Books are being written on this subject these days. It’s big news – Boomers! And why 60? Because it’s smack in the middle of the baby boom that began in 1946 and ran out of steam in 1965. Well, I hit the big Six Oh this year and began to wonder what the fuss was all about.
I must admit that I too have written my little book on the boomers, a novel titled In the Shadow of the Conquistador that I wrote 8 years ago and was worried about releasing into the world as I felt that I was going to enrage my peers. I had portrayed my boomer characters as takers rather than givers, people who built empires and trampled on the feeble to realize their ambitions, people who had left the planet confused and their progeny either unborn or malformed and marooned in a sea of underemployment. Then I began to read about the lives of the Conquistadors, about Pizarro, de Almagro and Cortes, and realized, that in temperament, they were no different from my boomer buddies. The Conquistadors had been takers, they had trampled on others, they had been “me, first” thinkers. Only the technology is different today.
So what’s it about being a boomer, and turning 60? Well, for starters you are never going to get a job again and you are too young to retire just yet, so you live in an occupational limbo. This may sound frightening but it’s also greatly liberating. Boomers of 60 are either their own bosses after having been turfed out with generous severance packages from the corporations that once employed them, or they are cashing in on their inheritances from their more frugal parents of the Great Generation. They are writing books (mostly autobiographical), starting business, travelling, exercising, watching their diet, downscaling to release equity from their homes, and throwing it all on Facebook to make everyone above or below them on the age spectrum envious of their lifestyle. A few reckless ones are going in for divorces, cosmetic surgery and sports-cars that attract younger partners, but those are the ones who have a lot of money to burn. The rest are shoring up their pension funds and figuring out how to stretch them out until age 95. And they are starting to feel the pressure to let go: let go the four-scotch lunch (try wine instead), the 18-hole round (how about 9 holes as a compromise?), running that marathon (how about the gentler ski-machine in the gym – it’s easier on the knees!), and the 8-ounce steak (chicken or fish is better for the cholesterol).
And what legacy have they left behind? A damaged planet that reacts badly and erratically more often, a politically polarized world of haves and have nots, a technology-charged world that has not adequately compensated those who have been released from their labours by machines, a hedonistic world focused on the “I” not the “Us.” Also a huge gulf for their fledgling children to surmount, one that many have given up even attempting. “I’ll just live off Daddy’s and Mummy’s left-overs,” seems the cop-out strategy. Watch it, kids – daddy and mummy may live to be over 99, and with their lifestyle needs, the breadbasket will be empty by the time you get your hands on it!
Now I realize why I wrote that novel, and after much vacillation, why I released it into the world last month. My generation needs a wake-up call, a reckoning. It’s great to be a boomer of Sixty, but it comes with a huge price tag, and it seems to me as if its only others who are footing the bill right now. Being 60 also comes with responsibility. What message of hope do we provide the Boomerangers and Echo Boomers? I tried to do that in my novel, as my way of expiation. But I’m plagued by the suspicion that it was only a gesture and that the solution has eluded my generation completely.
