Twilight Of The Boomers

By Daniel Okrent

Were you there, back in the beginning? Were you one of the 76 million children born in the most fertile years in American history? If you weren't, you're probably thinking that you really can't take any more boomer solipsism. You've already suffered through a lifetime of references to Woodstock and the Beach Boys and Vietnam. You've gritted your teeth as you endured the preening, self-congratulatory smugness that leads Ken Dychtwald, a gerontologist who has lately made his living warning about the coming boomer bust, to say, "Boomers feel superior to the younger generations. It wouldn't even occur to boomers not to."

But if you were there, especially if you are part of that front-loaded cadre of boomers born between 1946 and 1957, the last thing you want to hear is that you aren't going to have it your way anymore. After all, as Ralph Whitehead Jr., a public service professor at the University of Massachusetts says, "The baby boom was a self-absorbed generation, a generation that defined itself not through sacrifice as its parents had, but through indulgence."

When you've been walking on water most of your life--when, since you reached adulthood, America has mostly been at peace, the economy has mostly been strong, and you've been part of a group large enough to call the cultural shots--harsh reality makes for a cold shower.

Did I say reality? In a recent survey conducted by the MacArthur Foundation, American 50-year-olds, when asked how old they thought themselves, ignored the evidence of the hairline, the waistline and the calendar, and said 40.

I have news for you, pals: you're not. (Neither am I. I'm 52, which, when I was a teenager imagining the far, far distant coming of the new millennium, is exactly the horrifying age I figured I'd be.) If you're like the overwhelming majority of boomers, your career has hit a brick wall, you haven't saved enough, your pension is underfunded, your health is deteriorating, even the medical advances that will probably extend your life will, in an especially cruel paradox, probably mean that late life will be meaner and more spartan. You'll have a hard time selling the house that you considered your nest egg (the generation behind just won't have enough buyers). And your neighbors' children, simultaneously burdened with the cost of your aging and victimized by the one thing you'll hold onto--your political power--will boil with resentment. Your own kids may get especially peevish: even today, says Rand Corp. economist James P. Smith, "half the adult children with parents who die over age 70 get zero. Parents are living longer, with more health expenses. The first thing to go...is bequests to children."

Need more? There are no movies made for people your age, the music on the radio is dreadful, television programmers behave as if you don't exist. In an astonishing merger of boomer aging with boomer self-involvement, Matsushita Electric has built a prototype smart toilet with built-in microsensors that can run an automatic, daily chemical analysis of the user's urine. Stock-market analysts are growing bullish on companies that build nursing homes or manufacture laxatives.

Coming soon: the Metamucil boom.

Here's looking at you, kid.

The slippage probably began on the turf that the boomers seem to have owned for more than three decades: popular culture. Listened to the radio recently? Do you feel any different than your parents must have felt when they first stood aghast as you fell in love with the Beatles? Of course you do--if you're a boomer, you knew then that your musical taste was superior, and you know it today. What about the movies--weren't you watching The Graduate at the same age that these kids are drooling their brains away over Scream XXVI?

Not having movies to go to, music to listen to or television to watch doesn't exactly rank with famine or pestilence as a besetting syndrome, but it is indicative of the larger phenomenon. You know you're fading when even advertisers of new products don't try to reach you anymore because they no longer care what boomers want, or think or spend their money on (unless it is a solution to pesky erectile dysfunction or your annoying estrogen shortage). Says Cathy DeThorne, executive vice president of the advertising giant Leo Burnett U.S.A.: "Whining baby boomers are mourning the fact that those rules they understood just don't apply anymore." Maybe we need to attend to the commercial wisdom of Hallmark cards, one company that has no problem marketing across generations. Hallmark simply adjusts the product line to conform to demographic trends. Consequently, says Marita Wesely-Clough, trends expert for the company, it will soon be producing more get-well cards for people with "extended illnesses."

But if pop culture has assumed an alien look, so increasingly has the workplace. In a word, says Chicago-based outplacement specialist John Challenger, "baby boomers are getting squeezed" on the job. "They're filling up the ranks of middle management and fighting each other for the executive-level slots. There are just too many of them."

