I don’t see the older people who don’t need help, so I have a kind of skewed sense of life at age 70 and up. The people I visit have physical or cognitive limitations and I’m part of the support system.

Still, after a day of talking to people in the high-rise buildings and people living alone in houses or apartments, I often have a sense of waste. These are people with decades of adult life experience, work histories, knowledge of the changes society has gone through. If the local candidate’s father was a real twit in high school, these people know about it. The current recession is old news to survivors of the Great Depression.

The right to work, to be useful– it would be a hard life without it. Volunteerism is fine, but in my experience finding a compatible volunteer opportunity is no easier than finding a paying job. I hope to keep working all my life, partly because I have to but also because I want to. Not the 40 hour a week grind, but something manageable and suited to my abilities.

I think the Japanese are on to something here–

The percentage of Japan’s residents over age 65 is closing in on 25 percent — a level that makes Florida seem youthful by comparison. But so far the country hasn’t declared bankruptcy or erupted in cataclysmic generational warfare.

Instead, its fate is partly in the hands of people like Kenji Ueda, a 72-year-old entrepreneur who founded a temporary employment service for older workers in Tokyo. Most of Japan’s elderly are healthy. So Ueda is giving them a chance to put their time to productive use — and trying, as he told me through an interpreter, to “strengthen the ‘elderly’ brand.’’

Not makework– real work. There’s a lot of wasted talent in the high-rises and sitting in an apartment watching TV all day can get pretty dull. There’s already an unacknowledged economic contribution of child care for young working parents– no one is talking about how many families are getting by because of grandmothers. When those kids are grown the grandmother just might like to keep working– at an easier pace.