Nikki Gemmell: How Boomers will age better than their own parents

I’m starting to feel energised by the idea of the exuberant years ahead, rather than dreading the retirement journey as a descent into bleakness, bewilderment and loss of control.

The future of ageing is community, says Nikki Gemmell.

“I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere,” Carrie Fisher once wrote. Yet as we age, Somewhere becomes the destination aimed for, our desires blazing towards the anchor of home. Somewhere, as opposed to nowhere. As a species, a safe space to call home is a life goal that informs immigration, tree changes, rental anxiety, wars. Our innate desire, as that vulnerable, grasping species known as Homo sapiens, is to feel protected. Ideally in a community of the like-minded.

The future is community. The future of ageing is community, and increasingly companies and collectives are realising this. Everything old is new again as they harness the power of bringing people together in support and socialisation. An estimated 14 per cent of boys and 19 per cent of girls born today are expected to live beyond 100 – so the question of ageing well is becoming increasingly urgent. New and surprising ways to do the retirement community are being experimented with and I’m suddenly starting to feel energised by the idea of the exuberant years ahead, rather than dreading the retirement journey as a descent into bleakness, bewilderment and loss of control.

A recent survey conducted by aged care provider Bolton Clarke found that isolation is seen as the number one mental health issue. Loneliness is a scourge in our social fabric. It’s associated with an increased risk of chronic health conditions, not least depression, dementia and addiction. This is an indictment of the world we live in; on the busyness of families, geographical fracturing and the stresses of staying connected in crammed lives.

Around the world, new approaches to ageing are focusing on that great tonic of bringing people together. A joyous example is the UK’s “New Ground” project for older women which offers communal areas alongside individual apartments. Tasks such as gardening, maintenance and legal issues are divvied up among volunteers. Residents check in on each other. “The women who started this were adamant they didn’t want to sit in a day-room ... for the rest of their lives,” founder Maria Brenton says. “We were fiercely opposed to the ageism and paternalism, the infantilisation of older people by social care services.”

Multi-age communities are seen as the future. The US, the UK, Denmark and New Zealand are leading the way in shaking up stand-alone residential aged care models with new, cross-generational innovations. In the US, more than 60 retirement communities are co-located within universities, giving residents an opportunity to be involved in academic and campus life. Japan has added free sports clubs for the over-sixties, to keep them moving.

Bolton Clarke has a retirement village in St Kilda that’s pioneering a new way of elderly living in this country, encouraging a melding of the different generations. It’s a self-contained world that includes things like a children’s play area, an art room, a cinema, restaurant and community garden. On-site, at-home support services give residents access to nursing help and there’s also apartment-to-apartment messaging as well as an electric share car for residents. It’s the future, now.

To gather together is intensely human; it’s what we do, as a species. In a darkening world of AI creep and war thrumbeat, of screen saturation and fear-flinched tribalism, loneliness is vining its way in. But increasingly it’s being recognised that humanity’s future must involve community, especially as we age. We’re coming full circle, back to the idea of bringing the generations together. To protect our most vulnerable – and stave off the corrosiveness of loneliness.