Aging
The number no longer makes sense.
Forget lying to others about your age, can you lie to yourself?
It was really our grandparents who were the last generation to get old and accept it. It was a natural stage of life. As for our parents, they were flummoxed. The sixties were unfathomable, some got on the bandwagon but most stayed on the sidelines. And then everything their children augured for, believed in, became de facto. The end of the war, casual clothing, music everywhere. I don’t know when your parents started to wear jeans, but I was shocked when my dad showed up in a pair in the late seventies, prior to that, he didn’t own any.
And it’s not so much that we had a good run, but that the run is over.
As Solters calls them, the “civilians” are all retired. And those still in this business are running things, or got squeezed out. You can hire youngsters with more passion for fewer bucks.
We stopped going to the movies, now we cotton to streaming TV. After all, they don’t even make movies for us anymore. We remember the last true heyday, the seventies, which contained the birth of the blockbuster, but began truly in the late sixties with “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate,” but ended in 1979 with “Kramer vs. Kramer.” Imagine a film like that getting greenlit today! Never mind the younger generations get divorced less than us. Then again, it’s a class thing, the less wealthy and educated often don’t get married at all!
We still go to see our favorite bands live. Not like the younger generations… For them it’s a gathering, an event, the music is almost secondary, it certainly doesn’t strike their soul the way ours did. We want to remember those days.
But we don’t recall video games, and as far as tech… If our generation even knows how to do more than surf the web and text, they decry it. Social media is the devil. Why won’t those damn kids get off the lawn! And while they’re at it, get off the phone too!
But our kids played all those video games and they survived. What makes us think that Gen-Z won’t survive the smartphone?
But really, it’s the feeling that the world is passing you by.
I don’t know about you, but over the past couple of weeks, the tsunami of Trump traffic just doesn’t hit me the same way anymore. I just don’t get worked up about it as much. I know some people cheer on the Orange “Genius,” but they’re not friends of mine. Yup, I’m a college graduate, a member of the so-called “elite,” I believe in facts and truth and I laugh when someone whips out a conspiracy theory.
And the funny thing about being over seventy is you stop correcting people. You realize it’s not worth it. You can send them the report that the government quashed, about the benefits of the Covid vaccine, but this is how people feel powerful, with their own ideas and viewpoints, they’re sick of everybody getting rich and being powerful other than themselves. I mean there are many costs of the plethora of billionaires. Sure, everybody would like to be rich, but they know that most of these guys, and almost all of them are guys, pay few taxes, think their sh*t doesn’t stink and…
That’s another thing about getting older, you no longer have any heroes. You’ve realized everybody is human. I guess when someone my age starts testifying about believing in certain musicians… You mean the one with the plastic surgery, who hasn’t had a hit in eons? I mean give Bob Dylan credit, he’s doing it his way. But giving him hosannas for his shows is literally the Emperor’s New Clothes.
But those are fighting words. Because Boomers have so little to believe in that that which they do they’ll defend to their death, their icons can’t be questioned.
So yes, some Boomers wear blinders and are delusional, and this is hard for me to handle.
They’re still trying to impress. How could they not know no one cares what kind of car you drive, where you went on vacation? You reach seventy and society is no longer fluid, it’s set. If you’ve got a bunch of bucks, feel free to spend them, but don’t tell me that makes you better than me.
But the rat race, society, you reach seventy and you feel strangely estranged. There are those alta kachers who won’t give up their jobs in D.C. Are they that delusional, do they think that’s what their life is about, their title? I mean they’re not accomplishing much. No one is as hollow at the core as a politician.
But there’s so much info coming down the pike. Is the feeling of being overwhelmed the nature of life in the twenty first century or is this a particular side effect of being old? I mean you used to be able to be comprehensive, see all of the movies, know the hit records, now that seems impossible, and you wonder why you’d want to anyway. Meanwhile, the media are like that Who song, meet the new hype, same as the old hype. We literally can’t be fooled again. If something is truly great and it sustains, we’ll find out about it, we don’t need to be teased and foaming at the mouth in anticipation.
So some of us are self-satisfied, some in a good way. They own their own home, they’ve got grandchildren, they’re living day by day.
While they’re not going to the doctor.
And then there are others who just can’t let go of the mores. Is this a function of being a Baby Boomer, or is it just a consequence of getting old?
And no one will admit all this. Everybody thinks they’re as hip and up to date as ever. But unlike when they were young, they pooh-pooh the new rather than embrace it.
And the younger generations want us to move on down the line and we refuse to. We won’t leave politics, and not only that, we’ll denigrate those with youth, they just haven’t lived long enough to understand! Isn’t that what they told us, isn’t that why we got the voting age lowered to eighteen? I mean if you’re old enough to go to war, you’re old enough to vote.
And the whole world changed and we’re frustrated when people don’t know it or acknowledge it. We couldn’t beat the North Vietnamese and now we see how Ukraine is standing up to Russia with drone warfare and the machine is busy telling everybody that we’re the biggest and baddest while we’re running out of ammunition, having spent so much cash to build Patriot missiles to blow drones out of the sky in the Middle East.
And we didn’t exactly declare victory when we left Vietnam, but there’s no way to portray the fracas in Iran as anything but a loss. And as bad as we perceive the religious government in Iran to be, so many did come out this past week to mourn their lost leader.
Begging the question what we know.
Never mind the shifting image of the United States.
Back in the seventies, when we all went to Europe on cheap flights and used our Eurail passes, we had to defend our nation, the locals wanted to chide us for Vietnam. I don’t even hear about college students doing that today, and how many Americans even have passports? We’ve been sold a bill of goods, that America is the tippity top in every vertical, when this is patently untrue.
Socialism is pretty damn good in Scandinavia. Free college? Our national hero St. Reagan changed the California college system from nearly free to expensive. Then again, California is now in the doghouse, a national punching bag. What can you do but throw your hands in the air?
So you can try and go on like it’s the same as it ever was, or you can own your age and get freaked out and try to adjust, even though no one ever talks about this.
Yup, you can get riled up about the issues of the day, from Meta to AI to…they’re endless.
Or you can see that your time on the planet is limited and take an alternative path.
But there’s no context. We used to all be in it together, of one mind, leaning on each other. Now we’re all in our own private Idaho not admitting that we feel lost and don’t know what to do.
And believe me, we know so much of what we see going on is B.S. But we used to care, we used to believe in change, now we see it all as cyclical, we’ll vote, but don’t ask us to believe.
After all, the game is rigged. That’s one thing we’ve all learned. But we’re trying to pull the wool over the eyes of younger generations who know this. Telling them to let us continue to rule, that we know what is going on.
But the truth is we’ve lost the passion.
We just don’t want our power usurped.
