That Great Retirement Not So Fast At the start of the Industrial Revolution, early labor theorists saw the transition from small business owner to employee as a kind of limited servitude. When I read about that years ago it made a big impression, because it was clear that even as a professional, I gave up much of my agency when I accepted a job. My career was spent in the maw of American work culture; a
How I Made A Huge Mess of My Life Billie Best has been a music producer, a marketing executive, a farmer and a writer. Her memoir, How I Made a Huge Mess of My Life (or Couples Therapy with a Dead Man), is a witty, unblinking look at success, failure, bliss, infidelity, life, and death. I loved it and was lucky to catch up with this busy author for an interview. Stella: Your memoir How I
The Active Grandmother Theory We women, unique among female primates, live long past our childbearing years. There are good reasons why. I’ve written before about the Grandmother Hypothesis, the brainchild of Kristin Hawkes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah. Hawkes and her colleagues published the seminal article on grandmother theory in 1998. They showed that in modern-day hunter-gatherer societies, healthy grandmothers support their grandchildren by foraging for food (or by providing childcare
The Big Boom Theory – Baby Boomers Explode Paradigms A guest post from the audacious and extraordinary Isabel Alexander I’m not a physicist but I enjoyed high school chemistry. However, I was more intrigued by biology, and specifically, anatomy. Ultimately my independent research and extra-curricular experimentation proved another theory: that hormones + heat – caution = pregnancy. BOOM! I was a teen mother and that set off a Big Bang reaction that rocked my personal universe.
Influencers In The Elder Ecosystem Word pairs are powerful; remember “outside agitators?” If the agitators are from outside, that implies people in the community are fine with the status quo. But are they, really? Or take my current least favorite pair: “young influencers.” If influencers are automatically young, that implies the old lack influence. But do we, really? Who are the influencers in the elder ecosystem? It’s the job of badass women to question social expectations.
Retirement Till the End Retirement is a lovely vacation that ends in death. Our exhilaration when we first retire is tempered by how it will end. Back when I was working, if I had two weeks off, I reveled in the first week and spent the second week dreading the return to the office. Even then I knew that was absurd. Why not enjoy it all? And I don’t want to do that again: Dreading
