From MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER in the NY Times today, July 22, 2017, Why Are the Baby Boomers in Such a Bad Mood?
Cut to: The Present.
I recently asked a neighbor how old she was: Nervous, reluctant, she said, “Oh, 60 or 61.”
This conveys the ennui of today’s “new middle age” baby boomers, immersed as a group suddenly in retirement, the loss of parents, the start of Medicare, the end of daily routine, the start of your husband’s affair, the sudden, urgent need to grapple for assets for the rest of life and to guess at its length while enduring rash-raising reactions to the word “Kardashian” (for which no prescription creams exist at present). Or all of the above plus no retirement and no assets because of no job! This produces “artisanal stress” (created, by hand, by individual boomers for themselves).
To those of us in it, the new middle age in America is the most despised age ever, right up there with “stillborn” and “dead.” No lovely, leafy glade — just a hazy, terrifying landscape of crepey cleavage, popping veins, trifocals and sagging breasts strewn across a lifeless vista. (And the one for women is just as bad.) This new middle age does not describe the lithe, the sexual, the hip or the cool — especially hard on baby boomers, the actual inventors (see above) of both “hip” and “cool.”
Read the complete article: Why Are the Baby Boomers in Such a Bad Mood?