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.

Janice Walton and her husband, Dan, were married for more than 60 years. They made every decision, planned every holiday together.

For six decades.

They raised their two kids together, providing them with a safe and secure home environment.

Dan was the love of Janice’s life when, overnight, their world went pear-shaped.

He began to experience signs of dementia. Janice found herself thrust into a role she was ill prepared for – that of a fulltime caregiver.

Then, Dan needed surgery. And after the surgery, his mind began to spin away even faster, to the point where Janice had to find a memory facility for him.

The facility was hit with Covid during the pandemic; Dan became infected and died.

Suddenly, for the first time in her adult life, she was alone.

This is a very personal story but one that is not unique. It’s the story of a spouse hurled into the role of caregiver with no roadmap as a guide.

To try and deal with her grief, Janice began to write. A lot. Today, at the age of 85, she is the author of one book and a newsletter, Aging Well, on Substack.

Janice shares much of her story this week on The Art 2 Aging.

Baby boomers have grown up with technology. We’ve seen enormous change over the past seven decades. It’s staggering what has transpired since the days of telephone “party” lines in homes, rotary dial phones, two or three TV channels via an outside antenna – the list goes on.

So, it’s always odd to hear someone who is NOT a baby boomer make the assumption that older people are clueless about technology. We’re not.

But what can baffle us is the complexity of technology today. Which baffles many who are much younger, too.

It is difficult to stay on top of authenticator apps, IPTV apps (and how to configure them), two or three step ID security systems, modems, ethernet, etc. The technology is always changing and tricky to master.

Ezra Schwartz is a UX developer with more than 30 years experience designing interfaces that are clear and simple. His major complaint with technology – the industry in which he makes his living – is that apps and software platforms have become so complex that they are leaving many older people on the sidelines. He’s our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging and he explains what’s wrong and how to fix it.

Correction: Ezra Schwartz is a UX designer; he is not a UX developer. Our apologies to Ezra!

A company called Rest Less has released the results of a survey it did on self employed individuals in the U.K.

Rest Less has a simple mission: help those in their 50s and older to find jobs. What their survey discovered is that a record number of individuals over 60 have become self-employed. This represents nearly a quarter of all of those in the U.K. who work for themselves.

It would be a real stretch to say that all those self-employed over 60 are dying to work for themselves. More likely, they are forced to because they can’t find a job with a company. And that’s likely because age discrimination, more commonly known as ageism, is keeping them on the sidelines.

This week, a conversation with Janine Vanderburg, a veteran consultant who has taken on the task of battling ageism in the workplace, trying to tear down the prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination at work that does such damage to those over 50 and also to the companies that reject their applications.

Most of us blunder into retirement without any realization about how much our lives are going to change. We’re entering unchartered waters.

Or, as our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging, Wayne Lehrer, would say, we are entering our third act without the knowledge of how to make it extraordinary.

That’s why Wayne looks at life as a play in three acts.

Act 1 is our personal development up to age 20.

Act 2 is when we begin striving for success, accumulation, wealth building and family.

Act 3 likely begins around age 60 and it could be the most challenging one of all.

Wayne has worn a few hats in his life: IMAX film maker, theme park designer, sculptor, and writer.

And as he wound his way through his own three-act play, he came to realize that it wasn’t until he reached Act 3 that he began to understand what the play was really about. Listen this week on The Art 2 Aging.

This week on The Art 2 Aging, we resume our conversation with Jim White. If you’re Canadian, then you will know what President’s Choice is. As well as PC.

Well, that’s Jim White.

And if you’ve ever eaten a muffin from Starbuck’s, then you have consumed a Jim White recipe.

You have probably enjoyed food and beverage products from Costco, Walmart, Wegman’s, Safeway and many other food retailers throughout the U.S. that have Jim’s moniker all over them.

Jim has enjoyed enormous success in the food and wine industries and he’s done so with very little fanfare.

Today, the final part of our interview with Jim as he relates how he moved from food to wine because, as Jim would put it, he’d never done it before and it sounded like fun.