What The Hell America!

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In the next 10 years, our society will become more old than young. How do we leverage this time to build stronger intergenerational connections? Eunice Nichols, the co-CEO of CoGenerate, has spent more than two decades bringing older and younger people together to address issues that affect us cross-generationally. She explains how a history of structural policies, some of them great innovations, have contributed to this age-segregated era and about what a future could look like if people from different generations choose to partner together more often.

The following is a transcript:

Yasmin Tayag: Well, you said that we were the same generation, and we’re not!

Natalie Brennan: Technically, that’s true, but I was raised alongside a Millennial six years older than me and one four years older than me, so culturally I feel like I grew up with a Millennial core despite my Gen Z rising.

Brennan: I’m Natalie Brennan, Gen Z producer at The Atlantic.

Tayag: And I’m Yasmin Tayag, a Millennial staff writer with The Atlantic.

Brennan: This is How to Age Up.

Brennan: What do you think your most Millennial quality is?

Tayag: I am very self absorbed. [Laughter.] I would say an obsession with myself and always putting myself in the center of everything and thinking that everything that’s going wrong is directed at me. Like the failing economy and the climate: It’s all directed at me.

Brennan: Yeah, I have that too. I kind of thought it was a Gen Z quality. Maybe that’s just the Millennial core in me. [Laughter.]

Tayag: Okay. Well, what do you think your most Gen Z quality is?

Brennan: I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I wear baggy, big pants. Okay.

Tayag: Okay. But I do too.

Brennan: Yeah, that’s true. But I think I’m wearing even baggier.

Tayag: Yes. And I’m doing it because I wanna look like you. [Laughs.]

Brennan: I’m like, I don’t know. You don’t feel that different from, like … me.

Tayag: Perhaps I’m just an exceptional Millennial.

Brennan: Correct. And I’m just an exceptional Gen Z.

Tayag: I mean, maybe we have a lot of overlap because we generally spend most of our time with people within a decade of our own age.

Brennan: Yeah.

Tayag: Like, there’s research showing that most adults don’t have close friends who are either 15 years older or younger than them.

Brennan: Wow.

Tayag: A few years ago I used to work with a much younger colleague who asked me out for coffee, and we had this lovely coffee date where we talked about life, talked about working in media, and then after I saw that she tweeted—

Brennan: No…

Tayag: She wrote, “As a 22-year-old woman, making friends with 27- to 34-year-old women has been the best thing I’ve done this year.”

Brennan: No!

Tayag: And I read this, and I’m like, Excuse me, am I the upper limit of your age range? Kudos to her for going out of her way to make older friends.

Brennan: “Older friends!”

Tayag: I’m glad she got something out of it. But still, even if I’m at the end of her age range, I’m just 12 years older than her.

Brennan: Right.

Tayag: Like, is this really as age diverse as we can get?

Brennan: I mean, 25- to 45-year-olds are only about 25 percent of the U.S. population, but make up almost the entirety of my day-to-day interactions.

Tayag: Which is kind of wild, because statistically it shouldn’t be so difficult to meet people of different generations.

Brennan: Right. But your friend is onto something. You do get something out of meeting people outside of your age group. With older people, you get a different perspective on work and relationships, on what really matters over the course of a lifetime. And I’m sure, for you, as the older person in this relationship, I’m sure you learned something too.

Tayag: Yeah. After I got over being the “old friend,” it actually helped me realize I had something relevant to share, like my experiences amounted to something interesting and useful to someone else.

[Music.]

Tayag: Natalie—that’s Eunice Nichols. She’s the co-CEO of CoGenerate, an organization focused on intergenerational partnerships. She’s spent over two decades witnessing how bringing older and younger people together can be really transformative for everyone involved, and that it’s a really effective way to tackle societal problems. And we spoke about how much interest and movement there is in this space right now, even if it’s not how our society is currently structured.

