"Training to be Old?" Not.

The thing about Boomers getting older that is so exciting to me is that we are literally reinventing the definition of aging.

I'm doing things at close to 60 (yoga, climbing mountains, working multiple career paths) that my parents never even dreamed possible. They had totally bought in to the "now that I'm 60 I slow things down dramatically and live out my last years quietly" program.It's all they knew, really.

Viva la Difference!

I believe getting old is a combination of several factors that may or may not relate to each other. The first "getting old" is getting old in body. One needs to accomodate to the changes such as: developing heart conditions; weight gains, losses, shifts; arthritis; changes in hearing and eyesight; loss of speed in reflexes and feelings in hands and feet; changes in need for heat and cooling. Those, you adapt to without making too much noise or giving an "organ recital" everytime someone asks you how you feel. Body changes are endemic and you will have some. Get used to it and work around them.

The next is the perspective of others. You will be treated as old when you simply look older. My feeling about this issue is: Fuck them and the horses they came in on! I do not take my vision of myself from the perceptions of others.

Then, more important, is your own perception. Mine is simple. As long as my mind remains facile, I can do what I am able where and when I choose. I accept that "what once I could do all night now takes all night to do once," but other than that, I still am the same intelligent, perceptive, caring and vital person I was at twenty - or not. The issue is, what I was in those realms I still am.

I can still make things happen - now more with my mind than the sweat of my brow. I remember my mom at 89 refusing to join the senior citizens group at the Y. She felt that the experiences they were subjected to were demeaning and that those who joined accepted that they were "less than" the people who belonged to the "all ages" programs. She never needed someone to lead her in singing songs. Until the day she died, she wrote the music, the lyrics and set the beat high and fast. I try to emulate her.

As for finances: If you are cautious and frugal when you are young, you will have enough when you grow old. Don't allow the nay sayers to scare you. Nest eggs are not something you can make happen at 65. Either you lived for the future throughout your life or you didn't. I did. We put our son through college without loans. We helped him choose good schools that weren't Ivy League. Education isn't the name of the school on the degree. It is the quality of what you learned about life and yourself that you can put to use to make life work for you after you have your ticket to ride.

All the vacations I didn't take, the cigarettes I didn't smoke, the McMansions and Beemers I didn't buy, the parties I didn't throw for a buncha drunken neighbors who didn't give a fresh shit whether I lived or died the rest of the time, is all now in the bank, in rental properties and in CDs. The pensions we have weren't blown by "loans" against them. When they all kick in when my wife retires, we will have a little more income than we had the last year we both worked. My wife believes in the same things I do so we had no disputes. BTW, we still had lots of fun without $10,000 trips to Disneyland. I saw enough real mice when I lived on my uncle's farm during the summers I enjoyed there. She mentioned that she dated a few rats and clowns before we met.

Fear is the only factor you need to control. We are living in an era in which everyone is expected to have psychological problems, drown their troubles in Valium and alcohol and curl up in the closet when someone spills red wine on the Aubusson carpet. I was raised to believe that if you can't see the bone the cut isn't all that bad!

Maybe I'm different from the majority. I don't know ... or care. I like me the way I am and so far, age has only stolen those things my body cannot do. I can still catch any ground ball you can hit. The only difference is, now, I have to wait until it stops rolling.

Lollipops and unicorns

I think attitude and a combination of a few things determines what life is like when you age: enough money, good health, sociable personalities with a desire to join others in activities and interests.

My parents are 80 and 83 they choose to be busier now then when they both had full time careers. My mother complains if she has stayed home too many nights in a row and does not have social commitments. They like to fill their days going to the club, play cards, book club and have lunch out, and go out to Broadway shows or dinner with friends and my father is the treasurer of the county Democratic club so they have many political fund raising commitments, and travel if they have time!

My husband and I are probably not going to be as social as they are, we will probably work much later into life (we have not saved enough) we tend to be homebodies and worm our way out of too many social obligations, so I think much of it is personality.

Milt , thank you, you are awesome!

Sometimes I think you are a pain in the ass and what is so great about that is, you don't care what I think. Kudos to you.

I agree with most of what you say. I did not put away for the future, my bad, however, with the help of my lovely bride, we are better off now than ever before.

I do not listen to what others say about how things should be. It wasn't that many years ago that you were lucky to live past 50.

We have evolved in thought and behavior and anything is possible.

I'm just glad they got rid of the 'geritol' commercials!

Special sections are typically the demon seed of the ad sales department -- the "content" gets written by beat reporters who hate such assignments and mail them in, or by freelancers who care just as little. You can also be pretty sure that the writers are young enough that they believe getting old will never apply to them -- yet they're put off by having to write about it because they subconsciously fear aging might be contagious, like bird flu. (The way to avoid bird flu is to avoid birds.) So you were right to feel cynical and not force yourself to plow through it.

Gordon, I'm with you on this one. I'm getting older every day, but at 57 with a 61 year old husband, we are doing things my folks would never have considered. We are much more physically fit and have had some life experiences that allow us to conceptualize a different life. That all being said, we are aging and there's no doubt about it.

So I've joined tbd as one way to get my training on how to be old. Hopefully, the newspaper special sections will take a lesson from sites like this one.

You are so right, Sailordog! You can smell the contempt and the fear behind it. Dennis Hopper is appearing on commercials these days claiming that we're reinventing retirement, and despite the fact that he's an odious sell-out, what he says is true. Many of the evils of getting older are avoidable--bingo, for instance.

I had knee surgery (an unavoidable evil) and had a short stay in a rehab hospital that was also a nursing home. The folks who run this place have no clue about the coming demographic, and for those of you with an entrepreneurial bent, there's serious money to be made, if you ask me. These people are still serving pork chops for lunch when even older folks are eating salads and wraps--as for the bingo tournament...somehow they couldn't drum up much interest.

If I were looking to start a business, I'd open up a retirement community of the kind I'd like to live in myself. Actually, my parents lived in a place like that. Concerts, theater, lectures, exercise, and no bingo whatsoever!