TAIPEI — The cat was found in a dark stairwell leading to the top floor. Kuro, once a plump and affectionate feline pampered by the whole family, had become skin and bones, her eyes filled with fear.
It was just one way the atmosphere at the home of Zheng Caini had begun to change after her grandfather got seriously ill. Bedridden and increasingly irritable, he would often shout things he did not really mean — “Don’t bother with me, I’ve been abandoned anyway!” — frightening everyone around him.
The foreign caregiver the family had hired left, forcing Zheng’s grandmother to spend all her time caring for her ill husband.
And the family cat that used to curl around their feet was no longer appreciated, drawing impatient scolding — and eventually learning to hide quietly.
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After the grandfather died, his exhausted widow decided she no longer wanted to look after Kuro. When relatives came to take the cat away, they searched the whole house, finally spotting her in a corner on the stairway to the top floor, frozen in place, staring blankly into space.
This scene stayed with Zheng, now 25. For her, it was not just a cat’s plight; it was a microcosm of an entire family slowly collapsing under the weight of “old age, sickness, and death.” Her grandfather’s angry outbursts, the cat growing increasingly fearful, the arguments among relatives over caregiving duties and expenses, and her grandmother’s quiet exhaustion — all of it made her realize that “growing old together” is far from romantic in real life.
Super-aged society
Zheng is part of Taiwan’s Gen Z, a generation for whom the image of old age is no longer the comforting scene of grandparents surrounded by grandchildren. Instead, it resembles a frightened cat hiding in a corner. As Taiwan’s population races toward “super-aged” status, a generation raised in an age of low wages andjan high housing costs is bracing to shoulder long-term care alone — and wondering whether they will have any say in how their own lives end.
Taiwan first met the World Health Organization’s threshold for an “aging society” in 1993, when adults over 65 made up more than seven percent of the population. It became an “aged society” in 2018, after that share rose past 14%. By the end of this September, adults over 65 accounted for 19.8% of the population, Interior Ministry data shows. Taiwan is now just a fraction away from becoming a “super-aged society,” where more than one-fifth of residents are over 65. Today, approximately one in every five people on the street is an older adult.
What alarms experts and young people alike is not just the percentage, but the speed.
From “aged” to “super-aged,” Germany took 36 years, and Japan took 11, according to a 2024 report from Taiwan’s National Development Council. Taiwan is making that same leap in just seven years. With rapid aging compounded by a steep decline in births, Taiwan’s social safety nets, infrastructure, and even people’s psychological preparedness are struggling to keep pace. Labor shortages and long-term care crises are already emerging.
Taiwan’s fertility rate has long been among the lowest in the world. In 2024, it fell to just 0.87 births per woman. The National Development Council projects that the old-age dependency ratio — the number of adults over 65 per 100 working-age people — will deteriorate from roughly 5.4 workers supporting one older adult in 2020 to 2.7 to 1 by 2040. By 2070, it is expected to approach one to one, meaning each worker would, in effect, be supporting one older adult.
That is Taiwan’s projected reality in less than 50 years. Yet even today, the old-age dependency ratio is forecast at 29.29 — roughly three working-age adults supporting one older adult.
For Zheng, imagining her own old age means picturing a life much like her parents’: a body slowly deteriorating while still needing to invest money and time caring for an even older generation. As the only child in her family, she has little confidence she could manage the same responsibilities her parents have shouldered — especially without siblings to share the burden.
Children, who have traditionally taken on most long-term care duties, will no longer have the capacity to do so.
Her worry echoes a warning from Wang Zhaoqing, head of the Peng Wan-ru Education Foundation, who predicts that as Gen Z enters middle age, Taiwan will become what he calls a “zero-family-carers” society. Children, who have traditionally taken on most long-term care duties, will no longer have the capacity to do so. With low birthrates and rapid aging shrinking the workforce, Taiwan’s long-term public care system will need new, dedicated funding sources. It can no longer rely primarily on labor income.
An “Only-Shoulder Generation”
Gen Z, now roughly between 18 and 28 years old, is still in higher education or just entering the job market. Compared with their parents — who by 25 might already have been married, working, and raising children — Gen Z’s youth seems endlessly stretched too thin. They hesitate about marriage or having children, seeing homeownership as something out of reach, yet are simultaneously pushed to grow up faster as they confront youth poverty and the looming reality of aging parents who may need long-term care at any moment.