Nichols: So I’m the daughter of immigrants from Taiwan, and like many children of immigrants, I grew up in an intergenerational home because my parents, once they got settled, brought their parents over. Much of my community was the extended immigrant community that my parents were part of. I was surrounded by many aunties and uncles and grandmas and grandpas. Most weren’t related to me, but they felt like family. And it wasn’t until after I left for college and launched out in my own adult world that I realized not all of society is structured that way. And I think I didn’t actually know what I was missing until many years later, when I realized I felt a little unanchored—because my whole world from college and then my early career was surrounded by other people my age. And it was fun, and I loved it. But I definitely felt like I was missing something. It wasn’t until I circled around and started working for the nonprofit I’m now part of, CoGenerate, where I started running programs that brought older adults into, at that time, public schools, helping kids read. And turning these institutions into places that felt like extended family kind of reminded me of the fabric of love and care that I grew up with, and I’ve followed that thread ever since.

Tayag: I totally relate. I didn’t grow up with my grandparents, but I grew up going to babysitters who were other people’s Asian grandparents. And so I spent a lot of time with my friends’ grandmothers, and they would make us soup. And yeah, now, being a mom myself and my parents not being around, I think a lot about how much I wish they were here.

Nichols: Yes, absolutely.

Tayag: Not just to help with the day-to-day of raising a kid, but to give him perspective on things that I don’t know myself, like growing up in the Philippines, or being an immigrant.

Nichols: Well, and I think that also brings up the importance today of building the skills of collecting found family—aunties and uncles, grandmas and grandpas that might not be blood related but can actually play some of those same really critical roles.

Tayag: So where are we at as a society now? Why aren’t we seeing more of these intergenerational relationships?

Nichols: Yeah, so we’re living in the most age-diverse time in human history, in part because of this extended life that’s come from innovations in health care, technology, etcetera. And, at the same time, we have a birthrate decline, because of women having children later in life. I think I talk to a lot of young people that aren’t sure they want to have children and bring them into such an uncertain world. So, these are sort of the trends in why we have a declining younger population and a growing older population.

Tayag: So usually, a typical population chart looks like a triangle—where there are almost double the number of young people as older people. But if we look at a population chart today, it’s getting closer to a rectangle—where there are almost as many 5-year-olds as 15-year-olds as 50-year-olds, right?

Nichols: Yeah, that’s never happened before. And, for the next 10 years, this incredible diverse-age population is a gift to us if we seize that opportunity. While we are the most age-diverse society we’ve ever been, we’re simultaneously the most age segregated by institutions, by infrastructure, by policy. It’s like everything in our lives are designed to separate us.

Tayag: How did it come to be that we are living through the most age-diverse era in human history and yet it’s also so age segregated?

Nichols: Yeah, so on the age-segregation side, we went from having kind of these age-integrated one-room schoolhouses, and the agrarian society meant younger and older people worked together, side by side out in the fields. But then, there were all of these great innovations in policy. So child-labor laws: I think we all agree that’s a very good thing. Universal schooling, I think we agree that’s a really good thing. Social security, which provided a safety net for older adults, and at the same time made room for young people who are experiencing massive un- and underemployment. These were parts of societal infrastructure built to help us. But the unexpected part of that innovation was that it pulled generations apart. All of a sudden, kids were in schools, middle-aged people had jobs, and older people were in retirement communities.

Tayag: Tell me more about how those retirement communities came about?

Nichols: It used to be that we lived generationally together, and in a lot of immigrant communities that still happens the way I was raised. When retirement became recast as the “golden years,” sort of “graying as playing” and this time of endless leisure, some very scrappy entrepreneurs developed the idea of retirement communities. And Sun City [in Arizona] was formed, and these spaces where you only see older adults. And I think the idea was: If you don’t see young people, then you’ll never feel old. And so, it was sort of a, in some ways, beautiful concept for older folks who are feeling very marginalized. But we now have places like the Villages in Florida, which has a population of 145,000.  There are ramifications when you wholesale pull older adults out of society, especially those who have the most lived experience and the resources and the networks, and there are no young people interacting with them.

