This book is organized into five chapters. Each chapter highlights a key aspect of the experience of aging, then explores the challenges and opportunities that an individual or organization might encounter when working with older adults to build a better future.
Though each chapter can be read on its own, the book itself represents the richness and complexity of what it means to get older. Together, these chapters reflect a holistic understanding of aging—one in which community, healthcare, technology, identity, and financial well-being are not siloed, but are viewed instead as entangled threads that hold equal importance for building a better future of aging. Each chapter is structured as follows:

This chapter explores the role that community plays in health and well-being later in life, including health and social systems as well as physical environment.

“The hyperlocal context becomes more important for the vulnerable. For seniors and children, you need the things that will keep [them] well in [their] community and close to home.”
Alexis Wise, Director of Health and Human Services, Sidewalk Labs

This chapter discusses some complementary ways of thinking about health and wellness, including ways to reframe aging as a vibrant, vital process to be embraced rather than a problem to overcome.

“[A] mindset emerged alongside the enormous spread of hospitals as 'houses of cure' through the 19th and mid-20th centuries. It is clear why healthcare today still revolves around resisting, curing and eliminating disease.”

This chapter challenges past assumptions that adults cannot adapt to new technology and posits that today’s emerging technology provides opportunities to achieve greater independence for people.

“According to a 2017 Pew Research Center Survey, there has been an exponential rise in internet, social media and smartphone usage by older adults in the US, with internet usage in particular seeing [an increase from] 12 per cent to 67 per cent over the last two decades.”

This chapter investigates the widely held logic that the aging workforce will affect labour productivity - including how the concept of productivity itself is defined and understood.

“Many organizations are redefining work for older employees as well, resulting in the growing popularity of new terms like ‘retirement,’ ‘encore career,’ and ‘senior-preneur.”

This final chapter covers identity and how older adults do not want to be lumped together or defined by their age. Particularly because such definitions are based on misplaced myths and stereotypes.

“Many older adults will continue to reinvent and recalibrate how they express themselves in harmony with changing circumstances[…]”