#131. Age and Action
What are you doing with what you've got?
Last week, we separated age from capacity. Being 62, 72, or 82 doesn't tell us what we're capable of, but knowing we still have capacity leads us to ask: What are we doing with it?
Maybe you have energy. Time. Money. Experience. Connections. A voice people listen to. Those aren't small things, and they don't have to be deployed in some grand third-chapter reinvention.
Because aging in power is about putting capacity into action. Right now, elections are putting questions of age and leadership squarely in front of us. Older adults aren't politically powerless. We vote. In fact, older voters consistently turn out at higher rates than younger ones. Candidates know it. Campaigns know it. Policymakers know it.
So while we're asking society not to use our age to determine our capacity, we need to ask something of ourselves, too. How are we using the capacity we have?
If we argue that age shouldn't disqualify us from leadership, contribution, or influence, then we also have to think about the responsibility that comes with that influence. Are we using our longer view only to protect what matters to us now? Or does living longer ask us to see farther? That's where things get messy.
We care about retirement security and healthcare because they affect our lives. Of course we do. But the ballot also carries questions whose consequences will stretch decades beyond the next election: housing, education, climate, public debt, reproductive freedom, technology, democracy itself.
Some of us will live to see those consequences, and some won't. But millions of people will inherit those consequences—in our voting districts and around the world.
This is where age offers something more useful than another demographic category for a campaign strategist: perspective. We've seen panics that passed and problems that didn't. We've watched rights expand and contract, economies boom and buckle, technologies transform daily life, and things once considered impossible become utterly ordinary.
That doesn't make us wiser by default. Years lived aren't the same thing as wisdom any more than years lived are the same thing as capacity. But they give us material to work with, and choices about what to do with it.
Voting is one. So is volunteering, mentoring, organizing, serving, donating, protesting, writing, listening, running for office, supporting someone else who does, or having the uncomfortable conversation at the dinner table.
Sometimes action means stepping forward. Sometimes it means using our influence to help someone else step forward. And sometimes it means recognizing that the future we're helping shape belongs more to people coming behind us than it does to us.
Aging in power doesn't mean holding onto power. It means deciding what to do with the power we have.
The question isn't whether older people still have a place in shaping what comes next.
We do.
The harder question is the one we started with: What are you doing with what you've got?