Tayag: And does there seem to be momentum to want to reintegrate?

Nichols: We did a national opinion survey where we asked people across the country of all ages if they think bringing older and younger generations together is a good thing, and if that might actually solve some of our essential divides. And we were surprised to find that people of all generations actually said yes. The thing that actually was fascinating was that young people wanted it two times more than older adults. Even though everybody wanted it, the real momentum for young people is to connect with older adults, in part because they know they need it. They need the resources, the networks, the learning, the life experience. Again, there’s a drive to be connected, especially in a very disconnected society. So in that sense, helping older and younger to find common ground is a critical thing.

Tayag: So what’s a practical example of how different generations can find common ground? What does that look like?

Nichols: Think about where you might encounter people of different generations to build that found family. Doing what we call co-generational service is a beautiful way to both make a difference in your community and connect across generations. The other thing where we’ve seen beautiful partnerships is around housing. I don’t look around and see communities that I want to live in when I’m older. There are few and far between. And they’re not accessible and available to everyone. We think that housing could also be the path back into reintegrating society and bringing generations back together. Young people right now are experiencing incredible anxiety around housing affordability. How many young people think that they will actually own a home in their lifetime? Very few.

Tayag: I don’t think I’ll own a home, and I’m 38. You know, I’m not exactly young.

Nichols: Yeah. Exactly. There are a number of older people that do own a home, and they’re struggling to age in place. You look around; what are the options? If you could afford it, you could sell that house and move to a retirement community, maybe to a place with extended care. But most older adults would actually like to stay in their home—and many can, but not if they’re isolated and alone. And so here you have a bunch of older adults who own homes and they’re empty-nesters; they’ve got a couple spare bedrooms. You have young people—often in college, or they’ve moved to a place. They’re far from family and, you know, it’s their first time in a job, and they can’t afford a place, and rent is too expensive. There’s once again a solution that’s just waiting to happen. And there are some organizations out there that are actually becoming the matchmakers, like an Airbnb for empty-nesters’ spare bedrooms.

Tayag: Oh, really?

Nichols: Yeah; and at a discount, you can get cheaper rent and in return help around the house. And then the beauty is, in the process, you get companionship that becomes equally important for the older person and the young person. These innovations—we need more of them. There’s some of this happening on college campuses. There’s a whole trend of university-based retirement communities. So instead of building far away from society, what would it look like to build a retirement community literally on campus? There’s one I visited at Arizona State University called Mirabella. And the residents there get an ID card. They can go use the gym, they can use the library, they can take classes. Drexel University in Philadelphia is located in a very urban area, and it borders a very African American neighborhood with a lot of elders who own homes. There was a program that was a creative-writing class, and students and elders in the community would come together for this class and just do creative writing together. And they got to know each other and these beautiful relationships that were built. But one day, one of the elders came in and, because of the gentrifying neighborhood, was going to be kicked out of her housing. And one of the students said, “Oh my goodness; what is the point of connecting and getting to know these wonderful elders in the neighborhood if, at the end of the day, all we’ve done is written creative stories together?” It did get the students and older adults having what became extensive conversations around different ways to live together because the students were themselves feeling pretty housing insecure. And so, this concept of the Second Story Collective happened. It was just a concept for a long time—of the idea that it would be awesome if students and older adults could live cooperatively together. They were able to attract the attention of Charles Lomax, an African American real-estate developer. The plans are to build duplexes where the older adult could live on the ground floor, and then the students could live upstairs, and then they could actually live together.

[Music.]

Tayag: I’ve also heard about intergenerational relationships being formed around fostering. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Nichols: So, there are a lot of foster families out there that are doing amazing work to provide a loving home for a child. But, man; is it hard to do that if you don’t have a robust community connection. So one of my favorite organizations is called Bridge Meadows, in Oregon, and they actually created a built community around foster families and older adults who are retired. There are homes for these retirees. They agreed to move there to Bridge Meadows. There are homes for these foster families raising kids. And then all of it’s built around a community center where the olders and the youngers gather together. And if you’re an older adult, out on your porch, you actually get to hear kids on a playground or running across your lawn. That’s so joyful, rather than being isolated and alone. And if you’re a foster parent with kids and you have grandmas and grandpas all around that chose to be in this neighborhood in order to be part of the extended family, that’s the dream. And so we need more communities creating the infrastructure for connection to happen.

