So, you’re 53 years old and you get fired without warning. What do you do? Well, if you’re Gail Mercer-Mackay, you don’t panic. You go to Arizona to play golf for two weeks and do some serious journaling as well.

What Gail discovered (besides still having a slice) was that she wanted to be a writer. Long story short, she did become a writer and founded a content creation company in the process.

Today, the company routinely earns revenue in the millions and at the age of 69, Gail is still going strong.

Hear her story this week on The Art 2 Aging.

How should we be looking at aging in the 21st century?

There are a lot of ways we could tackle that question.

We could come at it from the point of view of health and medical breakthroughs occurring continually around longevity.

We could examine the question by considering whether or not we shift our thinking around retirement.

Or, like our guest this week, we take on all of the challenges and throw in the elephant in the room – ageism – at the same time.

Helen Hirsh Spence is a retired Canadian educator, TedX Talks speaker, writer and blogger whose excellent website, TopSixtyOverSixty is packed with information on ageing in the 21st century.

Nearly 30 years ago, a University of Toronto professor named David Foot wrote a book called Boom, Bust and Echo.

The book dealt with how the global population was aging and how savvy investors could profit from the graying trend that would become a tidal wave. In fact, Foot referred to it in terms akin to those of a tidal wave.

The book was a best seller. 30 years ago. Foot wasn’t blowing smoke; everything that he said would come to pass, did.

So, if he knew this and wrote a book about it, why are we still struggling to build enough retirement residences, long term care facilities and find the staff to run them? Why is funding for services for older people in such short supply? Why are employers pushing out older workers in favor of young, inexperienced employees?

Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging is the CEO of a Canadian advocacy group called CanAge. Laura Tamblyn Watts outlines the parameters of what is an enormous challenge for governments, the public sector and the private sector as well.

A note: we apologize for the audio quality at the time the interview was recorded.