Twilight Of The Boomers

  • ILLUSTRATIONS FOR TIME BY MATT MAHURIN

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    ILLUSTRATIONS FOR TIME BY MATT MAHURIN

    Evidence? We may claim to feel as if we're 40, but if you really want to know what we've got on our minds, wander the Web to gauge the current state of boomer consciousness. A recently launched site targeted at people over 50, , boasts of its large-size type fonts. Elsewhere, the author of a regular boomer column begins, "I had some serious dental work done this week." The longest threads in the community section of "Boomer Board" are about estrogen-replacement therapies. A new boomer site, , has so brazenly donned the generation's narcissistic garment that without irony, it calls its series of cheesy self-evaluation quizzes "Me Meters." On "Are You a Candidate for Burnout?" I scored an 86.

    The Marriott chain has opened about 150 managed-retirement communities under the names Brighton Gardens and MapleRidge, apparently confident that boomers will be filling the apartments in 10 years, the assisted-care quarters in 20, the intensive-care units in 30. About 25% of those latter spaces are being specifically reserved for residents with cognitive disorders. Makes sense: while only 8% of people over 65 suffer from the severe memory loss that characterizes Alzheimer's disease, the number leaps to a range of 30% to 47% for those over 85, and we all know that we're going to live longer than our parents. Boomer watcher Dychtwald, in his list of 10 physical, social, spiritual, economic and political crises just ahead, puts "mass dementia" at No. 2.

    If you want a glimpse of the boomer future that you'll never see in the ads for Brighton Gardens or MapleRidge (knowingly ironic boomer question: Where do they come up with these names?), travel instead to Rochester, Minn., and the Mayo Clinic. In Dr. Darryl Chutka's classroom, the 10 first-year medical students look a little different from what you might expect. They're all wearing goggles coated in a clear film, ear plugs, heavy rubber gloves, extra-thick socks. They also have marshmallows stuffed in their mouths, corn kernels scattered inside their shoes, stiff, confining braces around their necks--and enormous, padded diapers stuffed inside their underclothes.

    What Professor Chutka calls the "Aging Game" is a novel, if slightly frightening, effort to familiarize future physicians with the circumstances of the patients they will be treating when they emerge from their medical training. The goggles simulate cataracts; the ear plugs, loss of hearing; the gloves, arthritis; the socks, edema; the marshmallows, post-stroke paralysis; the corn, bunions; the neck braces, the nearly universal muscular stiffness of old age. The diapers...well, the diapers are indicative of what managers at Kimberly-Clark consider the promising future of the market for "adult-incontinence products," one of their fastest-growing areas of business.

    Wearing all this stuff is the easy part of the aging game; what's harder is performing the various tasks Chutka demands of the students, like reading the labels on a vast array of prescription containers when you're wearing goggles, or counting out the daily ration of pills with fingers rendered numb by a sheath of glove rubber. Near the course's end, the students are placed in a mock nursing home, where other students, trained to act like ward attendants, fail to bring them their food, or shove spoonfuls of apple sauce into mouths rendered immobile by the marshmallows or ignore them altogether. "They wheeled me into a corner, and it was so hard to see and hear anything," remembers third-year student Melissa Niesen. "It was really depressing."

    Useful, though: "It's definitely in the minds of my classmates," Niesen adds, "that we will be seeing a lot more older individuals in our practices."

    That's you, Mr. and Mrs. Boomer. The good news is that you will be retiring younger than your parents and living longer than them too; in fact, if you started your career at 23, are one of the few sufficiently well off to be able to retire at 55, and live to be 90, you will spend more than half your adulthood in retirement--an unprecedented reconfiguration of life's traditional arc. But in what physical condition will you spend those years? And with what financial resources will you be able to finance them?

    The best case would see the entire Sun Belt populated by a new cadre of semi-retirees, fit and healthy, working part time from their homes while enjoying the fruits of well-invested savings and well-funded pension plans. That's what the management is counting on at the headquarters of the Del Webb Corp. in Phoenix, Ariz., developers of the Sun City chain of retirement communities. Del Webb executives are quivering in anticipation of a flood of boomers pouring into the retirement-home market. LeRoy Hanneman, 54, Del Webb's CEO, stands on a hill from which he can see his company's future as vividly as he can mix metaphors: "The explosion of baby boomers is like a freight train bearing down on us," he says. "Del Webb has already laid the tracks for the future, and we expect to benefit mightily."

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