Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast where two professors bring philosophy into dialogue with everyday life.

I'm Dr. David Pena-Gusman.

And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.

David, the past couple of years of my life have been dominated by care obligations.

While I've been trying to balance my job and my hobbies and my

relationships, I've also been finding myself spending so many hours and a lot of emotional

and mental energy on elder care. My parents are a bit old relative to my age,

and both of them have really needed a lot in the past couple of years. Without getting into

too much detail, I ended up moving back into my childhood home to help out and also having to

ensure that my dad, who has Alzheimer's disease, has gotten the care

that he needed. First, by trying to find in-home care. And second, by ensuring that he moved

into a home that would give him the care that, frankly, like, we couldn't give him in the house.

And top of mind throughout all of this has been money. It has been such a stressful experience here in the U.S.

I mean, it's not going to be a surprise to any of our listeners to know just how bad the financial situation around care is.

And just the costs are absolutely astronomical. And I say this as somebody who comes from a position of relative economic privilege with a nice childhood home that my parents own, with them having retirement funds.

Like it has been almost completely unmanageable for our family and it continues to be a source of stress.

Yeah. Well, and I know from conversations that

you and I have had also as friends outside of this podcast, just how emotionally difficult that

has been for you and your siblings to have to negotiate this, to have to make decisions, to

have to then bring some of those decisions to your parents, sometimes to make them together,

sometimes to make them for them.

...