Toward the Dimensional Ascension of Older People (1)

★The Arrival of an Aging Society

Looking at current population trends in Japan and in many other countries, newborns are relatively decreasing, and older people are increasing.

Whoever looks at it, and however they look at it, that is certainly the case.

What this tells us is that, combined with lifespans growing longer year by year, society is becoming a super-aged one.

Even now, you feel it when you walk around town, don’t you?

“There are a lot more older people than there used to be.”

What’s important for living through such an age is that when people who aren’t elderly look at elderly people, they don’t see them through fixed ideas like “That person is old, so they must be such-and-such.”

And those who are on the elderly side themselves shouldn’t see things in light of memory and common sense, like “I’ve reached this age, so I must be like this,” or “This is surely how things will go from now on.”

Who decided that people’s legs and backs grow weak when they reach 80 or 90?

And as a practical matter, why have so many people become physically limited as they aged?

What’s important in changing perception is not only not seeing things through the fixed ideas of the past, but, just as importantly, looking correctly at the causes that created the present situation and overwriting those causes.

There aren’t many people who deteriorate because they want to, are there?

But as people age, all of them, to varying degrees, wear down.

★To Live Through an Age of Strained Policies for the Elderly

Do you think it can’t be helped because it’s a physical law?

Or is it because of lifestyle habits?

Or even because of karma from past lives?

Why is it that when people get older, so many of them have health problems and line up in hospital waiting rooms?

Behind that, there are also older people who, afraid of falling into hardship by going to the hospital, can’t go, carrying the suffering of pain and distress, unable to find meaning in living on, gasping at the edge of despair.

Many people feel that as young people decrease and older people increase, the present insurance system faces a big challenge.

If society keeps charging ahead with its present systems as they are, it’s clear to anyone that no matter how much money is taken from young people and distributed to medical care for the elderly, there’s a limit.

The burden grows heavier for both young and old.

The government is doing what it can, but while the burden on the younger generation keeps growing, the reality is that some older people fall into hardship because support doesn’t reach them fully.

Everyone knows that protecting yourself is best, but the reality is that many elderly people don’t really know what to do or how.

Here, each and every person must think very carefully.

Is it all right to go on like this?

Is there no way for everyone to be happy?

Is there no effective way to change the present situation? (To be continued)