This is what a senior citizen said in the film “The Way We Get By”.  You can watch it on Hulu here. I used to volunteer at a senior citizens home with my grandmother and many senior citizens said and felt this way.  I always felt it was a fault of society that didn’t value their existing skills/talents.

Can someone really be useless who is still capable of caring for others?  Is a smile, a twinkle of the eyes, or just a few words really so valueless?  It seemed a tremendous waste to me.  Here are people who have a tremendous wealth of experience and wisdom and as a society we ignore them.  No wonder we are sometimes as shallow and venerate people like reality TV shows and Paris Hilton.  How can we have any wisdom when we don’t learn from our past?

You know who the really dead people are?  The ones who have outlived their usefulness?  The ones who don’t care about others.  If people only care about themselves, they are the most useless kind of people in the world.