The Bestseller in Japan Raised Up the Discussions: You May Have Made Over a Million Dollars When You Were Still able to Work, But Twenty Years from Now, You May Still Become, an Elderly Living in Poor Conditions

Trending now!!! From the Front Page Sections, translated…

Those with the monthly paychecks of over $50,000N.T. members of the middle class, twenty, thirty years from now, may become, “poor, elderly, and alone”, the elderly who lived on the bottom of the socioeconomic statuses?   This, is not just a “rumor” that’s flowing around, but the reality of the world we live in. The UDN paper’s exclusive report on “Elderly Who Lived Alone”, proved, that the “poor elderly and alone” is a problem that’s currently happening in Taiwan.

The term of “Elderly from the Bottom End” was a term, coined by the Japanese sociologist, Takashi Fujita, it’s directed toward the elderly who couldn’t live their lives normally, and were forced, into living in the lower end of the socioeconomic status. With his long-term observations, last year, he’d published the “Elderly Living on the Lower End”, it’d sold over 200,000 volumes in Japan, and the Chinese translations will soon be put out by a Taiwanese publisher too.

Fujita bore witness to the “elderly living on the lower end” that they’d only had one meal per day, and had, taken the cheapest of the food items to check out by the counters. They can’t afford the medical fees, and could only, take the meds they’d bought off the shelves; nobody is there, looking after them, and they can only, walk towards death all alone on their own.

And yet, this, is just the tip of the iceberg. In his book, Fujita felt, that so little understood the background living environment and the living standards of these “elderly on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum”, and there were, rarely ANY social welfare organizations that provided any sort of practical assistance. “And maybe, because the situation is too horrid, that everybody is, subconsciously, turning away from the issues”. He’d estimated, that there are about, six, to seven million of the elderly in the population of Japan who are living like this, that if there’s NO effective ways of solving the problem, in the future, there would be the situation of the “collapsing of the old age of a hundred million people in the population”.

Fujita used the examples of the elderly whom he’d assisted, and shattered the beautiful ideal of the “Second Spring in Life” for everybody else. In the past, people believed, that as they’d gotten older, they will have their children to look after them, and that all they’d needed to do, is play with the grandkids and be happy, but, with the decline in birthrate, the bloodsucking younger generations, people are, slowly losing the option of “living in with the children” as they get older; and even if they have kids, their kids may have difficulties, making their own ends meet. And, you think, that you can check into a nursing home, and live out the rest of your lives? In the future, the prices of staying in the nursing homes are going to skyrocket, and the middle class won’t be able to afford it anymore.

In the past, people believed, that so long as they’re earning an above-average salary, they can be secured, with their retirement pensions; and now, you must pray, that there are no serious illnesses, no financial downfalls, that the government won’t be declaring bankruptcy. Fujita stated, that the elderly from the “lower end of the socioeconomic statuses” were all once, members of the working class from the middle class.

and, here’s what that looks like, in a GRAPH…

not my picture…

With the people in the population, living longer and longer, the stagnant in the growth of economy, the bad situation of the employment of the younger generations, and the hike in the medical care and long-term care costs, and the members of the population not getting married, and the increases in the part-time workers; all of these conditions, will impact, the life after retirement of those in the elderly population.

Fujita warned, that even IF your yearly income is of the average, and, as you’d gotten to fifty-five years of age, when the following happened, you will turn, instantly, into an elderly who lives on the lower end of the socioeconomic status: gotten seriously ill, which required an enormous sum of treatment fees, couldn’t move into a long-term care facility, your kids are blood suckers, getting divorced in your late adulthood years, diagnosed with dementia, but without loved ones to look after you.

And so, this, is the TREND, of the world right now, because with the population, aging fast, accompanied by the declines of birth rate, because a LOT of us, in the younger generations are NOT choosing to procreate (hello, hello, hello???), and that, is why this is going to keep on, trending, for a very long time, and this, is a HUGE problem, because as humans live longer, there would be, MORE and MORE physical, mental, psychological problem that keep on, surfacing, because as we age by the day, our bodies will become weakened, and, our minds, feeble too…