Coming of Age in Troubled Times: An Interview with Stephen Jenkinson
This interview, in its original form, was published in my book We Live in the Orbit of Beings Greater Than Us through Gods&Radicals Press, which features segments of close to thirty interviews that originally aired on my podcast Last Born in the Wilderness, interlaced with commentary.
“It occurred to me long ago that it is not older people that confer elder status upon each other. Elderhood is fundamentally recognized by the people who seek it, not the people who seek to be it. It is in the wheelhouse of young people to craft elders in their midst by their willingness to seek them out.”
The future is unwritten.
How we choose to respond matters. Even in the face of what lies ahead, our response to these times of trouble may be varied, but it will always be layered with grief. This cannot be avoided, and part of what I call our sacred response will come from this place of grief. As such, we shouldn’t give into nihilism and cynicism, and if I could be dogmatic about it, our actions should not be based on an anticipated outcome, that we can be saved or that there is a battle to be won (to “save the Earth”—which is just a coded phrase for “save this civilization”). We are past that point.
Regardless of what is coming, we must demonstrate our love for the Earth, in all the forms that comes in. Our love is not an abstract, it’s as tangible and as real the air we breathe and the soil beneath our feet. How we choose to be in this time is as important, if not more so, than any other time previous. Our love does not recede, and is not diminished, because death is around the bend. This is as true for the individual as it is for the collective. Our acceptance of limits is what makes our lives all the more meaningful, and any system that infringes on our ability to fulfill our obligations as members of this planet’s community of life should be resisted, full stop.
In the previous section, I pointed to a range of responses that, at least in my view, will not elicit anything close to the kinds of actions that are actually required of us. Whether it’s the vengeful, murderous, and wild outbursts of violence of misanthropes and nihilists, or the concerted efforts to remake capitalism under a “sustainable” energy paradigm that only deepens and further replicates the worst aspects of this world-eating machine, these responses will not solve, let alone resolve, a damn thing.
To know how to proceed, asking the right questions is crucial. Grief is the only sober response as this globe-spanning catastrophe plays itself out. Whether we choose to accept grief into our lives, our communities, our activism, our expressions of love, will make all the difference in how we proceed. We can’t even ask the right questions without accepting even this most basic of things.
We must wonder why we can’t seem to ask those right questions, or why those questions rarely arise. Part of the reason may be our lack of elders. In the view of the next person I would like to feature, living in an environment bereft of elders has denied us something deeply crucial. As Stephen Jenkinson elaborates, the elders that would emerge in our time would not be those of any other time previous. Our time demands something quite different.
Stephen authored two books relevant to this subject. The first is Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, which gives profound insights into our death-phobic culture drawn from his countless encounters with death and dying as program director for a major Canadian hospital palliative care unit. The second is Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble, in which Stephen argues that elderhood is a function rather than an identity—it is not a position earned simply by the number of years on the planet or the title parent or grandparent.
Why is it that the dominant culture of North America does not produce the conditions necessary for elderhood to flourish? Our denial of limits, of death, is directly tied to this question. In my interview with him, Stephen discusses the historical and cultural conditions that have led to this unexplored and unexamined crisis, and speaks to what elderhood in our time could look like, framing it within the profound realization that elderhood can only flourish when the appetite exists for it.
“I am making the case for elderhood, not for easy agedness. I’m doing so mostly by wondering what happened. Because something happened. Something happened to ancestors and elders and honour. There’s work to be done, and there’s an old wisdom to be learned where there used to be the wisdom of old, and you can’t fix what you don’t understand. That’s where we’re headed: to grievous wisdom. Let us see if we can bear the sound, the particular sound, of no hand clapping.”
In our times of trouble, where are the elders?
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: You’ve pointed out that we have many elderly people in our society, but we lack elders. What is elderhood in your perspective? And why are we in such desperate need of elders in this time of trouble?
STEPHEN JENKINSON: We can actually work backwards here, from some very observable things, rather than asking, “what is elderhood, what does it look like?” You might wonder, “what doesn’t it look like? What would be a sure sign that elderhood is in some kind of atrophy?” This takes some imagination, but it also takes more observation.
Popular rancor today is fixated upon several things in North America. One of those is identity politics. This doesn’t personally concern me, but I’m paying attention to the current fascination with identity, because to me it is a smoking gun. This is one of the things that you begin to infer backwards from rather than going with the idea that inherently being tormented, tortured, and precise about one’s identity is a good fix. It might be an attribute of the thing you’re trying to fix instead. The lunge towards ever greater fixity in identity seems to suggest a fundamental adriftness regarding what one “means.” Not our intentions, but the meaning of our very existence.
