Ignore those girls in the blue-jean ads.
Forget the youth-happy pap of movies and magazines and TV-land.
Look at the real world, instead.
Walk down a street. Sit in a theater. Attend a community function. Look around.
America is growing older.
We’re all growing older. Some of us just started earlier.
In short, after six–and–a–half decades of baby booms and teenage tyranny and abject worship at the altar of youth, America is coming of age.
The era of the Older American has arrived.
Older Americans are the fastest-growing minority group in the country, and more and more of them today are refusing to hang their grey heads in shame at having committed another birthday.
More than 30 million Americans are age 60 or over. Most of them are healthy, active, functioning citizens who pump an estimated $100 billion a year into the economy through their purchases of goods and services.
The cult of youth, meanwhile, is by no means dead, but it might be on its way out.
In 1900, one person out of every 25 was at least 65 years old.
Today, the ratio is one in eight. The generation that trusted no one over 30 in the 1960s now is over 60 and counting.
Although the nation’s love affair with youth may finally have cooled down, the idea of “getting old” still scares many people to death. In fact, it seems many people would rather die than get old.
One National Institute of Health survey completed in the latter part of the 20th century revealed that most people expect to live a while longer than they really want to. The years of old age, many seem to feel, are not worth living. Some are even more afraid of becoming “old and senile” than they are of getting cancer.
While some of our apprehensions are valid (getting old can mean problems and losses, reduced incomes, shrinking social contacts, and failing health), most of our worst fears about aging are unfounded, and stem from a handful of myths.
Over the years these myths have helped sentence millions of Americans to lives of boredom, uselessness, often hardship, and worst of all the numbing emptiness of life in nursing homes and mental institutions.
How many times have you heard someone say that at about age 60 or 65, human beings undergo physical and mental changes that limit their ability to perform former tasks, make sound decisions, assume responsibility, or continue to function in the world of work?
According to medical science, there is no biological event that markedly changes human being in their 60s. Most people who reach their 65th birthday could go right on working.
The number 65 is an arbitrary figure picked back in 1881 by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Germany, who instituted the world’s first Social Security program.
He picked 65 as the pension age after his actuaries reported that few Germans in those days lived much longer than that.
The number stuck.
By the time other countries (including our own, in the 1930s) adopted Social Security programs, age 65 had become entrenched as the “out to pasture” point.
The only exception has been in politics; we are still willing to entrust our national leadership to the over-60 generation.
The truth is, scientists assure us, that aging is a gradual, continuing and (thank heaven) very slow process that has nothing to do with being old or incompetent.
Other myths include the following:
Ironically, as America grows older, we are becoming what one of the country’s leading authorities on aging calls “an age irrelevant society.”
We no longer blink at the idea of a 22-year-old political candidate or a 70-year-old college student.
As for retirement, it doubtlessly can be a mixed blessing.
It depends a lot on the job you’re leaving—and what you must look forward to.
Now where did I see those blue-jean ads?
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Top o’ the morning!