Long Form Text #3: Welcome to retirement

Congratulations, you’ve made it to retirement age, and without a pension or investment plan, you’ll have to hack your way through your golden years like you did your youth. Have no fear, with a little bit of innovative thinking and peer collaboration, you can seamlessly cruise through your elder dementia in style!

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Many precarious workers do manage to make it to retirement, and it just might happen to you. Some Americans have turned to “outsourcing eldercare” by shipping their parents off to India , to live like a Maharaja on $2000/month. In Japan, the film “Mezon do Himiko ” tells the story of a retirement home for elderly transvestites and homosexuals. They managed to fund their retirement from a successful Tokyo nightclub and wealthy donors.

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But are Ledgestriders™ so well prepared for our retirement? Do you really think people will want to read your pitch decks, funding or job applications when you’re wearing a diaper? It’s time to start exploring options for people who aren’t part of the rank and file society before it’s too late.

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But you are now 96 years old and your robotic care assistant accidentally sucked up your dentures into the opensource vacuum cleaner because the IoT fridge and stove were chatting away and inadvertently knocked the robot offline.

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It’s really not a problem because a neighbour in your HackGrace has a 3D printer and (after downloading a free 3D file off Thingiverse) you manage to print a new set of teeth. Unfortunately, they are not the right size and you wind up gumming your food at that evening’s Disco Soup event, getting chunks of organic radish all over your sustainable milk-fiber bib. Since your robotic helper is on the fritz, you decide to wash yourself off in the hipster bathing facility but slip and break your hip.

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Again, your mates have this problem covered and start using 3D printed bones to grow you a new leg. Unfortunately, the operation doesn’t go well and you get an infection, however, there is a cure for those with sufficient computational capacity: you can manufacture your own patent-free medicine based on your individual DNA.

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Hooray! You win! you have advanced to the next level of retirement: that of constantly badgering your kids to come and visit you! But not everyone will be so lucky in the future, so it is time to explore the different possibilities that can be made to exist for people outside the “system”.

On (DATE) Edgeryders is coordinating (Name)- An online summit on how we can regenerate livelihoods after covid. And make our local economies more resilient to crises that will soon be upon us due to climate change and ecological degradation.

We’ll do it with everybody, leveraging community management, and an a stack of open source data analysis toos to turn the online conversation into collective intelligence. The whole process will be – and stay – open to anyone who wants to participate.

Together we will

  • Find & showcase existing initiatives from which we can learn
  • Deepen our understanding through open discussion, both online and offline
  • Matchmake participants to co-imagine and experiment new models in their local environments

Why it makes sense to participate

Together we will:

:speech_balloon: Find the right conversations

:memo: Grow their professional network

:hammer_and_pick: Build new income opportunities

:open_book: Learn from others’ past experiences

Compass on Google Android 10.0 March 2020 Feature Drop Experiment new models for securing resilient livelihoods

Want to get involved? Register here.

Date: 2nd week of june, exact date tbc
We will reach out to you with more information as we approach the event.


How we are financing this:
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825652.

The post ^^ was based on a piece commissioned by Edgeryders from Jeff Andreoni