Baby boomers won’t go bust
By Margie David Collins
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 05:46:00 07/20/2008
Filed Under: People, Culture (general)
ENGLAND—Greying at the temples, waistlines expanding, popping pills for hypertension, cholesterol, depression? Hard of hearing, poor eyesight, leaky memory, ache in the bones, wrinkles forming deep gullies? If this were a dog, he’d have been put down already.
Except we won’t be put down, not even pastured! Age can wither us, but we won’t flag, fail or flinch; no retreating to a life in the shade. “Good news, honey, 70 is the new 50,” said the wife to her depressed husband in a New Yorker cartoon.
Do the math. At 64, Mick Jagger still struts his stuff. Ivana Trump, at 59, recently wed a minor 35-year-old actor. “The groom wore white, the bride wore pink and those of a sensitive disposition averted their eyes,” reported a newspaper of Ivana’s fourth wedding.
At David Gest and Liza Minnelli’s star-crossed union, attended by Kirk Douglas, Joan Collins, Petula Clark, New York columnist Cindy Adams wrote that the reception was “the night of a 1,000 facelifts.”
Mock all you want. Fabulous, feckless and fearless, this is the much-analyzed and studied generation born between 1946 and 1964, the post-WW2 period of high birth rates, relative peace and plenty.
Over-caffeinated and overindulged subversives, aging hippies and grumpy curmudgeons, Baby Boomers are said by demographers to be the luckiest generation in history. With a rebellious disregard for authority (we are the authority), we turned on, tuned in, dropped out, to the best soundtracks, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Mao’s thousand flowers blooming, Woodstock, Kurt Vonnegut’s rants, rock-and-roll, shopping, sex, the Pill.
A generation that wants it all, we married our sweethearts, decamped to a house in suburbia, had two children, tightened our arteries with cigarettes and then loosened them again with booze or drugs, all the while enslaving ourselves to jobs that paid for the here and now, and if we’re lucky, for the future. One thing’s for sure: when the pharmaceuticals wear off and before slipping the surly bonds of earth, time—that subtle thief of our youth—isn’t going to catch us unawares.
Fiction of marriage
In the intervening years, the sweetheart turned to a pillar of hardened salt, the job a soul-destroying treadmill, shopping a crypto-fascist religion that does its feeble best to fill a big hole. With the children gone, couples who have drifted apart and become unlovable strangers find there’s no longer a need to sustain the fiction of marriage. In the UK where we have high divorce rates, divorces soar by 25 percent in January, prompted by the stress of family gatherings and being cooped up together indoors during the Christmas holidays.
It’s not true that men who leave the marital nest always trade in their exes for new models; of these divorces, 65 percent are initiated by women. Studies show that after years of looking after hearth, husband and home, women of a certain age find that the things that were once vitally important are no longer. Emotionally drained dry, they feel they’ve done their duty, they want to move on.
“When women reach the perimenopause, from 44 to 55, their hormone levels are fluctuating. This shifting tide of oestrogen affects circuits in the brain and the part that’s programmed to nurture and put everyone else’s needs first starts to shut down. Women feel ‘it’s my time now’; this change in their outlook sometimes means they won’t be continuing in their marriage,” writes Prof. Louann Brizendine in “The Female Brain.”
New yearnings
Freed from emotional and matrimonial handcuffs, some of these women—and men—think life’s happening elsewhere to someone else but them. Hopeful of starting again and seduced by the prospect of life lived on their own terms, they harbor new yearnings. If they’re wealthy, they give the middle finger to the physical ravages of time and buy new bodies and faces, wardrobes, adventures and romances.
A study of divorcees found that, ironically, divorces have led to less, not more, satisfaction with their new lives; that it’s hard to meet new partners; it’s expensive living alone. On vacation from their real selves and everyday lives, they wash up in foreign shores, lured by the attractions of sun, sea and sex. Targeted from the moment they get off the plane, some of these vulnerable women—and men—have flings with complete strangers to whom they hand over obscene sums of cash, in return for a sexual relationship or the promise of marriage.
‘I was bored, my children had left home and I was looking into a lonely future. This beautiful young man offered an escape, not just passionate sex and attention, but also the chance of a new life,’ said 54-year-old Sarah, who gave £80,000 to a man who became her lover during a holiday in Goa. Until she found out he was replaying the same tired old script to other older women who really should know better.
Adultery
After a lifetime’s hard work bringing up families, some Boomers find the lure of an affair compelling, of life being breathed back into forgotten limbs. A recent survey of the over-50s showed that a third of respondents claimed to be having affairs; that their reduced sex drive is no barrier to adultery; in some, it’s the trigger for an affair, which is deemed a last chance for self-fulfillment. Retired teacher Jane Juska’s ad in The New York Review of Books read: “Before I turn 67, I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.’ She was inundated with replies. The survey also showed that there has been a marked rise in sexually transmitted diseases among the same age group.
The widower Coleman Silk, played by Anthony Hopkins in the film version of Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain,” falls headlong in lust, and in love—in that order—with a young woman. Incredulous, he says to his friend: “When this stuff comes back so late in life, completely unexpected, it comes back with such force, there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s nothing to dilute it, it’s ignitable, ill considered.’ And so it is—this complete leave-taking of the senses, like a sharp, stinging downpour on a hot summer’s day, to get a romantic whiff of the past.”
Most Boomers are happy to live out their lives in sedentary comfort. Looking forward to their retirement, they’ve bought the golf kit and are poring over travel brochures. Still married to the same spouse, a more profound love for each other exists, utterly at home with the A to Z of give-and-take, every nuanced smile or frown, nook and crevice of each other’s bodies. “It’s the body I love; I particularly love the signs of its aging, which are, of course, the signs of my own aging,” said Crispin Sartwell of his wife’s body.
Then there are the GOTYs— the getting-old-thinking-young brigade—usually rich, blessed with genetic good fortune and with a rekindled fire in the belly, buzzing with enthusiasms for travel, extreme sports and Internet chat rooms. These audacious, newly vigorous Boomers push the boundaries of time, trying to look, think and act younger. They drink life to the lees, believing the best is just going to get better. Wiser to old mistakes, they commit new ones more interestingly. As if a switch has been turned on, they view the world through the prism of new desires, their search for happiness. Not for them the deserts of awful silences and emotional destitution in empty, stale marriages.
Breaking out of their emotional vertigos, these Boomers have been known to seek out their first loves, contract second or third marriages in the classic triumph of hope over experience.
Dark side
There’s also a dark side to Boomers, at whose door is laid the blame for the drugs culture, family breakdowns, feral kids. In Boomergeddon, Mike Males pooh-poohs the popular view of Boomers as the happy, prosperous product of the post-war economic revival. He cites instead the example of Californian Boomers who suffer high levels of drug and drink abuse, family chaos, psychological problems, STDs.
It’s not all rosy in the Garden of Eden. Whether living inside a room full of regrets and remembrances, playing a charade of unrequited dreams and loves, or trekking happily in Machu Pichu with the stamina of a teenager, married to our soulmates and with our children set fair for life, I think we Boomers should try and live every moment magnificently, before we run out of puff.
The future is a fast-abbreviating machete. At the threshold of ripeness, we’re not yet too old to be either wholly content with our achievements, or resigned to our lives’ discontents or failures. It feels like it’s always getting late rather early, but we’re a long time yet before the twilight world. There are many lives yet to be grasped and lived; they should still intoxicate, amaze, stir and shake us awake. As the poet wrote, we have to rage against the dying light. Bungee-jumping, anyone?
|
