When Time Goes By was barely a glimmer in the back of my mind in 2003, I had been researching aging for about seven or eight years during which time I had amassed a hefty library of books on the subject along with hundreds of pages of popular, medical and research reports. After all that study, the only message I could find was that getting old is entirely about debility, decline and disease. No one had anything good to say about it.
My refusal to believe that was the genesis of this blog which would investigate, think out loud and write about what getting old is “really like.” I would not avoid the normal changes that come with advancing years, but I would also seek to correct to some degree the prevailing zeitgeist in both popular and scholarly circles that there are no positive aspects to aging, that it is all about being unwell.
Back in those years before TGB, the potential consequences of the aging of the gigantic baby boomer generation was confined, mostly, to researchers concerned with statistics and demographics. It had not trickled down yet to advertisers, politicians, self-help gurus, cosmetic surgeons, pharmaceutical manufacturers, book publishers and the popular media. That changed in 2006, when the oldest boomers began turning 60 – a nice round number to take advantage of – revealing a huge, new potential for profit-taking.
And so they all jumped on the boomer bandwagon headlining stories in newspapers, magazines and on television for that generation creating a new market for products and services aimed at them. Internet sites with the word “boomer” in the name multiplied like bunny rabbits although most of them failed. (I can tell you why, but that's for another day.) The marketing to boomers, however, continues to grow.
But a funny thing has happened with that: the boomer-targeted media is still about how awful it is to get old. Superficially, it doesn't always look that way with the bright, shining faces of handsome people in their slim, trim bodies riding bicycles whose only concession to age is (professionally styled) gray hair - lots of it.
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