Retirement – Image is everything

What is the most carefully chosen component of the election campaign we’ve just endured? Not the torrent of verbal promises or the billboard slogans which border on the banal. My money is on the images of the candidates, photoshopped to look confident, resolute, fit and focused on the far horizon. In a television age, looking right for the job is as important as sounding right.

Contrast that with the images used to portray the Gold Card generation. Generations actually, because over 65’s stretch across three decades and more, embracing all manner of conditions, from marathon runners to wheelchair-bound, global leaders to backyard vegetable gardeners.

But the default images used by television news to summarise this diverse and largest cohort of New Zealanders is invariably negative and constrained – pictures of frail, arthritic hands, bent bodies and stumbling steps. A favourite go-to image whenever issues about seniors make the 6pm news is a shot of a rest home exercise class with the very elderly seated in rows waving their hands above their heads, like a Pentecostal meeting in slow motion.

I suspect, probably unfairly, these images were chosen by a 20’s something researcher who’d never spent more than two minutes talking to, let alone looking at, someone over 65.

But what is really unfair is the way these constrained images of older people distort the real truth about us. Namely, that we are a lot smarter and more useful than the enfeebling pictures suggest.

An Australian neuroscientist Olivia Maurice recently published new research to bear this out. She shows that older people are better at remembering and paying attention to positive information, better focused on meaningful relationships, have greater ability to accept events and find a useful perspective on life, more readily appreciate and value good things happening.

All this is on top of the physical facts about the over 65 population. We are healthier, live longer and offer more to the wider community than any generation in history. It’s high time the image makers reflected that.

Maybe it serves some unspoken political purpose to keep portraying older people as frail, infirm and not very useful to the wider society. Watch this space carefully as the debate heats up in the next election cycle over superannuation eligibility and income settings. Because the images used to define the elderly will make all the difference to how fairly we’re treated.

That much-favoured TV shot of withered hands clutching a tea cup says it all. It suggests this person has passed their use-by date. The portrayal of older people as helpless ignores the fact that they have spent their lives contributing to the economy and building the communities we enjoy today.

The unemployed, the homeless and those living with disability know all about the power of negative images to curtail their rights. Gold Carders beware.