under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success. - Atul Gawande

Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. It gave people — the young and the old — a way of life with more liberty and control, including the liberty to be less beholden to other generations. The veneration of elders may be gone, but not because it has been replaced by veneration of youth. It’s been replaced by veneration of the independent self. * * *

You know, there’s this phase of people’s lives in which they can’t really cope on their own, and we ought to find a way to make it manageable.

We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being.