Gordon Flett

And I just got fed up hearing, we even heard some accounts in terms of politicians saying, if we have to make a choice between the economy versus older people during the pandemic, we're picking the economy.

And that horrible sense, no matter what your age is, of feeling expendable and unimportant.

And the father of mattering research and theory, Rosenberg, in his original paper,

said that the two groups most susceptible are adolescents and all the identity issues that are going on and physical changes with adolescents and older people.

And he specifically talked about people who are retiring.

And that, of course, resonated with me as well in terms of that need to still be doing something that's useful and seen as useful where you can make a contribution.

And invariably, when we look at the people who are heading towards 100, like my

My wife's uncle, Derek, almost made it to 100.

He was 99 and three quarters.

If he wasn't stubborn, he would have made it to 100 because he didn't accept help a lot of the time.

Very self-reliant.

But he became the man of the community.

And this included throughout his 90s even.

So that he felt so useful, even though he lived by himself in the same house he was born in all of his life.

And I once asked him, I said, Derek, have you ever felt lonely?

And like, because you live by yourself and

his brothers had passed and he was cut me off.

He says, not for a second.

He goes, because I know right out that door, there's people down the street.

I can go drop in and they check in on me when they haven't seen me in a while.