By Jessica Solomon
In 2004, I cannonballed into a world I didn’t even know existed—senior care. I had never heard the term “caregiver,” didn’t know people hired them, and honestly had no idea what hospice was. At 30, I found myself walking through a portal into the healthcare and aging industries—equal parts care and commerce, compassion and confusion.
Back then, people were just starting to talk about the “Sandwich Generation.” This described adults who were stretched thin, balancing the care of aging parents while raising children of their own. Society was shifting—people were living longer, medicine was advancing, and family dynamics were evolving in ways we hadn’t yet begun to grasp.
I had no caregiving role models growing up. My father’s mother died when he was just 12. My mother’s parents had her later in life and were gone by the time I was in my mid-20s. So, by the time I found myself in senior care, I was learning everything from scratch—and fast. I got to know the hospice teams, the social workers, the estate planners, the rehab and home health coordinators. Everyone was orbiting this middle market of aging Americans and the adult children suddenly responsible for making impossible decisions.
And what I saw? I saw everything.
People think sales is about closing deals, but in senior care, everyBODY is a transaction—one layered with emotion, urgency, confusion, and desperation. Over time, I witnessed the children of the elderly becoming elderly themselves. Imagine talking to someone in their late 70s about coordinating care for their 96-year-old mother. That’s not rare anymore. That’s Tuesday.
We’ve transitioned into a new era, and it’s time to say it out loud:
We are no longer dealing with just the Sandwich Generation.
We’re living in the Six-Foot Hero Generation.
If you grew up in the 80s, you probably remember those six-foot-long party subs—those giant deli creations served at family events or football Sundays. They were iconic, yes, but let’s be honest—nearly impossible to hold together. They cracked, they slid, they crumbled. Sound familiar?
That’s today’s caregiving reality. We’ve got four (sometimes five) living generations in the mix. Grandparents, great-grandparents, aging adult children, and young adult grandchildren all under one roof—or fighting over who will pay to keep someone in one. We’ve got adult kids in their 60s moving back in with their 90-year-old parents because their own retirement savings are gone and that family home is the one asset left.
We are witnessing the slow collapse of systems that were never built to support this level of longevity. The planners are outliving their plans. The caregivers are burning out. Even the most resourceful families are struggling to hold it all together.
A social worker once told me, while we were discussing the explosion in dementia diagnoses, “We’re not meant to live this long.” A chilling thought, but there’s a truth to it. As people live longer, we’re increasingly confronted with a devastating choice:
Would you rather lose your mind but keep your body?
Or keep your mind and lose your body?
It’s not just a personal dilemma—it’s a logistical and financial one for every family member involved. The real suffering often lands not on the patient, but on the loved ones trying to provide care, make legal decisions, find the funds, and keep their own lives from imploding.
Over the past two decades, I’ve tried to organize this chaos—by bucketing seniors into categories based on need, urgency, finances, or family involvement. But the buckets kept changing. They multiplied. And the services meant to support them couldn’t keep up.
So here we are, still talking about caregiving like it’s the Sandwich Generation, but let’s be honest—that sandwich fell apart a long time ago.
We are the Six-Foot Hero Generation.
And like those massive deli subs, we’re impressive in scope, stuffed with responsibilities, stretched to the limit—and one wrong move away from falling apart.
So what now?
We need better policies. We need more education around aging. We need housing and financial strategies that reflect this multi-generational reality. We need real conversations about longevity, not just retirement. We need to prepare our kids to make decisions we weren’t ready to make. And we need to stop pretending that the solutions of 1990 will work in 2025.
The future of aging isn’t about just adding more years to life—it’s about building a society that can hold it all together when those years come.
Because the six-foot hero isn’t going away. In fact, it’s growing longer.
Let’s talk.
Let’s innovate.
And let’s stop romanticizing a sandwich that can’t hold the weight anymore.
Jessica Solomon
Next Best Home | Senior Care Industry Veteran | Aging Advocate