Not to mention plenty of smart, energetic 33-year-olds who are more than eager to step into the shoes of every smart, not-so-energetic 53-year-old--for less money too, and probably with more appropriate new-economy skills. (The guy in the next office who's still having his secretary print out his e-mail must be planning to win the lottery.) Consequently, says Challenger, boomers who haven't reached, and won't reach, the top "are being squeezed from below as well." It's a squeeze that has brought on a psychic shortness of breath: the 1997 National Study of the Changing Workforce, comparing the attitudes of men and women ages 46 to 51 with a similar cadre studied in 1977, exposed the hollowness and the fear creeping up on the leading-edge boomers: in the original survey more than half felt it highly unlikely they'd soon lose their jobs; in the recent survey barely a quarter felt so comfortable.

Such anguish has grown palpable. FORTUNE magazine's career-advice columnist, Anne Fisher, calls the angst pouring in from her boomer readers "a continuing lament," and there's evidence that it will soon become operatic. From the mailbox of Fisher's website, askannie.com "I'm learning that being over 40 is not only an obstacle, it's more like a brick wall," writes someone who signs himself "Not Dead Yet." Bob C. thinks "younger bosses see...older [workers] as a menace." Edward, the realist, writes, "Many of us over 40 have failed to constantly update our skill sets."

The anecdotal evidence certainly supports data that would have 3 out of 4 experienced workers, even in a full-employment economy, fearing for their jobs. Steve Harrigan, 51, of Austin, Texas, asks a question that virtually any leading-edge boomer can relate to: "Where are we?" When Harrigan is sitting in a restaurant, visiting an office or just walking down the street, he wonders, Why does it always seem he's the oldest person in view?

Want more? As unforgiving as the present has become, our future could be bleaker. It is truly stunning how financially unprepared for retirement boomers are. They don't hold nearly as much stock as their parents do, and according to Richard Hokenson, chief economist of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, when they were younger--filled, no doubt, with a confident belief in boomer immortality, or at least boomer invulnerability--they saved for retirement much less conscientiously than their Gen X counterparts are doing today. As a result, a full 40% of boomers, and 30% of those nearest to retirement, have less than $10,000 in personal savings. That's more than 30 million people who are no better prepared for retirement than they are for a couple of weeks with the family at Disneyworld.

Pensions? Once upon a time, American businesses funded what was known as defined-benefit plans; they were required to contribute whatever amount would guarantee a specific payout. But corporations like to be able to predict their future liabilities, and the defined-benefit approach has rapidly been replaced by the defined-contribution plan: employer and/or employee contributes X dollars, fund trustees invest it, and investment performance determines the payout. It's great in an up market, but, says Michael F. Carter, a benefits specialist with the Hay Group, a worldwide human-resources consultancy, "we're beginning to enter what I call the worry period." Older boomers, he says, are right to wonder "what happens if there's a correction in the stock market and it falls off 20%" without swiftly bouncing back?

From the satirical newspaper the Onion: "Long-awaited baby boomer die-off to begin soon, experts say. Before long, tens of millions of members of this irritating generation will achieve what such boomer icons as Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Timothy Leary and John Kennedy already have: death. Before long, we will live in a glorious new world in which no one will ever again have to endure tales of Joan Baez's performance at Woodstock...[T]he ravages of age will take its toll on boomer self-indulgence, and the curtain will at long last fall on what is regarded by many as the most odious generation America has ever produced."

Like all good satire, this hurts because it is, in its essence, so accurate. Where once my generation was celebrated for its commitment to peace and justice, what we've grown to be--what we always were, probably--is a generation committed to nothing more (or less) substantial than what we appear to be leaving as our signal legacy to American culture: casual Fridays.

As you read this sentence, another baby boomer is turning 50. In eight seconds, so will another, and then another, and on and on will this cascade of calendar-enforced maturity continue for the next decade and a half, an entire generation hitting the back nine and turning the world over to those who are younger, faster, fitter, more ambitious. (Even the most commonly used number--the 76 million born in the boom--is a gross underestimate: add 8 million immigrant boomers to the total.) For the present purposes, though, we're going to focus on the leading edge of the boom, those people born between 1946 and 1957 who made it to their teens before the '60s ended. We know self-indulgence better than our younger siblings do, so we're going to feel what's happening next that much more sharply. And, of course, sooner--like, tomorrow.