This meaning is somehow up for grabs every time identity clamors for attention, and it does so in a way that’s not very dignified. I’m not sure it trades in anything substantial, other than feelings, a sense of how I feel. And when feelings become your map, you’re in for heavy weather, because that’s what the nature of feelings are. They’re weather. They blow in, they blow out.
Where I’m sitting today talking to you, it’s very sunny. If I were an architect and could build a house in a day, and if I was preoccupied with the feeling of this particular day, I would build a Phillip Johnson house—nothing but glass, virtually no walls to speak of. And the truth is, within four months here, it would be at minus 30 Fahrenheit. So that house will be of absolutely no use to anyone. It won’t even be a greenhouse. It’ll be a disaster.
This is what I mean by predicating your entire self-project on how you’re feeling today about something. I’m not saying there’s no such thing as weather. I’m simply saying that it changes: it blows in and blows out. To extend that understanding to the question you’ve asked about elderhood, I might come up with something like this.
This question about elderhood comes from its absence. Nobody would ask about it if we were awash in elderhood. Nobody would be wondering about it. Not that many years ago, we were awash in death phobia. I squeaked a little book called Die Wise and then people started asking me about it, but I was never asked about it earlier, ever. By the same token it seems the concern over elderhood speaks to its virtual nonexistence among us.
More importantly: I have scores of older people coming to the things that I do. And what they’re hoping for is that their elderhood will be recognized, that it will be rewarded, it will be employed, but most emphatically they look for an imprimatur for their incipient elderhood, that it will burst forth in all its raging glory. If there were such a thing, it certainly wouldn’t need me to confirm it, because who am I but another person struggling along?
If older people are floating from one retreat center to the next self-help event and so on—they’re the people that basically keep the lights on in places like that—is this a sign that elderhood is so rife that we have to elbow older people out of the way to get to the trough of elderhood? You see what I’m saying? In my experiences, it’s quite the contrary. When you have older people looking to be identified as elders, this is as much of a sign of the absence of elderhood as anything could be.
In North America, we are an ever-aging population. If age meant elderhood, you can do the math immediately. We’re an ever more elder-ing culture, if you want to put it in that awkward fashion, meaning: with our accumulation of age comes our accumulation of aged people. With that comes the accumulation of life wisdom. And with that comes the accumulation of elderhood. That’s the automatic slippery slope that everyone assumes, because how could you come to another conclusion if you don’t question the idea that trauma experience automatically translates to wisdom at some point?
I’m suggesting to you that it does not and it never has. I was raised with the following declaration from a young age: “respect your elders.” This was told to me sometimes as a correction on my behavior as a young kid, and more often than not there was utterly no explanation that accompanied it. None whatsoever: no elaboration, no justification. It was nailed to the sky for all to see. One respects one’s elders.
So let me wonder about this for a minute. It seems self-evident, and I’m not saying it is not advisable nor a deeply meritorious way to behave. But I’m wondering about the kind of mandate that’s carried in the phrase. I suspect there was a time when “respect your elders” was not prescription, it was description. When people said “respect your elders,” they were trading on the understanding that elders were imminently and irretrievably respectable. Not that they just earned it, but that it was self-evident that they had earned it. So when people were trafficking in that phrase, they were acknowledging the obvious, as well as advocating for it.
Now, here’s the dilemma. When the question of elderhood comes, an awful lot of people over 60 years old basically raise their hand not to volunteer, but to get their allotment. But what were they doing in their peak income-generating years? What was the world like in the dominant culture in North America? What was going on? I won’t trouble you with historical details, but it’s recent history. I could mention the word Monsanto, and that would cover a lot of territory because Monsanto occurred during the time frame I’m talking about. And of course the maniacal charge towards climate change was accelerating during this time, though the science was already clear.
So while the case was being made that something fundamental had to change, the people who had their fingers on the trigger, had their hand on the steering wheel, had their arm at the helm—all of these people of the generation I’m describing now were in positions where they could have acted on these troubles. I don’t say fix them—I’m saying they had the opportunity to behave and conduct themselves as if we were about to enter the shit.
So my question is, what did they do during that time? I’m sad to report that, when these people who now want to be recognized as elders had the chance to be elders-in-training at the beginning of their middle age, they appear not to have done so. The world that people like you are about to inherit from people like me bears the marks of truancy in the generation I’m describing. Not even mistaken notions, but abject truancy. And if any of that holds any water, then my question becomes: when somebody says respect your elders, I say, “respect what?”
