Freedman wants to radically reframe retirement from a time of leisure to a time when people use the skills and experiences they’ve accumulated over a lifetime to improve society. Encore creates opportunities for them to do so by matching retirees to organizations that have a social purpose for yearlong fellowships. Former engineer Pam Mulhall, for example, did her Encore Fellowship at an organization called Crossroads for Women in Albuquerque, where she used her technology skills to build a database to help women struggling with addiction and homelessness find housing and jobs. After the fellowship, many fellows move into part- or full-time jobs with their host organizations or find new roles using their skills in the nonprofit sector.
In addition to its fellowship program, Encore also maintains a story bank of people who have moved into “encore careers”—and these stories, Encore hopes, will help change our culture’s narrative of retirement and inspire others to adopt new purposes in their later years. Tom Hendershot, whose story is featured on the Encore website, for example, is a retired police officer who now creates dinosaur art and builds exhibitions for museums. People like Mulhall and Hendershot are actively engaged in the “second act” of their lives, as Freedman puts it—and though their second acts can be wildly different from their first, there is usually some connection between their early career and their encore one.
Cultures of meaning can also be created with the help of public policy. In 2006, the World Health Organization launched the Global Age-Friendly Cities project to encourage city leaders to design communities that foster positive aging. One of the cities to have taken up the WHO’s cause is New York, and it has become a model for other communities hoping to make life more enriching for their older citizens. The president of the New York Academy of Medicine, Dr. Jo Ivey Boufford, helped to establish the WHO criteria for an age-friendly city and advocated to implement the model in New York. “Age-Friendly New York City” was launched in 2007 as a partnership between the academy, the mayor’s office, and the city council. Its goal is to enhance the health and well-being of older adults by making the city a more inclusive and humane home for them. “From the city’s standpoint,” said Lindsay Goldman of the academy, who directs the project, “this makes good financial sense. If you promote health and well-being, you’ll have fewer people who are becoming dependent and in need of social insurance programs and city services.”
When the project first launched, officials held community forums and focus groups across the five boroughs to hear from older New Yorkers about what they liked and didn’t like about the city. A few topics came up again and again, but one overarching theme united many of their comments. Like most people, they simply wanted to lead good, fulfilling lives. But as they’ve grown older, there have been more and more obstacles getting in the way of that goal. Some of their concerns were practical, like pedestrian safety and the lack of affordable housing. Others said they wanted to be as engaged with the community as they were when they were younger, but worried about being, or had been, marginalized or disrespected because of their age. “I’d like to do something that I can be proud of,” one New Yorker said. “I don’t mind getting old. I just want to be doing something.”
Over the last decade, program leaders have continued the dialogue, and they’ve enacted many initiatives to address the concerns older New Yorkers have raised. For example, the Department of Transportation installed more bus shelters throughout the city and ensured they had seating and transparent walls so that seniors would feel comfortable and safe inside of them. They added more benches throughout the city to promote walking, and some city pools have implemented special senior hours so that the adults don’t have to worry about being overrun by young children. These changes are small but significant. In a fast-paced city that can be exhausting to navigate, these enhancements make life a little bit easier for older New Yorkers and give them the chance to participate more fully in their communities, helping to bolster their sense of belonging. “People socialize,” said one woman during senior hours at a pool: “And being around people their own age—our age, I should say—you are not self-conscious of who’s looking.”
These age-friendly initiatives are designed not only to provide assistance and support, but also to give seniors an opportunity to use their strengths to give back to the community—to live with purpose. Success Mentor, for example, is an initiative that connects older individuals with at-risk school-aged children. Through Success Mentor, dozens of adults are mentoring and tutoring students at schools all across the city. As a result of such programs, students perform better academically and experience fewer disciplinary problems. But there are also benefits for the adults: studies show that when adults volunteer in their communities as mentors to kids, their physical and mental health improves.
Nursing homes where neglect and abuse run rampant may soon become relics of a bygone era as cultures of meaning emerge that redefine the role elderly people play in society. From Encore’s Marc Freedman to bureaucrats in New York, more and more people are realizing that older adults can contribute a great deal to the community, and should be supported in their desire to do so. “It’s hard to have a life of meaning and purpose,” said Lindsay Goldman, “when you can’t do all of those things you’ve loved to do throughout your life.” By expanding opportunities for older adults, New York is now trying to change that.
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Transcendence and purpose are not the only pillars that institutions rely upon to create cultures of meaning. Age-friendly New York City is working to enhance belonging among older New Yorkers by emphasizing that they are valued members of the community. At St. Mark’s and DreamCon, people come together over shared interests and form a unique community. And likewise, the staff at Life is Good are a tight-knit tribe of optimists—and Bert and John have crafted a compelling story that explains the origin and significance of the brand. The pillars of belonging and storytelling also define the mission of another organization that is dedicated to creating a culture of meaning in our society—StoryCorps, an oral history project founded by journalist Dave Isay.