Evidence? We may claim to feel as if we're 40, but if you really want to know what we've got on our minds, wander the Web to gauge the current state of boomer consciousness. A recently launched site targeted at people over 50, GenerationA.com boasts of its large-size type fonts. Elsewhere, the author of a regular boomer column begins, "I had some serious dental work done this week." The longest threads in the community section of "Boomer Board" are about estrogen-replacement therapies. A new boomer site, myprimetime.com has so brazenly donned the generation's narcissistic garment that without irony, it calls its series of cheesy self-evaluation quizzes "Me Meters." On "Are You a Candidate for Burnout?" I scored an 86.

The Marriott chain has opened about 150 managed-retirement communities under the names Brighton Gardens and MapleRidge, apparently confident that boomers will be filling the apartments in 10 years, the assisted-care quarters in 20, the intensive-care units in 30. About 25% of those latter spaces are being specifically reserved for residents with cognitive disorders. Makes sense: while only 8% of people over 65 suffer from the severe memory loss that characterizes Alzheimer's disease, the number leaps to a range of 30% to 47% for those over 85, and we all know that we're going to live longer than our parents. Boomer watcher Dychtwald, in his list of 10 physical, social, spiritual, economic and political crises just ahead, puts "mass dementia" at No. 2.

If you want a glimpse of the boomer future that you'll never see in the ads for Brighton Gardens or MapleRidge (knowingly ironic boomer question: Where do they come up with these names?), travel instead to Rochester, Minn., and the Mayo Clinic. In Dr. Darryl Chutka's classroom, the 10 first-year medical students look a little different from what you might expect. They're all wearing goggles coated in a clear film, ear plugs, heavy rubber gloves, extra-thick socks. They also have marshmallows stuffed in their mouths, corn kernels scattered inside their shoes, stiff, confining braces around their necks--and enormous, padded diapers stuffed inside their underclothes.

What Professor Chutka calls the "Aging Game" is a novel, if slightly frightening, effort to familiarize future physicians with the circumstances of the patients they will be treating when they emerge from their medical training. The goggles simulate cataracts; the ear plugs, loss of hearing; the gloves, arthritis; the socks, edema; the marshmallows, post-stroke paralysis; the corn, bunions; the neck braces, the nearly universal muscular stiffness of old age. The diapers...well, the diapers are indicative of what managers at Kimberly-Clark consider the promising future of the market for "adult-incontinence products," one of their fastest-growing areas of business.

Wearing all this stuff is the easy part of the aging game; what's harder is performing the various tasks Chutka demands of the students, like reading the labels on a vast array of prescription containers when you're wearing goggles, or counting out the daily ration of pills with fingers rendered numb by a sheath of glove rubber. Near the course's end, the students are placed in a mock nursing home, where other students, trained to act like ward attendants, fail to bring them their food, or shove spoonfuls of apple sauce into mouths rendered immobile by the marshmallows or ignore them altogether. "They wheeled me into a corner, and it was so hard to see and hear anything," remembers third-year student Melissa Niesen. "It was really depressing."

Useful, though: "It's definitely in the minds of my classmates," Niesen adds, "that we will be seeing a lot more older individuals in our practices."

That's you, Mr. and Mrs. Boomer. The good news is that you will be retiring younger than your parents and living longer than them too; in fact, if you started your career at 23, are one of the few sufficiently well off to be able to retire at 55, and live to be 90, you will spend more than half your adulthood in retirement--an unprecedented reconfiguration of life's traditional arc. But in what physical condition will you spend those years? And with what financial resources will you be able to finance them?

The best case would see the entire Sun Belt populated by a new cadre of semi-retirees, fit and healthy, working part time from their homes while enjoying the fruits of well-invested savings and well-funded pension plans. That's what the management is counting on at the headquarters of the Del Webb Corp. in Phoenix, Ariz., developers of the Sun City chain of retirement communities. Del Webb executives are quivering in anticipation of a flood of boomers pouring into the retirement-home market. LeRoy Hanneman, 54, Del Webb's CEO, stands on a hill from which he can see his company's future as vividly as he can mix metaphors: "The explosion of baby boomers is like a freight train bearing down on us," he says. "Del Webb has already laid the tracks for the future, and we expect to benefit mightily."

