During societal contingencies, most older people need more help than others, because physical frailty is a fact of life. But senior citizens also have crucial skills, not least because they have spent most of their lives in an era during which digital tools and solutions didn’t exist. That makes them an indispensable resource as countries and companies seek to build their resilience to contingencies — both those caused by nature and those caused by hostile states.
In 2018, Sweden published its instantly famous In Case of Crisis or War leaflet, which instructs the public in how to prepare for and behave during such situations. Since then, the leaflet has been joined by similar ones in other countries. Earthquake zones, meanwhile, had long been giving residents similar advice. While emergency guidance varies across nations, the message is broadly consistent: Individuals and communities must be prepared to act when disruption strikes.
Yet evidence from disasters shows that crises often bring out the best in people. Communities — especially older citizens — tend to show remarkable “catastrophe compassion”: the instinct to help rather than withdraw. A U.S. study has found that people aged 55 to 84 are more willing than those aged 18 to 36 “to put in the physical effort to help others.” Older citizens represent both a point of vulnerability and an untapped reserve of resilience.
But society cannot expect a 75-year-old to be able to move about with the same agility as someone half a century younger. On the contrary, it is a widely accepted reality that the state, aided by younger people, will need to make sure the elderly are looked after in a crisis. In developed countries, that matters a great deal, because extreme-weather events and hostile-state activities are increasing — and the population is aging. In the EU, 21.6% of residents were aged 65 years old and older in 2024, an increase of 2.9 percentage points compared with 2014. In the U.S., the figures were 18% in 2024 and 14% in 2014. In the U.K., they were 19% and 18%, respectively; in South Korea, 19% and 13%, respectively; and in Japan, 30% and 26%, respectively. If electricity or the internet is knocked out, others will have to make sure this large part of the population is safe, because older people can’t be expected to fend for themselves entirely. If a cyber attack cripples supermarket supply chains or public transport, they will need help navigating the disruptions. The fact that older citizens need assistance — and rely on already limited government resources — during crises perversely increases the incentives for hostile states to expand their gray-zone aggression.
Indeed, hostile states and their proxies could exacerbate those gray-zone activities by targeting a well-known vulnerability among the older population: their relative lack of digital prowess. Scams tricking the elderly into sending criminals large sums from their online bank accounts could be exploited by hostile states, which increasingly commission Westerners, including members of organized crime gangs, to execute gray-zone activities. (Recent examples of such gray-zone acts committed by gig workers include an arson attack on a Polish shopping mall and parcel bombs delivered to DHL across Europe.) By systematically tricking elderly people into transferring their money out of their accounts, hostile states and their proxies could create real challenges for banks’ insurers.
Financial fraud targeting older citizens is already one of the fastest-growing sources of loss for banks and insurers. In a gray-zone context, such manipulation could blur the line between criminality and state aggression — a risk with implications for cyber liability, financial crime and pension protection frameworks
But older citizens are also a resource during crises. Consider Norsk Hydro. When the Norwegian aluminum giant was hit by a ransomware attack in 2019, it refused to pay the ransom — and kept operating manually, aided not least by older workers used to working in a pre-digital age. Or consider Colonial Pipeline, the crucial pipeline that provides nearly half of all petrol, diesel and jet fuel consumed on the U.S. East Coast. In 2021, it was hit by a ransomware attack in 2021 similar to the one that hit Norsk Hydro, which forced the company to slash its operations.
At a subsequent Senate hearing, Senator Josh Hawley asked Colonial’s CEO, Joe Blount, whether the company had the “capability to manually operate the pipeline in… the event of an IT like this one and if you don’t have that capability, should you, do you think, going forward?” Blount responded, referring to manual operations: “I think on a go-forward basis there’s no question that we will look at that capability and it’s a really interesting question, because if you look at the aging workforce now, a lot of those people that did operate Colonial Pipeline and other infrastructure in America historically manually, they’re retiring or they’re gone. Fortunately, we still have that last bit of that generation, which allowed us to do what we did during this particular event.” Older workers had saved Colonial too.
Retirement around age 65 is a leftover from generations when most people barely lived to see their 65th birthday. It’s also a leftover from a later era when the economic future appeared so stable that those over 65 wouldn’t need to fulfill any functions in the workplace.
But today, senior citizens are needed. They’re needed to help the far fewer young people now carrying the burden of the economy. Even more urgently, they’re needed to help keep companies and countries going in case of disruption or, to put it the Swedish way, in case of crisis or war.
For risk managers and insurers, recognizing older citizens as both a vulnerable group and a reservoir of experience is essential to understanding the next phase of resilience — one defined not by strength alone but by interdependence.
