have, the current amenities, medical care, and our expected longevity. Seniors didn’t have Zoom, Facetime or tele-medicine. Being 70 and 80 in 2025 in America is much different than being that age in 1900 or 1950 or 2000.

It’s a new world.

And in that new world, I don’t believe we should use the same parameters to judge how we should live. Just as we Baby Boomers were the first generation to grow up after World War II with the appliances, amenities, and comforts of middle-class life in the 1950’s and 1960’s, we eventually rebelled against that new culture and in turn created the 1960’s revolution. We re-wrote what it was like to be a teenager and would not accept the status quo of the time.

Here we are again.

I believe we can and should re-write what it is to be older. To be old. We don’t have to believe the images of “elderly people” we have seen in the tens of thousands of hours of TV and movies that we have viewed over our lifetime. We all don’t necessarily have to succumb to the image of being frail if we don’t want to or have the ability or desire to avoid that. And if we are frail, we don’t have to allow society to devalue that image, as it does. We don’t have to define ourselves that way previous generations of seniors have defined themselves.

We are Boomers. (Yeah!) We don’t let others define us. We define us. We decide how we want to live. And where we want to live.

The models of senior care out there are limited. While some of those choices are well and good and may be just fine, in some cases they are not. I believe that we should define what those new models are and how we want to live and be treated. Maybe we want to live with our adult children. Maybe we want them to live with us. Maybe we want to live with our friends instead of strangers. Maybe we want to live with our caregivers. Or dogs and cats. Maybe we want to live with people of all ages instead of with just other older Boomers.

Is it too much to ask to be respected as the elders we are? I don’t think so. Is it too much that society should value, respect and treasure its elders, as previous cultures have done so? I don’t think so.

The hell with Tic-Toc and Instagram and the pop-media culture which devalues older people. We’re not going to put up with it. (I’m getting worked up now…can you tell?)

So before I lay out all the current alternatives for you - which I will do in subsequent newsletters - and you start physically searching for the next place in your life, I strongly urge to you to first think about the “new” mindset I discussed in our last blog, making sure the quality of your life com

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