101 Year Old Lawyer Gives Terrifying Glimpse Into Our Dystopian Workaholic Future

At first blush, this Dallas Morning News piece honoring 101-year old practicing lawyer Jack Borden seems like a perfectly innocuous puff piece. The guy is being honored as the “Outstanding Oldest Worker for 2009″ by a non-profit that specializes in elderly services, and the interview reveals exactly the kind of rascal you’d expect to still be pulling cases after a century on this earth. Oh, don’t try to take his chewing tobacco, and don’t tell him he can’t drive his car to pick up the dry cleaning on Saturdays. He’s full of energy and enthusiasm and to know him is to love him and OK, everybody, that’s a wrap.

But wait– what was that about the elder services non-profit, Experience Works? What do they do exactly?

Experience Works is a national, charitable, community-based organization that helps older adults get the training they need to find good jobs in their communities. For more than 40 years we have devoted ourselves to helping people break out of poverty and reclaim their lives and dignity through work.

Oh, MAN.

OK, maybe this is our rampaging socialism here, but this sounds an awful lot like Boxer in Animal Farm, the elderly horse who literally worked himself to death before being sold for glue. And while we find the mission of Experience Works completely admirable, and God bless ‘em, but we can’t get over the incredibly sad fact that the organization even has to exist in the first place. What the hell world have we inherited where a 60-year old man even has to mutter the words “job training”? In a just, ideal world, the only thing Experience Works would ever have to worry about is helping our grandparents find affordable dinner cruises and time shares on the lake.

Of course, as dudes, we understand that there are Men of a Certain Age for whom the idea of “work” is indivisible from the idea of “manhood.” We’ve all known that retired guy, a former contractor perhaps, who just can’t give up the ghost and walks into every house offering to re-tile the kitchen or something (because that little asshole from Home Depot obviously had no idea what he was doing.) Nobody wants to be “put out to pasture” or considered useless and forgotten. Everybody wants to contribute. But why does this have to come in the form of labor? Why can’t there be a time when you’ve worked for, like, fifty years and you can just sit on your ass for a little bit and enjoy this world you live in? At what point did our weird culture condition us into thinking that we can’t earn leisure?

The other part of this, obvs, is the encroaching death (or severe gutting) of Social Security, coupled with the burning out of the middle class. Basically, we’re about to get older and poorer, in a culture already obsessed with work, during an era of increased life expectancy. So the idea of 100-year old guys still clocking in every day may start to lose their novelty (indeed - there are three lawyers in Texas older than Jack Borden who are still working.) In twenty years Experience Works will have to start listing their Top Twenty Centenarians On The Job, with pictures of sweet old ladies sporting telemarketer headpieces and a thumbs up. And, oh seriously, WTF America?

We know there are a few things ahead of this in line (like, oh, the entire US economy), but there’s got to be a point where, as the greatest superpower that has ever existed in the history of the globe, nobody over the age of 55 should ever have to lift a finger ever again if they don’t wanna. In they want to, OK - they’re crazy, but it’s their dime. But the idea that any elderly person can’t retire, because they can’t afford it, just plain sucks. There’s got to be money somewhere, for our little abeulitas, because God put us on this Earth for many reasons much better and more inspiring than punching a goddamned time clock for seventy years.

101-year-old Dallas-area lawyer Jack Borden honored as nation’s ‘Outstanding Oldest Worker’ [Dallas Morning News]