"Active ageing programs" are a scam and everyone's too polite to say it
ok i need to say this because i'm actually losing my mind a little bit. millions of dollars going into this stuff every year. ribbon cuttings, ministers posing with the same three grandmas and grandpas who show up because there's free lunch, big smiles, everyone claps. cool. meanwhile the actual elderly people i know are literally just... sitting at home. alone. every single day. some of them don't even know these programs exist, nobody told them, nobody's checking on them, nothing.
and the thing that really gets me is NOBODY follows up on any of it. nobody measures if it's actually working or if it's just theater. it IS just theater at this point and everyone kind of knows it but we all just go along with it because saying otherwise feels rude or ungrateful or whatever.
and then when the whole thing predictably doesn't work, guess who gets blamed? not the people who designed the program, not the budget, no. it's the seniors. "oh they're just resistant to change" "oh they don't want to engage" like??? loneliness and not being able to get around easily isn't a personality flaw, it's literally what happens when you build a program and never once ask the people it's for what they actually need. shocking i know
anyway i'm done being quiet about this. there's a survey going around right now actually asking why sedentary elderly people stay sedentary, real questions, real data. link's below. genuinely curious if the numbers just confirm what all of us already suspect, because i would bet actual money they do
https://forms.gle/ac6e5Fw72ittG4mYA
