Senior’s Greatest Challenge
Sept.7th 2026
When you finally find yourself in a place where you really / really are a senior and for most of us it would be somewhere over 70-75 years old. That is when the wheels start to wobble a bit and your out of country insurance takes a leap into outer space. You begin to realize things are not the same as they were, friends are slipping away. Either they are dying, or moving into a storage facility for old people, or they don’t recognize you anymore. For what ever the reason, and there are many more, you are going to have to adjust for the fun ahead. Adjusting is not easy. You have done so many things the same way for years and it always was good enough, but not so now. Better get a pair of those new slip-on shoes because if you can still bend to tie those laces, your fingers may have other ideas. The same with buttons.
Many of us are facing some trauma filled years of many more visits to the doctor and then the specialists and also the hospital. There will be the odd exceptional senior, but these guys are rare and very lucky. We fear new threats to our not so busy lives in the big “C” or heart attacks and strokes, memory loss and falling and so many more threats to what was promised to be those “golden years”. I had no idea gold could get rusty.
We are shocked when we have to purchase a special box to sort out and dispense a bunch of pills that were foreign to us just a few months back. Getting into those pills is another matter. Child proof packaging is a threat to a senior’s sanity. Special tools should be provided to every senior citizen for getting into almost all the products we use and need. In the olden days back in the 1960’s & 70’s when I was in the business of selling products to all the major retailers in Canada, packaging was not a problem. Plain brown cardboard boxes did a fine job of holding and shipping nonperishable product. Paper bags were also used for much of our packaging needs. However, retail stores were depending on packaging to take the place of displays and sales people. The manufacturing industry was forced to comply to the customers and the governments to enhance the packaging and provide bi/lingual information as well as coloured pictures on the packaging. This was the genesis of higher pricing and a whole new industry for artistic and printing skills and costs to rise to the point where the package in many cases costs more than the product inside. This also opened the door to new ways to confuse and cause seniors with less strength in their arthritic hands to open these contraptions. Plastic has replaced paper and children are so smart today, they can get into packs that seniors will never figure out. It’s not that we are stupid, it is just that we are seniors and have too many obstacles.
There are some positives in becoming a senior. I just can’t think of what they are.
Paul D. Scott has written 7 books and over 300 stories on his blog. rantingsandraves.com