Isay got hooked on storytelling as a young man. After graduating from New York University, the twenty-two-year-old was planning to attend medical school when a walk through the East Village changed his life. He passed by a storefront that looked interesting, went inside, and met the married proprietors—Angel and Carmen Perez. Their shop, full of self-help books, was for people recovering from addiction. As he spoke to them, Isay learned that they had been heroin addicts, that Carmen had HIV, and that they dreamed of opening a museum of addiction before Carmen died. “They showed me scale models of the building,” Isay wrote, “which they’d constructed out of tongue depressors and plywood. They had blueprints for every floor and intricate drawings of each exhibit.”
Deeply affected by the conversation, Isay went home and called the local television and radio stations, suggesting they cover Angel and Carmen’s story. No one was interested except for a community radio station called WBAI. The station didn’t have a reporter on hand, so the news director told Isay to put the story together himself. “When I went back to their store, and sat with them and hit record on my recorder,” Isay said, “I knew that this is what I would be doing with the rest of my life.”
Over the next two decades, Isay worked as a radio producer and documentary maker telling the stories of, as he has put it, “underdogs in hidden corners of the country.” He focused on the people whom society has traditionally overlooked: prisoners, drug addicts, the homeless, and the poor—people like Carmen and Angel. During the process of interviewing these individuals, he learned that the simple act of listening to another person could make that person feel valued, respected, and dignified. It kindled belonging. As he asked the people he interviewed his standard questions—how they would like to be remembered, who matters to them, what they are proud of—he saw their backs straighten and eyes light up. Isay realized that no one had ever asked them about their lives like that before; no one ha
d ever taken a genuine interest in hearing their stories.
When one of his radio documentaries, which was about the last flophouses in New York, turned into a book, he took the proofs of it to the homeless men he had interviewed. “One of the men,” Isay wrote, “looked at his story, took it in his hands, and literally danced through the halls of the old hotel shouting, ‘I exist! I exist!’ ” Isay couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “I realized as never before,” he wrote, “how many people among us feel completely invisible, believe their lives don’t matter, and fear they’ll someday be forgotten.” Listening, Isay realized, is “an act of love”—a way to make people feel like they and their stories matter. Research confirms this: sharing stories strengthens the bond between the listener and the storyteller and makes people feel that their lives are meaningful and have dignity and worth.
Isay founded StoryCorps in 2003 to give ordinary people the opportunity to tell their stories and be heard. In the StoryBooth, he created an intimate space where two people could come together and honor one another through the act of listening. He opened the first StoryBooth in Grand Central Terminal in New York. Though the Grand Central booth closed in 2008, there are other booths today in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco, as well as a mobile booth that travels around the country to record stories. What happens inside is the same today as it was back then. Two people who care about one another meet in the booth, which looks like a metal capsule, where they have an intimate and uninterrupted conversation for forty minutes. One person in the booth assumes the role of the interviewer, while the other speaks about some aspect of his or her life. A facilitator in the booth records the interview.
After the interview, the participants receive a recording of the conversation. With participant permission, a copy of the recording is sent to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, where it is archived, giving participants some measure of immortality. The sessions are free: anyone can make an appointment to record one—and tens of thousands have. By collecting a wide variety of stories from people across the country, Isay hopes StoryCorps will preserve the “wisdom of humanity.”
But StoryCorps also has a more radical aim. It sees storytelling as a way to combat certain harmful aspects of our existing culture, like materialism, which research shows leads people to be more self-oriented and is associated with having less meaning in life. In 2008, StoryCorps launched an initiative called the National Day of Listening to encourage Americans to record stories with family members, friends, and loved ones on Black Friday, the pre-Christmas shopping bonanza that occurs the day after Thanksgiving. This act of resistance against consumer culture was rebranded as the Great Thanksgiving Listen in 2015. Working with schools across the nation, StoryCorps asked students to record the story of an older relative on an app on their phone—taking a technology that can separate and isolate individuals and using it to foster human connection. “We want to shake people on the shoulders and remind them of what’s important,” Isay said.
In October of 2015, I traveled to the StoryCorps office in Chicago to speak to people about the experience of sharing their stories. As I waited for one couple to come out of the booth, a facilitator named Yvette approached me to say that there was a woman who had made an appointment and needed a partner to interview her. This woman’s friend, who had agreed to come with her, could no longer make it. Would I be willing to step in?
The woman’s name was Mary Anna Elsey, and she was a fifty-one-year-old schoolteacher from South Carolina who was visiting Chicago for the weekend. Mary Anna and I shook hands and chatted for a few minutes before we stepped inside of the booth, taking our seats across from each other at a small table. Yvette positioned the microphone in front of us and then closed the door of the booth, sealing us into the quiet wood-paneled room, away from the noises and distractions of the outside world. The lights were dim and the room was bare. We turned our cellphones off. All Mary Anna and I had to focus on in this almost sacred space was each other. Yvette fiddled with the recording equipment. Then she gave us a silent cue that it was time to begin the conversation.
