{"id":1725,"date":"2010-04-12T07:43:16","date_gmt":"2010-04-12T11:43:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicholsclan.com\/tinblog\/?p=1725"},"modified":"2010-04-09T13:30:27","modified_gmt":"2010-04-09T17:30:27","slug":"talkin-bout-my-g-g-generation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2010\/04\/talkin-bout-my-g-g-generation.html","title":{"rendered":"Talkin’ ‘Bout My… G-g-generation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"old<\/a>The Who sang, “Hope I die before I get old.”\u00a0 I can’t say I’m personally hoping for that, but on the flip side I do think more now about my impending senior years.\u00a0 Minimally, I know I’ll be in good company.\u00a0 Of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65, half are alive now.\u00a0 People 65 today can expect a minimum of 20 relatively healthy years, and that number will rise to 30 by the time the last of us Baby Boomers hit retirement.<\/p>\n

Let that sink in a bit.\u00a0 Add to it the reality of the birth rate in most developed countries being only about 1.2 children per woman (2.1\/woman is required for a stable population).\u00a0 Then factor in that most developing countries, where the birth rates are considerably higher are, well… developing.\u00a0 And the inexorable trend is that birth rates fall as standards of living increase.<\/p>\n

When you put this altogether, what you see is a trend where there are fewer in the younger generations and more in the older.\u00a0 One of the obvious implications to this is that programs like Social Security and Medicare are ultimately unsustainable.\u00a0 In Germany, France, and Japan there are already fewer than two working adults supporting each retired person.\u00a0 The US isn’t far behind.\u00a0\u00a0 But does that mean we simply abandon these popular social programs?\u00a0 I don’t think so, but I do think it means rethinking “retirement.”\u00a0 And I think that’s maybe a good thing.<\/p>\n

The prospect of being retired for 30 years is frankly a little disconcerting.\u00a0 It’s hard to project that far forward, but easy to look that far back.\u00a0 30 years ago I was in college.\u00a0 That was several lives ago.\u00a0 I’m not the young man I was then in many many ways.\u00a0 In the same way that my life has not been static across the last 30 years, it won’t be static for 30 years of retirement.\u00a0 At least I hope it won’t.\u00a0 That would be a dreadful thing to look forward to.\u00a0 Similarly, I also don’t want to be doing what I do now for the next 50 years.\u00a0 So what does one do?<\/p>\n

The problem is that most of our workplace culture is designed around the model of taking people from young adulthood to retirement.\u00a0 The prospect of getting back on that Merry-Go-Round is not all that appealing.\u00a0 I don’t want to go back to school, get a new entry level job in another career and work my way up the ladder again.\u00a0\u00a0 My needs, my ambitions, and my skills at that point will be very different than a young adult’s.\u00a0 There’s no family to start and provide for.\u00a0 There’s not the drive to succeed and compete, and working 60 hour weeks has lost its appeal.\u00a0 Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt.\u00a0 It’s more about being useful, valued, and compensated enough to offset living expenses.\u00a0 Sure, Wal-Mart has figured out how to exploit that niche, but we can’t all be greeters.\u00a0 Most of the world doesn’t really know what to do with, or how to incent, the older generation.<\/p>\n

Seniors are an enormous resource.\u00a0 They have experience and wisdom that only comes with life.\u00a0 We can’t afford to just pay them to play shuffleboard and do crosswords.\u00a0 And as they are (or we will be) an ever widening slice of the population, we can’t afford to try and succeed without their contributions.\u00a0 Part of making this work has to be figuring out how to create jobs that leverage senior’s skills in an environment that’s sensitive to their needs and appealing to people at this different stage of life.\u00a0 Something I don’t think is happening much if at all today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Who sang, “Hope I die before I get old.”\u00a0 I can’t say I’m personally hoping for that, but on<\/p>\n

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