My Generation

My Generation

A “generation” is made up of sort of the same folks, sort of around the same age, sort of experiencing the same things, sort of all playing a role in the same big sitcom.

-P.J. O’Rourke

Continuing the conversation…invoking the mantra I’ve repeated many times over the last decade: “Today, 10,000 people in the US will turn 65.”   Even after all this time, it’s still true!  Another ten thousand people will turn 65 today, tomorrow and the next day and every day until 2030! That’s a lot of people! 

When I first appropriated that sentence back in 2014,  I was in my 60s and daydreams about getting older were already starting to invade my psyche. The country was also on the cusp of its own big demographic shift and somehow, there was comfort in knowing that whatever worries I felt about aging could be shared by another ten thousand people every day.  At least I wasn’t alone.

The tip of the inevitable iceberg had arrived, one that people didn’t like thinking about or talking about or discussing in public. One that the culture had taught us to ignore and that no one had actually planned for.  It had snuck up on us in plain sight, by creeping slowly under the radar, one day at a time. 

And as I made my house calls, the different conversations I was having with different people (of a certain age), were all morphing into the same conversation,  one that wasn’t really as much about a real estate transaction as it was about the big life transition ahead. I had accidentally tuned into the collective voice silently rattling around in the heads of all those people who weren’t “talking about it.”

They were “my ge-ge-generation” as Roger Daltrey put it in 1965,  a giant swathe of now greying baby boomers, the horde of 80 +million people born between the post- war years of WW 2 and the assassination of JFK.  The oldest of those boomers reached the river of no return in 2014,  and the rest have been steadily taking up residence in the undiscovered country of the last third of their lives ever since.  

We’re all living on the continuum, heading in the same direction and the one thing that stands out about the journey is that change (not taxes) is the one thing we can’t escape.  Since people are living longer,  many of those first ten thousand folks who turned 65 in 2014  are still around to experience what 75+ feels like.  Suffice to say,  75 is a lot different than 65 and in another ten years, 85 is going to feel like light years away from 75. 

More Next Week…