Tayag: Are most of these partnerships built around children?

Nichols: There’s an amazing organization in L.A. It’s the LGBT Center, and it’s a senior center focused on creating space for older members of the LGBT community. And at the same time, they recognize that a lot of young people from the LGBT community that were aging out of the foster-care system or were transitioning into early adulthood would need to find housing and were falling through the cracks. And so they had the idea of creating intergenerational housing that could be used both for the seniors and young people. And there are so many people in the LGBTQ community who are in their 70s and 80s and are at much greater risk of aging in isolation and alone without the kind of blood family or even found family that we talked about. So, creating a housing structure where they can be connected through infrastructure to young people and create those bonds is a wonderful thing. And meanwhile, young people who are just starting out on their own, even though they’ve aged out of the foster-care system, can be living with older adults in the community who have so much to give, and so much they can learn from.

[Music.]

Brennan: You know, when I think about aging up, the thing that I get the most anxious about is where to age up. Both my grandmothers lived in assisted-living facilities and were pretty isolated, and a lot of the responsibility fell on my mom. And it’s the part of getting older that freaks me out the most is thinking about where or how to age up in America, when a lot of the options feel like they require … an incredible amount of wealth.

Tayag: Yeah. This is why I have this fantasy of buying a property with my friends and all of us getting older together. My group chat with my girlfriends always comes back to: Okay. We’re all retiring on a lavender farm together, right? No kids, no partners. Just us having wine on the porch every sunset until we all die at the same time.

Brennan: Holding hands. Holding hands in twin beds across the aisles. No, but really, I hear this all the time. It’s such a common fantasy for women.

Tayag: I think about it as linked to the eldest-daughter theory. Do you know what that is?

Brennan: I’m familiar.

Tayag: Right? It was this idea going around social media a few years ago that eldest daughters have it especially hard—because so much is expected of them, because they’re both the eldest sibling and they’re also women. And so eldest daughters tend to end up having to take responsibility for long-term care for aging parents.

Brennan: Right.

Tayag: But they’re worried about who’s gonna take care of us when we’re older.

Brennan: Our friends.

Tayag: Exactly! So it feeds into the lavender-farm fantasy.

Brennan: I mean, I think there’s a lot at play here. I think it’s also that, you know, women tend to live about five years longer than men on average, though it’s not necessarily clear yet why. Women are also 80 percent more likely to fall below the poverty line after 65.

Tayag: Oh my god.

Brennan: So there’s a lot of factors that might lead to this fantasy.

Brennan: But, you know, any escapist fantasy doesn’t work to build structures that offer support. It looks to flee them.

Tayag: Right.

Brennan: And from your conversation with Eunice, I find myself getting defensive. I’m like, You can’t move to the lavender farm. We need you. And you know, our collection of elders. Here with us in society. And they need us, too.

[Music.]

Nichols: About a year, a year and a half ago, there was a report that came out called The Belonging Barometer, and it was a barometer checking on the state of belonging in America. You can imagine the data was not good. People across all identities are not feeling a deep sense of belonging in our country right now. I actually think for older people, to hear specifically from young people that they are wanted and needed, that they’re still relevant, that they matter, is far more important than hearing it from their peers. And the inverse is true, too—that young people can be told by their peers that they’re awesome. It feels really different to have somebody in their 60s or 70s say, “Hey, I love this thing that you’re doing,” or “I want to learn from you about this interest of yours or the skill set you have.” There’s something that just bumps it up a few levels on that belonging barometer.

Tayag: You know, we’ve described all these positive outcomes from these intergenerational relationships. Surely there’s some friction, right?

