There are certain silences in our culture that reveal more than any amount of noise. We discuss childhood development endlessly, examine adolescence in detail, reflect deeply on the choices of middle age. But when it comes to the final stage of life, the years that now stretch longer than they ever have in human history, we often fall quiet. It was this silence that first caught Claire Ruble's attention during a developmental psychology course in her undergraduate years at Virginia Commonwealth University, and it has shaped the course of her life ever since.
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The moment itself was ordinary. She was sitting in class, working toward her Bachelor of Science in Psychology, learning about the stages of human development. The early years were explored thoroughly: infancy, childhood, the tumultuous journey through adolescence. But when the syllabus reached older adulthood, it skimmed the surface and moved on, as if the decades beyond retirement were somehow less interesting, less full of growth and change. This struck Ruble as strange, even troubling. People were living longer than ever before. The population was aging rapidly. And yet here, in an academic setting designed to understand human behavior and development, the oldest among us were barely discussed.
She would come to realize this wasn't just an oversight. It was part of a larger pattern, one that reflected how our culture thinks about aging. We have organized our society around the young and the productive, and we struggle to know what to do with those who have moved beyond their working years. We place older adults in facilities and often lose sight of their daily experiences. We underpay and undervalue the people who care for them. We treat aging as a problem to be managed rather than a stage of life to be understood and supported with intention.
Ruble's response to this realization was not to simply note it and move on. She decided to dedicate herself to filling that gap, to becoming the kind of professional who asks the questions others overlook. She pursued a master's degree in gerontology, immersing herself in the study of aging from biological, psychological, and social perspectives. But she also did something equally important: she worked as a caregiver while completing her graduate education.
This dual experience gave her something that neither academic study nor hands-on work alone could provide. She learned the theories and research that explain how aging affects individuals and populations. And she learned, through long shifts providing direct care, what those theories look like in practice. She saw how profoundly meaningful quality care could be, how much difference it made when someone took the time to see an older adult as a whole person rather than just a list of needs. She also experienced firsthand how difficult it was to sustain that level of care, how the work could be simultaneously deeply rewarding and nearly impossible to maintain over time.
The challenges were not primarily clinical. Ruble found the actual work of caregiving fulfilling. What made it unsustainable were the structural conditions: inadequate pay, insufficient support, exhausting schedules, the sense that this essential work was treated as disposable labor rather than as the skilled, demanding profession it actually is. She watched colleagues burn out and leave the field. She felt the strain herself. And she understood that no amount of individual dedication could overcome systemic failures.
This understanding became central to her work. Ruble did not experience a single dramatic moment that reaffirmed her purpose. Instead, her commitment was strengthened through accumulated experiences, through the steady recognition that both older adults and those who care for them deserve better than what our current systems provide. She saw that advocating for one group without advocating for the other was insufficient. Quality care depends on supporting the workforce that provides it. You cannot create dignified aging experiences while treating caregivers as expendable.
Now working in Richmond, Virginia, at a nonprofit association focused on education and advocacy, Ruble has positioned herself to address these interconnected challenges. Her role allows her to work on the systems level, pushing for policy changes and educational initiatives that might actually shift how we approach aging in this country. She is no longer providing direct care herself, but her time as a caregiver informs everything she does. She knows what works and what doesn't, not from theory alone but from lived experience.
Her advice to students and early-career professionals considering this field is straightforward and direct: Do it. The field needs people who are curious, compassionate, and committed, people who are willing to ask hard questions and push for better systems. She encourages them to seek hands-on experiences early, to actually spend time with older adults and with the people who support them. Theory matters, but so does listening closely to the realities people describe. And she wants them to understand that they can have real impact by combining lived experience with advocacy and education.
This is not the kind of advice that promises easy rewards or quick success. Gerontology remains an undervalued field. The work is often frustrating. Progress can feel painfully slow. But Ruble believes the field needs people who understand this and choose it anyway, who recognize that the challenges are precisely what make the work necessary.
