JUntil now, they didn’t ask themselves the question. And then the first confinement gave them a taste of what their retirement could look like if things went well. Warm, but cut off from the world. Then the Orpea scandal gave them a glimpse of what it might look like if things went wrong.
They would do again at the end of their professional life what they had done before entering it, but without pooling everything.
The two events led some fifty-somethings, forced to accept that they too would eventually reach an advanced age, to dream of a third way: to find themselves together, with a group of friends, in a kind of community, in order to live a kind of eco-responsible fair old age, an inverted mirror of the student roommate. They would do again at the end of their professional life what they had done before entering it, but without pooling everything. It would be community, but we would still have a home each. There would be several of us, but not just anyone. It would be intergenerational, but without being invaded by other people’s children. We would live in a kind of hamlet in the countryside, but with all the possibilities of the city.
The senior roommate to stay young is an idea in the air, but also an idea in tune with the times. Social housing organizations and municipalities are considering supporting vaguely community-based projects. In Fantasy Finale, the next novel by François Cusset (to be published in March by POL), “four old characters at the end of their career, in Paris, decide to live together in a kind of wobbly and joyful phalanstery”. “We believed that by living all four we would live longer”, says one of them on the back cover of the book, it’s not far from what those who imagine out loud roommates of self-managed seniors think.
How do we recognize them?
Fifteen years ago, when they heard about the babayagas, a participatory habitat in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis) reserved for women over 60, they found the brilliant idea for the elderly: now that they are almost old, they want a community future, but otherwise. They like to tell themselves that they should buy now to lay the beginnings of a collective life before realizing that they have nothing. They made a list of what they wanted and didn’t want. Once every two years, they go to see an old factory in the suburbs, a ruined building and think about what they could do with it. They read white walls, the story of the shared house of the journal’s collaborators Spirit, and tell themselves that they wouldn’t go about it like that… They don’t talk about what will happen when they become really addicted. More generally, they find reasons why other experiments of this type around them have already failed.
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