Nichols: Yes, yes.

Tayag: What does that look like?

Nichols: What we heard from young people is Don’t start with the advice-giving. Get to know me. And when I get to know you, I will ask for advice that I need and want. We interviewed 30 young leaders who were all under 31 years old, who have a touch point with working with older adults. They really need older adults to know that they’re experiencing a different reality right now than the older adults did back then. So lead with a relationship instead of advice. That’s actually really hard for a lot of older adults, who’ve actually been taught to think that their primary purpose is advice-giving and mentorship. The other thing I think that came through loud and clear is—a lot of young people hear what older folks think is a compliment, which is: “You’re so inspiring, you’re going to save the world.” Right? “It’s all on you.” That can actually feel really overwhelming. And it’s actually not fair to young people to say the salvation of our world and many of our problems is on their shoulders. If we’re going to live 100-year lives, there’s plenty of time for older generations to come to the table, and young people are going to need that collaboration to stay the course. It’s not just about the compliments. This generation is breaking through a lot of the hierarchy and infrastructure. I think that’s one of the biggest cultural shifts we need to make to have good intergenerational partnerships. Older adults saying: I’m ready and willing to have a younger person co-design, co-lead, co-create with me. And my best role might be to let go of a lot of things I’ve spent a lot of time doing and support in a different way.

[Music.]

Brennan: We’re going to take a short break. But when we come back …

[Midroll.]

Brennan: Okay, one more time for the parents everywhere! We love your wisdom! And we really want you to listen!

Tayag: I do think it is the hardest issue we are up against—trying to communicate to elders that the issues young people are facing today are unique. But also that it’s not a generational conflict. It’s a product of the weird time that younger people just happen to be living in.

Brennan: Right, but there is a lot of generational anger. The National Debt Relief survey from 2023 reported that 65 percent of Millennials and Gen Z are worried about Boomers’ impact on their financial future.

Tayag: It’s “OK, Boomer.”

Brennan: It’s “OK, Boomer.”

Tayag: Right, or that’s the story we keep repeating. But that’s not a good place to be at, as a society, right? If in the next 10 years, our country will have a population with more older than younger people, a lot of the country’s resources and attention could shift toward supporting them. We’re already seeing policies designed specifically for the aging population, and so much money going into health-care and retirement communities.

Brennan: Right, which could mean … even fewer resources for younger people.

Tayag: Yeah, if we continue to treat older and younger needs as completely separate—if we keep stoking animosity between generations instead of figuring out ways to get everyone on the same page, fighting for the same causes.

Brennan: Like Bernie Sanders showing up at Coachella with Clairo talking about climate change!

Tayag: Yeah, he’s meeting the youth where they are!

Brennan: Yeah; the reason that seemed so interesting to me is that, of course there are lots of older people who stand up for the climate, but we don’t often see them in the same space or definitely not at a massive festival in the desert where most of the people are under 35.

Tayag: Right, and also older and younger people being positioned as a team. Bernie used the phrase “You and I” in his speech about standing up to the fossil-fuel industry.

Brennan: “You and I” is very intergenerationally coded.

Tayag: It’s not language we hear often! And I think climate is a good example, right—like, if it could be an issue that more older people championed because they care about the world they’re leaving the youth, but also one that more younger people champion because they want a safer and healthier environment for their elders … maybe we’d be making a lot more progress. We just need to get rid of the idea of generations first.

Brennan: Get rid of them?

Tayag: I know we were joking before about our Millennial versus Gen Z attributes before, but … generations aren’t real!

Brennan: What do you mean, “generations aren’t real”?

Tayag: I once wrote this piece about how generations are not scientifically defined. There is no set definition for what a generation is. And the people who study generational differences acknowledge that what they’re doing makes a lot of generalizations, and anything they come up with is an imprecise observation at best. But the concept of generations persists in American culture, because we’re just obsessed with categorizing everything. And we’re very attached to identity. But I think by holding onto this notion of generations, we’re unnecessarily pitting people of different age groups against each other. And there’s a lot that we lose in doing that.