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: I was definitely told as a child to respect my elders, but oftentimes the question was why or who? Obviously they meant parents and grandparents. But I think kids are really good at spotting bullshit. They may not be able to articulate it very well, but they understand that something is a little off about that. And what you just said there is really profound: that there was a time when it wasn’t a matter of telling you to respect your elders, but rather saying we respect our elders because it was just implied, it was pervasive.
I sense between generations now, there is no sense of appreciation or respect for what would be considered our elders, the generation that came before us. There’s resentment and frustration, anger and anxiety.
STEPHEN JENKINSON: And dismissiveness. Don’t forget that one.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: Yes, exactly. Because I think the guidance we look for isn’t there. Like you said, these people are asking to be respected as elders, yet they don’t hold anything that resembles elderhood. I think we intuitively sense what it means to be an elder.
In an interview, you mentioned elders you had in your life, people you knew when you were growing up. It’s almost automatic that younger people can sense if an individual embodies elderhood. You sense it and you feel it and you’re attracted to that person. You want to be around that person, you want to learn from that person. And that person then becomes an example. And you may not even realize it at the time, but it’s oftentimes in retrospect that we really integrate the lessons that came from being around those people.
STEPHEN JENKINSON: You’ve said something very important that needs to be emphasized. I should preface this by saying, I know there’s people who are living exceptions to the rule I’ve been describing. There’s no question about that.
You and I are talking about the same dilemma, which is not fundamentally of attitude or misapprehension. This is fundamental to our way of life. That’s the first thing. Secondly, I want to ask, apropos to what you said: where did you learn “to respect your elders,” aside from being instructed to do so?
The answer you gave was that, when you were around them, there’s an intuitive uptake. It’s almost alchemical. It’s really not by instruction at all. It’s from some kind of remarkable example, and that example has consequences for you when you’re very young beyond whatever it is that you were seeking. Often you can feel drawn to somebody in a way that doesn’t resemble what you might have been seeking for your self-improvement or betterment. The problem is that your instinct for it is formed by and then informed by its presence. So here’s the horrible possibility: if there’s enough of a disappearance of elderhood, the instinct to recognize it among younger people can go into atrophy. Do you see what I’m saying? It occurred to me long ago that it is not older people that confer elder status upon each other. Elderhood is fundamentally recognized by the people who seek it, not the people who seek to be it. It is in the wheelhouse of young people to craft elders in their midst by their willingness to seek them out.
So you have this double helix arrangement between the generations, which skips the medial generation, the parental generation. It operates something like this: by virtue of their appearance, they send up a kind of tendril of longing in you for them. But their absence doesn’t do that.
Years ago, I went out with an Italian woman whose mother was an insanely good cook. I heard the two of them talking one day when I was sitting in the kitchen, and her mother said to the daughter: “well, you know, food makes hunger.” She said that and just left it in the air like it was the most self-evident thing in the world. I tried to make sense of it, and this is the sense that I made of it. The Cartesian cause-and-effect fascist that we walk around with in our minds all the time dictates that it’s the absence of something that creates the desire for it. But you know, there is the distinct possibility that nothing of the kind actually ensues: it’s the presence of something that creates the longing. This is why you can eat, and then eat a couple hours later, though you are not hungry. The food appears again, and you think to yourself, “yeah, I could do that.”
If you apply that understanding to the experience of elderhood, you begin to see something beyond a national tragedy. It’s at the level of pandemic: if elderhood functionally disappears over more than one generation, there is a palpable rupture of continuity. At a sociological level, it may be irreversible. People know this about the disappearance of culture and language. You have the grandparental generation who was raised with the language. You have an intermediate generation, those who were there when the conquest or conversion to another religion came. This generation has both languages, but their young children are raised to benefit from the changed circumstance. The old language doesn’t benefit them or serve them in this changed circumstance. So the rupture between the grandparents and the grandchildren linguistically is so severe they often can’t talk to each other, even though they were technically born in the same country (but certainly not in the same culture).
To give you a feel for what this looks like, consider the Inuit of northern Canada. An old woman was interviewed one time and the interviewer asked, “what’s the worst thing that’s ever befallen your people?” This is a deeply indelicate thing to ask somebody from any kind of traditional culture, and it was clear to him that she didn’t know. So he started suggesting things to her. In fact, what she was trying to do was politely avoid answering the question. He kept prompting her and finally she said, “I think it was television.”