Before he adds a single unit to the nearly 72,460 Sun City houses his company has built in the past 40 years, Hanneman is investing $100 million to $150 million in research to understand the needs and wants of what research director Paul Bessler calls the "new bodies" moving into his company's focus. "The opportunity is just incredible for us," Bessler says, to provide homes for those few fortunate enough and farsighted enough to have developed sufficient skills, harbored appropriate attitudes and, probably most important, put away enough money for a retirement that is going to take on a shape we've never seen before. Based on its research, Del Webb already outfits its new houses with high-capacity wiring for home offices and offers options such as home exercise rooms. Integrated computer, security and entertainment systems will be the next must-haves in boomer retirement housing.

In fact, the Del Webb version of the future sounds pretty nice, the kind of fantasy that most of us have imagined at one time or another, and that, if everything breaks exactly right, a few of us will certainly experience: fit, healthy and well off, we will enjoy all those things--exotic travel, continuing education, 36 holes a day--that we could neither afford nor find the time for while we were raising our families. Professionally, we'll be called upon as part-time consultants by younger workers eager for the wisdom born of experience, or we will generously donate our time and skills to our favorite causes. Our children and grandchildren, so pleased with how well Mom and Pop are doing, will visit often, each time drinking thirstily from the vessels of kindly wisdom that we have miraculously become.

But even if we're living the high life in Maple Boomer Retirement Ridge Heaven, don't expect us to mellow much, to lessen our demands, our insistent wish that the world pay attention to us, us, us!!! In a Del Webb survey of boomer attitudes, respondents said their greatest contribution in retirement will include "demanding funding for medical research." The red ribbon for AIDS and the pink ribbon of breast cancer will be replaced by gray ribbons of gerontology.

And so, inevitably, will the funds to combat those diseases be channeled elsewhere. For the Del Webb interviewees also expected to be "setting the political agenda," and these four words may be even more important to the American future than the expected medical advances. There are today 3.4 wage-earning (and Social Security-contributing) American workers for every person over 65. In 2030 there will be only two workers for each of the elderly (which is why economist Hokenson, of DLJ, calls Social Security "the mother of all Ponzi schemes"). Those two are either going to have to work a lot harder to support all the old folks, or we will see a spectacle of misery unprecedented in the world's wealthiest nation. Two irrefutable facts, the size of the boomer generation and the tendency of the elderly to vote in greater percentages than any other age group, will converge to create a daunting political force.

And with it, a strong chance of intergenerational conflict. "Watch for tension to increase among generations as the boomers enter their late 50s," says Dr. David Reuben, who heads the geriatrics division at the UCLA School of Medicine. Noting that "it costs between $35,000 and $50,000 a year [to support] one person in a nursing facility," a strapped nation will, Reuben concludes, have to choose between caring for its children or its parents. Have you ever noticed how the elderly in your town vote when a proposal to raise property taxes to pay for education hits the local ballot? Count on it: this time, through the scrupulous, if self-interested, exercise of their franchise, boomers will yank the reins of society out of the hands of their children. In every other sphere, we may be every bit as faded as a poster from the original Woodstock. But here, in one final effort to forestall Boomerdammerung, we will summon the vigor to plant our solipsistic flagpole, piercing the heart of the larger society.

Thus casual Friday may not be our final legacy after all. Instead, we may create a gerontocracy of such unity and might that it will either utterly dominate the American political map or provoke all-out generational warfare. In a nation in which only 66 million vote in off-year congressional elections, a bloc of some 80 million people motivated by their desperate self-interest will become dauntingly powerful.

Now be honest, fellow children of the boom: Is this good news or bad?

--With reporting by Cathy Booth/Los Angeles, Maryanne Murray Buechner, Alice Park and Desa Philadelphia/New York and other bureaus

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Los Angeles, Maryanne Murray Buechner, Alice Park and Desa Philadelphia/New York and other bureaus