The Cost of Not Caring - Abby Bloom On What's Required For The Fabric of a Healthy Society

Today’s guest is Abby Bloom. I first met Abby in late 2017 and we’ve stayed in close contact since. She’s a remarkable woman and this is her second time on the show, and we get into a lot of her backstory way back in episode three, like being among the first cohort of women at Yale University, and her work designing and implementing healthy systems and programs right around the world. When I met Abby for the first time she was talking then about the impending care, aging and health system failures we were sleep walking into - and as we’ve seen through recent reports and our daily lived experiences the structural and systemic failures in child care, gambling reform and environmental regulation - it feels like we are in the era of progressive degradation of a societal, economic and political operating system that has underpinned many of the reason why we are living for longer, which is core to Abby’s new book, The Cost of Not Caring.

The Cost of Not Caring is both primer and instructional on the implications of a society where people are living for longer, and the demographic, cultural, policy and economic shifts this is driving. Abby’s career has and still spans health, government, insurance and innovation, and she’s on the show today to help diagnose the challenges associated with ageing, care and health, what that means for governments, organisation and individuals. She’s also got clarity on what’s required to shift and evolve a complex problem field that requires an injection of bold leadership, new practices and a compelling narrative to galvanise a population around the value and virtue of care. And not care as a service or an experience, but something we live from and care about. In a time when the enshittification of just about everything is only matched by the forcing of de-personalised bug-filled AI into every nook and cranny, we are at risk of losing the fabric that holds and sustains the health of our society and relationships to each other.

We cover heaps of ground in this chat - from her own moment of insight at her mother’s 104th birthday in New York, to the strains and stresses of care, the obligation and privilege of caring for those we love, the creaking institutional systems we all rely upon, the four requirements to age well and what we can do as individuals to support our caring efforts and look after ourselves too.

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