The interviewer couldn’t believe television compared to starvation and forced relocation by the government. He said, through the interpreter, “how can you say that television is the worst thing that ever happened?” And she gestured to her grandson, who was sitting in the next room, plastered to the television, of course, and she said, “ever since this thing came, we can’t talk because I can’t talk TV,” by which she meant English.
This is what happens not just linguistically but at the level of elder function. It can literally waste away within two generations. And you may have legions of people in your children’s generation who are so adrift that they embrace self-determination as a religion, as a personal obligation, as a moral act, and as a political orientation. Because the willingness or the ability to trust in anything that came before you is at least as corrupt as the ecosphere might be by that time.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: There’s a lot of thoughts going through my head right now, I’m trying to figure how to articulate this next question because it’s going to sound rather naive.
STEPHEN JENKINSON: Well, let’s risk it.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: Okay. I really want to know your perspective on why this is the case. I think this ties in to your work into the dominant death-phobic culture of North America. They’re obviously connected in some way. What is wrong with our culture? Why is it like this? Why are we so adrift? What has happened to create these conditions?
STEPHEN JENKINSON: I’ve always found a good question to be worth 40 good answers, because a real good question survives all the answers that are flung at it. And the spirit of inquiry remains even after the question is answered. So I hope in trying to answer this that what we’re both doing is lending credence to the question rather than trying to defeat it by coming up with an ever more elaborate and perhaps nihilistic answer. There are many things to point to. There’s no such thing as a beginning for any of these things. But you could speak of plural beginnings and you can’t isolate them in a particular moment, because there was a moment just prior to that which predisposed that moment and so forth.
A couple of things occurred to me. I’m old enough to remember the 1960s, though not old enough to really be included. By 1969, I was 16, a bit too young to wade in with both feet. Then, it was an article of faith in the politicized generation that you should “never trust anybody over 30.” It was a viral notion: there was a sense that there was a contagious quality to people over a certain age, that they had been so deeply compromised by working “in the system,” by participating in the system or even being educated by the system that they could never really recover their dignity or their sense of right and wrong.
It was extraordinarily naive, and frankly a kind of apartheid. You had people in their late teens through their late 20s traipsing about the cultural landscape, automatically denigrating anything or anyone older than them and their lived memory. And what was their background? It was the Second World War, of course, and the European Holocaust, the atomic bomb, and so forth. They found what preceded them so fundamentally discredited that they had no interest in engaging. Their belief was that when it was their turn everything would change, just like many women believed that once they took their places in the boardrooms of corporate America, corporate America would be humanized. We’ve been on that experiment for some time now, and I wonder how the humanization is working out?
By the same token, when you decide that people over a certain age are easy to discredit, are an easy and proper target for your venom and your disaffection about life, do not be surprised that when you become old yourself you have internalized this lesson—how despicable it is to grow old—that you can’t renegotiate it. It’s no surprise to me that the people who did walk around in that air are now looking to be venerated as elders without particularly acknowledging themselves as old.
There’s a line from a very famous song of the period, called “My Generation.” The line is, “I hope I die before I get old.” It was an enormously popular song that is still ringing in the memory of people of a certain generation now wondering if it wouldn’t have worked out better had they died before they got old.
In an older understanding of the term, you could say that any place populated by spontaneous mass migration as North America was, the cover story is that people were looking for a better life. The truth is, people were running for their lives, but they had no life to run towards. It’s not like they’d had an extraordinary run of beautiful luck, gorgeous democracy and a pool in the backyard, and then there was a slight downturn, and so they headed for America. Most of these people were running from every nightmare conceivable.
The irony is that they ran the way haunted people run. That means they bring their ghosts with them. In trying to escape your haunting, you bring your ghosts. And this is what America has become. It’s a ghosted place. America was a European fantasy, and as the generations distanced America from Europe, it became a haunted, adolescent place, and it still is.
That’s going back three hundred or four hundred years. When people left their ancestral lands, they left behind languages, understandings of life, poetries and songs. All the fundamentals of culture became instead a hyphenated identity, and identities suddenly became very, very important. Why? Because there weren’t any identities. By definition, you were not at home, and what do people who are not at home behave like? Ask any Indigenous North American and they’ll answer you, because that’s their recent history: being overrun by people who are not at home, ghosted, haunted, allegedly seeking freedom, but denying it to everyone they met when they got here.
The loss of any ability to live a sustained cultural continuity is bound to catch up with you. When does it catch up with you? Not when you’re in your peak years of physical dexterity and strength. Not when things are going swimmingly well for you. It catches up with you when everything starts going south, whether it’s personal health, your outlook on things, or your ability to believe in anything anymore and proceed accordingly.