Brennan: Yeah, and I wonder if this would still be the case if our society was structured in a way where we more naturally had access to one another.

[Music.]

Tayag: So, okay, let’s say I’m a listener, and I’m interested—but I’m not really sure where to find a community like this. Or I don’t have access to elders. What’s one thing, one really easy way I can connect with people from another generation?

Nichols: I would say service is still one of the best ways to connect across generations. Older adults are still amongst the most actively civically engaged generations we have. The generational values of caring about your community and serving are deep. Younger people are some of our most activated. They’re looking at a life that may not go well for them. They’re motivated to be involved. So if you find a cause in your community that you care about, chances are good you’re going to run into older and younger people there. Just be friendly. You never know when that might be the start of something else. It’s just rewiring to leave room for natural conversation to happen. Book clubs are actually really wonderful! There was a young woman who, she had an elder neighbor. And an Amazon package with a book got delivered to her house incorrectly. She didn’t know. She opened it up, and she was like, Oh, I want to read this book. And when she walked over to the older neighbor’s house to give him his mail, they talked about the book and they decided to start up a neighborhood intergenerational book club. And I was like, how sweet is that? And then she would choose one, and then he would choose one. So you’d get books that were more interesting to one generation or the other, but there was curiosity of, Oh, I want to read this. Even if it’s not the top of my list, so I can understand the perspective of the other.

Tayag: It’s funny; everything you’ve just described to me just sounds like “just do stuff you would do with your friends”—and I think that’s the idea, right?

Nichols: Yes, but expand who you think could be your friend.

Tayag: Eunice, thank you so much for being here today. This is so much fun talking to you.

Nichols: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

[Music.]

Brennan: Yasmin, I don’t have an intergenerational book club—yet. But when I think of close relationships with people of different ages, I think of my parents. And while parent-child relationships are different than straight-up friends, I’m really lucky to have a dynamic with mine that has evolved in a way where it often feels like both now.

Tayag: You’re really lucky.

Brennan: And in my life, my dad is pretty much the most adult person that I know. And he once told me that internally, he often still feels the same way he did when he was 17. And I found it really helpful to know that, because here’s this person who to me is so not 17—and to think of him thinking of himself in this younger way really shifted my perspective of what it could mean to age up. And it’s helped to not hold myself to some unimaginable standard of what it is supposed to feel like to age up.

Tayag: Right. It’s really common for people to feel this way—that their subjective age, which is how old they feel, is different than their chronological age. We ran a story at The Atlantic about this—that usually people feel roughly 20 percent younger than their chronological age … unless they’re below 25, and then they usually feel older than they are. And maybe that discrepancy can be a good thing, right? Like, if you view yourself as younger than you actually are, you feel like you’re still more useful and relevant.

Brennan: Yeah. At least you know in societies where older people are made to feel like they’re not useful and relevant.

Tayag: Right.

Brennan: What I found so interesting about that story is that in places where older people are treated with a lot more respect—like in the article, they mention Japan—there isn’t as much of a discrepancy between subjective age and chronological age, which might be because culturally, there isn’t the same pressure to defy aging.

Tayag: Right. I wonder if the big discrepancy between subjective and objective age reported in Western societies could still be useful in some ways.

Brennan: How so?

Tayag: Like, if everyone is walking around thinking they’re younger than they actually are, and we were able to focus on that rather than their actual age, maybe we wouldn’t have such a hard time imagining relationships with people who are chronologically much older. It’s the subjective age that really matters in a friendship, right? It’s what people bring to the table.

Tayag: Like, subjectively … [Smiling.] I’m basically Gen Z!

Brennan: Yasmin! Don’t make me tweet about you! [Laughter.]

[Music.]

Tayag: That’s all for this episode of How to Age Up. This episode was hosted by me, Yasmin Tayag, and co-hosted and produced by Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid (a-BADE) and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

Brennan: Next time on How to Age Up:

Tayag: We’ll be back with you on Monday.