When she describes what being a gerontologist means to her, she talks about putting people first, especially those whose voices don't always get heard, while working to strengthen the systems that support them. It is about balancing compassion with responsibility, understanding that quality care depends not only on clinical expertise but on policy, workforce sustainability, and equity. She sees her role as showing up with intention and accountability, working to ensure that people can age with respect, autonomy, and the resources they need to thrive.
This approach reveals a wisdom about how real change actually happens. Ruble is not naive about the difficulty of transforming large systems. She knows that individual compassion, while essential, is not enough. She knows that even the best-trained professionals cannot provide adequate care within structures that fail to support them. And she knows that advocacy requires persistence, that it means showing up consistently even when progress comes slowly.
Looking toward the future, Ruble hopes to see a healthcare system that is more proactive, equitable, and responsive to the realities of an aging population. She wants a system that values prevention, that invests in community-based supports rather than relying primarily on institutional care, that treats the direct care workforce as the skilled professionals they are. This vision depends on investing in the workforce so they can sustain this work, on bringing different sectors together to collaborate, and on shaping policies based on what older adults actually experience rather than what others assume they need.
She sees the next generation as essential to making this vision real. They bring fresh perspectives, a willingness to embrace innovation, and often a commitment to social justice that includes age equity. But they also need guidance from people who have been doing this work, who understand both its possibilities and its limitations. Ruble positions herself as someone who can offer that guidance, who can help younger professionals understand how to be effective advocates, how to balance hopeful vision with practical action.
What emerges from Ruble's story is a portrait of someone who noticed something missing and decided to spend her life addressing it. She saw that our society pays insufficient attention to aging, and she chose to become someone who insists on asking the questions we prefer to avoid. How do we want to live as we age? What kind of support do we need? How do we create systems that honor people's autonomy while providing necessary care? Who does the work of caring, and how do we ensure they can sustain themselves while doing it?
These are not comfortable questions. They require us to confront our own mortality, to think honestly about what it means to need care, to examine how we've built our economy and healthcare system around values that sometimes work against basic human dignity. It is easier to look away, to treat aging as someone else's problem, to assume that individual families will somehow manage.
But Ruble refuses to look away. She has built her career around insisting that we can do better, that we must do better, not through vague hopes but through concrete, ongoing work to change policy, educate professionals, and advocate for both older adults and the people who care for them. She brings to this work both the knowledge of someone trained in psychology and gerontology and the real-world understanding of someone who has done the caregiving herself.
Working in the nonprofit sector gives Ruble the space to pursue this kind of change. Unlike clinical settings, where the immediate needs of patients and the pressures of daily operations can consume every moment, nonprofit advocacy organizations can step back and look at the bigger picture. They can push for changes in the system itself, changes that no single provider or facility could make on their own. They can bring people together, help policymakers understand what's needed, and give voice to those who often aren't heard. This work requires patience and careful planning. It means understanding that change doesn't happen all at once, but builds over time.
Ruble has chosen this path deliberately. She could have stayed in direct care, and she clearly found that work meaningful. But she recognized that her impact could be greater if she worked on the systems that shape how care is provided and funded. This does not mean abandoning the people she once cared for. It means working to create conditions where everyone providing care can do so sustainably, where older adults have real choices about how and where they age, where resources are allocated based on actual needs rather than on outdated assumptions.
The vision is ambitious, perhaps even idealistic. But it is grounded in Ruble's realistic understanding of current realities. She knows what the problems are because she has experienced many of them directly. She knows what older adults and their families struggle with. She knows what makes caregiving unsustainable. And she knows that changing these conditions requires more than goodwill. It requires policy reform, workforce investment, and a fundamental shift in how we think about aging and care.
This is the work Ruble has committed herself to. It is work that will extend well beyond her own career, that will require the efforts of many people over many years. But it is work that matters, that addresses real suffering and real injustice, that has the potential to improve millions of lives. And it is work that began with a student in a psychology class noticing a silence and deciding that silence was unacceptable, that the people living through the longest stage of life deserved the same serious attention we give to every other phase of human development. Everything that has followed stems from that initial recognition, from the simple but profound decision to ask the questions we don't ask.