If you put those two things together as bookends, with about 400 years separating them, you certainly begin to get an idea of why the idea of cultural inheritance became seen as something that was better left behind. If it wasn’t left behind, it became a burden. And now many people your age are telling me candidly and openly that their resentment of people twice their age is enormous, largely because of old people absorbing an astronomical amount of the GNP.
It’s not like they haven’t already had their way through their entire lives, this older generation. And now they’re demanding euthanasia as a right, aren’t they? And LSD as a right, and legalized marijuana as a right. And of course, apparently they’re demanding elderhood as a right, and the demands never end. And young people hear this litany of demand that’s now sucking up something like 80 cents of every health care dollar, and their resentment is just around the corner. Well, it’s not around the corner. It’s part of the dialog now.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: So what would elderhood look, feel, and be like in this time that we are in?
STEPHEN JENKINSON: If elderhood is an identity and swept up with all the other identity clamor of our time, then what you’d do is look for people with that “personality type.” Or maybe there’s an elderhood MMPI—a psychological testing apparatus whereby we can tease out elder-tending personality types. Then you could identify the particular kind of elder you’re looking for and dial that in. Instead of speed dating, you could have speed elder-ing. You could just tell them what you’re interested in as far as being mentored and ten older people pop up and you get to choose. I wouldn’t be the least surprised that would come, and somebody is going to work on it as soon as they’ve heard me suggest it.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: [laughing] Yeah.
STEPHEN JENKINSON: But I’m going to offer an alternative to that. I’m going to suggest that elderhood is not a figment of personality or an aspect of identity. It has nothing to do with the particular qualities of individuals.
Elderhood is first, foremost, and will always be, a cultural function. In that understanding, an elder is a culture worker and so is not inherently an old person. While all elders tend to be older, not all older people are elders. So if elderhood is not a personality type, what else could it be? You’ve said it’s something to do with culture. But what precisely? Well the answer is the subtitle of my book: it’s why I called it “the case for elderhood in a time of trouble.” I believe the particular wrinkles of elderhood are dictated by the times in which potential elders find themselves. They were born to a particular time and the particulars of those times dictate what elderhood must be now.
So this means elders themselves must be on the steep learning curve, and they must be deep running students of their times. Their responsiveness to their times is what qualifies them. The word responsibility really works here. It’s not a sense of burden: sense of responsibility means simply the capacity to respond, and we need to distinguish respond from react. React describes certain responses that attempt to satisfy you, or assuage or reassure you. Whereas the capacity to respond might have nothing to do with you trying to feel better about anything: instead it comes from your sense of moral, political, cultural, or spiritual obligation. It comes from fully trying to inhabit the conditions of citizenship if you will, but citizenry not to particular geopolitical identity: your deep citizenship is a devotional one, rather than from affiliation. In that sense, the work you join yourself to is dictated by your time’s troubles. You’re a citizen of a troubled time.
If that’s possible, then it means that elders are not in the business of getting themselves recognized, they’re in the business of recognizing. In a time when elderhood has gone into terrible abeyance, it becomes the elder-ing responsibility to recognize incipient elderhood in their midst, and to proceed accordingly: acknowledging it, recognizing it, corroborating it, and authorizing it without ever trying to be included in it or to benefit directly from it. You follow what I’m saying?
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: Yes.
STEPHEN JENKINSON: It’s a radical re-understanding of what it means to be an elder. It’s not a club you get to join. No elder in a time like this would ever call themselves an elder. Because it is the responsibility of the people around them to recognize elderhood in their midst and to corroborate it.
And if it doesn’t happen, it’s because there are no elders to do so. The appetite for elderhood has gone missing, because young people are not exposed to it and their appetite for it atrophied, and they have traded it for self-reliance and a principled anxiety that masquerades as having a conscience, a chronic free-floating anxiety where you care about everything but only enough to paralyze you.
This is an awful lot to say in response to a short question. More simply, the greatest elderhood skill is not the skill of knowing how to be an elder, it is the skill of knowing how to have elders in your midst.
Stephen Jenkinson
is a culture activist, teacher, author and ceremonialist. He is the author of numerous books, including Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble and Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul. Stephen teaches internationally and is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, founded in 2010. With Masters degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work), he is revolutionizing grief and dying in North America.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH
is a long-form interviewer, occasional writer, and host of Last Born In The Wilderness, a podcast he's produced for the better part of five years. He is the author of We Live In The Orbit Of Beings Greater Than Us, published last year through Gods & Radicals Press.