AI Summary
5 min readIn 2023, a national survey asked Americans of all ages whether bringing older and younger generations together could help solve some of the country’s deepest divides. The answer was a clear yes across the board. But the most striking finding was that young people wanted intergenerational connection twice as much as older adults did. As Eunice Nichols, co-CEO of the organization Co Generate, explains, young people know they need the resources, networks, and life experience that older adults have. The problem is that society has spent the last century building infrastructure that keeps generations apart.
The Age-Segregated Society We Didn't Mean to Build
We are living through the most age-diverse era in human history. Thanks to advances in healthcare and declining birth rates, the population pyramid is flattening into something closer to a rectangle: there are almost as many five-year-olds as fifty-year-olds. Yet we are also more age-segregated than ever. Nichols traces this back to well-intentioned innovations. Child labor laws, universal schooling, and Social Security were all designed to protect vulnerable groups, but they had an unintended side effect. Children were sent to schools, middle-aged adults went to workplaces, and older adults were moved into retirement communities. The result was a society where a 25-year-old and a 65-year-old rarely cross paths.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:57) **Opening: Gen Z vs. Millennial Banter** - The hosts (Natalie and Yasmine) debate their generational identities, with Natalie claiming a "millennial core" despite being Gen Z.
- 2 (03:05) **The Problem of Age Segregation** - Yasmine shares a story about a younger colleague who bragged about making friends with women ages 27-34, highlighting how rare even a 12-year age gap is in friendships.
- 3 (05:50) **Eunice's Personal Origin Story** - Eunice explains how growing up in an intergenerational immigrant home shaped her worldview, and how she felt "unanchored" when she entered a world of only same-age peers.
- 4 (07:55) **The Age Diversity Paradox** - Eunice explains that we are living in the most age-diverse time in history due to longer lifespans and declining birth rates, yet we are also the most age-segregated.
- 5 (09:33) **How Age Segregation Happened** - Eunice traces the historical roots: good innovations like child labor laws, universal schooling, and Social Security inadvertently pulled generations apart.
- 6 (12:23) **Practical Solution: Co-Generational Service & Housing** - Eunice offers concrete examples of how intergenerational connection can work, starting with service and housing.
- 7 (15:09) **Case Study: Drexel's Second Story Collective** - A creative writing class at Drexel University brought students and local elders together, leading to a real housing crisis when an elder faced eviction.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
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.
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