“No matter how hard we work, we can’t compete with the people who entered the workforce 10 or 20 years before us and already occupy the positions,” said 25-year-old Huang Ziwei.
Before finishing college, Huang tried many new things. But to his family, it all looked like “not settling down.” To him, it wasn’t about failing to compete with industry veterans — it was simply that he didn’t want to compete at all. What he really wanted, he said frankly, was to move between different sectors, to test possibilities, and to find some way of living that allowed him to breathe.
That would restrict everything I can choose now.
Gen Z has come of age in what some scholars call Taiwan’s “new poverty era,” marked by slowing growth and stagnant wages. In 2024, the median regular monthly salary for full-time workers aged 15 to 29 was about NT$31,000 ($1,000), with nearly one million young workers earning less than that. Nearly four in ten workers under 39 report running a monthly deficit. Low pay, high housing costs, and precarious employment have turned a familiar parental promise — work hard and you’ll enjoy a comfortable old age — into a distant myth.
Huang has decided he will not sacrifice his entire life for the sake of an old age 40 years away.
“If I start planning around my parents’ future long-term care needs and my own old age, that would restrict everything I can choose now,” he said. “It would mean spending less money, fighting for a higher-paying job, not being able to go out with friends. But those things matter to me.”
Companionship questions
Another 25-year-old, Xie Bingying, said he does not feel, as some of his peers do, that he must have children. From what he observes, people with no clear desire for marriage or family are now the majority.
“I don’t want to turn out like that,” Xie said quietly.
As a child, he spent almost every weekend traveling with his mother to another county to visit his grandmother, who had Parkinson’s disease. He watched her condition worsen rapidly, leaving her like a young child who needed constant care. After she was hospitalized — hooked up to tubes and surrounded by machines — she could barely react to anything. Only when someone carried her great-grandchild to the bedside did her eyes begin to move, and the deeply wrinkled, hollowed-out face suddenly grew wet with tears.
“Older adults need a lot of companionship,” Xie said. The scene left him feeling heavy and helpless. As he prepares to enter the job market, he does not believe he can balance a high-pressure job with the emotional and time-consuming demands of long-term care. He also doesn’t want to become like his grandmother — unable to control his own movements or thoughts.
It basically destroyed our family.
The shadow of long-term care doesn’t just fall on those who are sick. It weighs on entire families.
Huang Ziwei remembers how, before his grandfather passed away, his extended family split apart over who would care for him, how to pay the bills, and how to divide the inheritance afterward. “It basically destroyed our family,” he said.
Zheng Caini also witnessed her own family unravel after her grandfather became bedridden.
Constant arguments over caregiving left the home thick with tension. As the only child, she was relieved she had no siblings she might end up fighting with. At the same time, she was terrified that one day she would have to shoulder the full responsibility alone.
She believes that even with the subsidies and services currently available, the system is still “far from enough” for families that genuinely need long-term care.
Her parents, determined not to become a burden to their daughter, have already begun exercising regularly and taking supplements, trying to keep themselves healthy. The family has started adjusting small daily habits now — planning for old age long before it arrives.
Let me choose
Faced with this reality, many Gen Z interviewees raised the same hope: when they grow old, they want to have the option of euthanasia. What they fear most is not death, but losing control over their own lives.
In 2023, life expectancy in Taiwan was 80.23 years, but “healthy life expectancy” — the years lived in good health and independence — was just 72.45. In other words, on average, a person can expect to spend nearly eight years in a state of illness, disability or dependence.
On a dimly lit train ride home after visiting his grandmother, Huang once blurted out his “euthanasia plan” to his mother. He regretted it immediately. He knew how painful it must be for a parent to hear their child say he does not love the world enough to stay in it. But to him, the plan is his firm bottom line.
“If I’m 55 and euthanasia still isn’t legal in Taiwan, I’ll help launch a referendum,” he said. “I’ll go door-to-door if I have to, collecting signatures.”
Other Gen Zs interviewed also cited the option for euthanasia, which they say is not a sign of nihilism. It is a last resort — a way to preserve dignity in a future where living worse feels more likely than living well.