Before we entered the booth, Mary Anna had told me that she had been adopted when she was a baby. Inside the booth, I asked her to tell me the story of her adoption. “My parents realized that they couldn’t have children together,” she began in her Southern twang. “This was back in the late fifties and early sixties. Their doctor told them that if they wanted to get divorced because of this, that would be an acceptable reason. But they said no, they’d rather adopt.” They adopted Mary Anna’s older brother and sister, and then welcomed Mary Anna into their home in 1964, when she was only eighteen days old.
You can take being adopted in one of two ways, Mary Anna said. Either you are grateful that your adoptive parents wanted you, or you are angry that your biological parents didn’t. Mary Anna fell into the first camp. “I never questioned anything about my adoption because I loved my mom and dad so much,” she said. As she got older, though, Mary Anna felt a yearning to find out more about her birth parents. While she remembers her childhood as full of warmth, she also recalls keeping to herself and feeling lonely quite a bit. She always had many friends at school, but she nonetheless felt isolated from others. She also struggled with depression. Tracking down her biological parents, she thought, might help her understand herself—and her emotional turmoil—a bit better.
After she gave birth to her second child, Mary Anna wrote to the state asking them to send her any information they could about her biological parents. Seven days later, she knew her biological mother’s name. She learned that Effie had been the salutatorian of her high school class. She learned that Effie had been working as a nurse and was unmarried when she got pregnant with Mary Anna in 1963. And she learned that, over the course of their lives, she and Effie had been at a wedding and a funeral together without realizing it.
She also learned that Effie was now living in Charleston. When Mary Anna told her husband, he suggested that they call his uncle Donald, a child psychologist in Charleston, and ask if he knew her. “And so he called Donald,” Mary Anna said of her husband, “and he said, ‘Donald, have you ever heard of a nurse by the name of Effie?’ And Donald said, ‘Yeah, she’s standing right here, do you want to talk to her?’ My husband said, ‘Donald, that’s Mary Anna’s mother.’ And he said ‘Effie?’ and she turned and looked at him.”
Mary Anna met Effie a few weeks later in Charleston. They had a cordial lunch. Mary Anna assured her she had led a good life. Effie told her about her two sons. She also explained that she put Mary Anna up for adoption because she thought she’d have a better life. Afterward, the two women parted ways and never saw each other again.
The meeting helped Mary Anna gain a new perspective on herself and on her relationship with her own three daughters. “You can only imagine,” Mary Anna said, “what Effie was feeling as she was expecting a baby, knowing she can’t keep it, making a decision to give a child away. How much of my personality—of my temperament—was affected by my in utero experience?” She wondered if spending her first seventeen days on earth in a foster home, with no consistent and strong bond with a caregiver, contributed to her loneliness and depression. She thought about the “hard” and “courageous” decision Effie made to give her up so she could lead a better life. She realized that it was a decision she could never have made.
Motherhood was much on Mary Anna’s mind in the booth. She and her husband were about to become empty nesters. One of their daughters was in pharmacy school. Another was heading to law school. And the youngest was getting ready to graduate from high school. For a woman who defined her identity primarily in terms of being a mother—in large part because she never knew her own biological mother—letting go of her children was a deeply painful process.
“What does it mean to you to be a mom?” I asked.
Mary Anna’s lips tightened and she started fanning her face with her fingers. “You’re going to make me cry, Emily
!” she said, laughing.
Your goal as a mother, she explained, is to prepare your children to face the world on their own. Her greatest achievement in life has been accomplishing that goal: with her husband, she has raised three strong and independent girls who no longer need her. “That’s also the hardest thing about being a mother,” Mary Anna said as she started to cry. She could barely get out the next words through her tears: “They don’t need you.”
“What’s going to give my life meaning and purpose,” she asked, “now that I’ve done my most important and challenging job in life?”
The interview ended. Mary Anna and I stepped outside of the booth and continued our conversation. I asked her what the experience was like of telling her story in the booth. It was cathartic: “It made me feel heard,” she said, “like someone wanted to listen to me.” She said things in the booth, she explained, that she would never have said in an ordinary conversation with friends and loved ones back home. There was something about the booth that made her open up, and that helped her build meaning.
For Mary Anna, the forty minutes in the booth enabled her to gain insight into her past experiences and present relationships. “Part of the reason I feel lonely,” she said, “is because I don’t tell people things. I hold my thoughts and feelings inside. This taught me that I should make more of a point of talking to others—and not just for me, but for them. When we tell our story, we do two things. We understand ourselves better and we offer support to people going through the same thing that we’re going through.”
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