By Jack Cumming

Would you want to go back to first grade? Of course not. I wouldn’t either, though I dearly loved our teacher, Miss Carney. I was a bad first grader.

Aging First Graders

There are many similarities between being a child in elementary school and being an aging resident in senior living. School was boring. Senior living is [blank]. You fill in the blank.

Back to first grade on the day after a big snow. The streets were freshly plowed, and the roadways were bounded on both sides by snowbanks. I had to walk about five blocks to school. Yes, in those days long ago, children still walked to school. We also walked home for lunch.

It was on the walk back to school that those snowbanks caught my interest. My little 6-year-old self found I could climb to the top and slide down to the road. That was fun. It was far more fun than sitting at a desk in a classroom. I slid over and over, making fresh tracks each time next to the previous tracks. That pattern, too, was fun.

Back to School

School resumed at 1:00 p.m. from the lunch break, but I wasn’t there. I had no idea what time it was. I was sliding down snowbanks. No wonder that later I loved skiing. Finally, I walked into the classroom. The clock showed 10 to 3. School let out at 3:15. I was late. Very late.

Miss Carney was at her desk in front of the room. The children were all hunched over their drawing books, lost in concentration. But, to my wonder, my mother was there sitting next to Miss Carney. I’d just seen her at lunch. What was she doing here?

You can imagine the rest. My breach was so egregious that I got in no trouble. My mother was glad to see me and didn’t flare up into the rage I deserved. All was forgiven because I was safe. Moreover, I didn’t have to walk home because my mother was there to drive me. I can add that school continued to be boring, and that changed only when I got to college, but that’s another story for another time.

Senior Life Enrichment

Have you ever participated in life enrichment in a senior living community? It used to be called “activities,” but senior living is an industry that changes terminology faster than it changes the experience. Remember when a life plan community was “continuing care retirement”?  For many, it’s still a CCRC.

The newspeak among senior living capitalists involves the “acuity stack.” The stack progression is from IL to AL or MC to SNF. If you know senior living, you know those references. IL is more stable with longer residencies. SNF is at the other end with shorter stays and volatile economics. Investment dynamics are stronger with revenue predictability.

Here, though, we’re talking about how to make senior living less boring than elementary school. At the high acuity end, MC and SNF, residents need amusements. Activities directors, now life enrichment, are good at that. Balloon play and local musicians.

Empowerment or Amusement?

At the economically more promising IL end of the “stack,” residents can, and probably should, create their own enrichment. Otherwise, their “enrichment” tends toward its opposite, passive amusement without purpose. That makes an early move-in less attractive, driving the industry toward higher acuity residency. I don’t know why providers are shrinking their market by moving up the “stack,” but that seems to be the trend aside from the squeeze on SNFs.

The impetus for this article, though, is to consider a spate of new subscription model startups promising to end boredom in senior living. You know the wannabe startup type. A person graduates from an elite college with a dream of wealth. Curating presentations for life enrichment seems like an easy idea, offering anticipated exponential sales. It’s popular for such wannabe billionaires to offer programs to amuse those daffy elders.

The idea is that elders will be happy with internet-delivered educational and engagement material. The easy sale, so goes the current thinking, is the B2B sale in which the brainy entrepreneurial youngster sells a subscription to a life enrichment director.

The Crowded Market for Life Enrichment

That may seem like a promising business opportunity, but there are many sources of internet-delivered content for people who are choosing to age outside of the senior living industry. How is internet-delivered content going to make residential life enrichment a marketing advantage? It’s unlikely that advantage will come from the same programs that support people aging at home, and there are many such programs.

Osher Lifelong Learning comes quickly to mind, as many universities shifted to streaming during the pandemic and have not gone back. Then, there’s the The Great Courses, Curiosity Stream, the University of San Diego’s U3A program, Open Yale Courses, and many more. Typical of wannabe startups is the EverLearn Campus, which is now little more than a dormant website. We haven’t even mentioned YouTube, which not only offers incredible content but also provides opportunities for entrepreneurial life enrichers to get a start.

Putting this into perspective: We’re seeing the senior living industry move more and more away from the lifestyle concept, which was trending upward before 2008, and toward a health care model. As residents morph into patients, there is likely to be a continuing trend toward less active engagement and more toward amusement for those nearing life’s end. Perhaps a return to first grade is inevitable unless Charon comes for us sooner.