How will the rise of single-living affect senior care?
This decade will deliver the first cohort of senior citizens who reached adulthood after the liberalizations of the sixties—the baby boomers are collecting Social Security. As a consequence, we’re starting to encounter a group of old folks for whom aloneness is a choice, an identity, an exercise of freedom. And the ethics of senior care will change as a result. If Mom has lived alone, successfully and proudly, for four decades, is it socially responsible to move her to a home when she stops remembering to pay her gas bill? Or is it an offense against the person she has spent adulthood laboring to be?
The Dish 