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Don’t ignore me!
It’s no secret to me, and likely to you that the demographic that reads, scans, loves, hates…
… my weekly blog posts are folks of a similar age (but not sex… er… gender) to myself… I’d guess that most are in the range of 45-80+ years. Put your hand up if you qualify… no cheating! (But please stick around if you’re younger, OK?)
Putting it more simply, let’s call us the “OK, BOOMER” group.
As a cohort, a demographic era, we’ve had enormous influence and impact over the entire globe for the past half century and more. World War II ended, the troops came home, jumped into bed, and one climax and 9 months later, we took over.
Politics, fashion, economics, housing, employment, sexual matters, environment, psychology… we’ve been Lords of the Land.
But are we becoming dinosaurs, doomed to fade and perish?
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Do you, like me, occasionally, sometimes, or maybe even a lot, find your sphere of influence, the acceptance and/or respect for your opinions and perspectives, showing signs of slippage within the younger cohorts, the Gen X, Z, Millennials etc., following in our footsteps?
Are we depreciating, like the Russian ruble, into irrelevance?
In years past, I’ve heard this thought brought up by others older than myself, but ironically, I dismissed it as measly elder crabbiness and grumbling without merit or basis in fact.
Point in case: sadly, I, in my own medical career, looked past hospital staff – doctors, nurses, lab techs, my colleagues – who essentially ignored elder patients in their beds who were talking pleasantly… or worse, crying out in agony for pain meds. They became less than human.
And then later, I remember the shock I felt when I was first called “Sir” in a restaurant. “Sir!”, are you joking? I’m barely 40… I’m no Sir. “The name’s Larry!”
Later still, I felt a jolt of surprise when someone younger than 30 called me by my first name without an invite… “That’ll be Sir to you Whippersnapper”, thinks I. Hmmmm… do I detect a hint of my own creeping crabbiness and grumbling? Nooooooo!
If I face the hard truth though, I kinda get it.
In my own true vision of “greyness”, ie. neither black nor white, and with my feet rather firmly planted on one side of the aging fence, I can see and relate to both sides of the divide.
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Yes, the advancing age we’ve attained is joined at the hip with acquisition and absorption of wisdom and life experience, both truly important attributes.
But the technology that increasingly runs our planet means that smooth functioning of almost Everything Everywhere All At Once requires a significant investment in current knowledge… not merely relying on tradition or learning acquired decades earlier. That’s Mad Men era thinking.
The world we find ourselves in today plays a pretty major role in this divide as the speed of technological innovation and change is leaving a large segment of the senior population scratching their heads (yes, this reluctantly includes me) from the firehose of information and app-based applications flooding our daily world.
If respect for elders today is to be based on insight and knowledge and ability, many of us are – respectfully – allowing it to slip away.
Wisdom and experience, while essential parts of a well-oiled (fossil fuel free oil!) planet, increasingly are taking a lesser role from a functional perspective.
What this reminds me, along with a desire to live longer, to experience the joys of a longer healthspan, is that I, along with other Boomers, must cling tightly to a willingness to keep abreast in a meaningful way with the changes coming at us with hurricane force.
I won’t be ignored if I give a cold shoulder to ignorance!
Man On The Fringe 