Introduction xv
are now reinventing the concept of older age—a historic achievement
in itself. For the past century in the United States, the post-employment
stage of life was viewed as a kind of epilogue to the main body of work.
There were exceptions, of course, but people older than 65 were gener-
ally considered no longer active, productive, and contributing members of
society. The passage of Social Security in the 1930s and Medicare in the
1960s were of tremendous benefit, but made older Americans appear like
dependents, and further marginalized them from the rest of the “useful”
population. Boomers are changing that perception, a cultural pivot point
that will perhaps serve as their greatest legacy.
A big part of the rethinking of what constitutes “oldness” is the decreas-
ing significance of biologically defined age. There is a greater understand-
ing that one doesn’t go to bed one night “young” and wake up the following
morning “old” just because it happens to be your 50th, 60th, or 70th birth-
day, making such milestones increasingly less important. The virtual
disappearance of mandatory retirement (usually at age 65) has also made
one’s age not the defining marker it used to be. The great variation in older
people’s physical and cognitive condition—a 70-year-old can be fi t as a
fi ddle or a total wreck—is additional reason to no longer view biological
age as a particularly reliable measure of who a person actually is.
Boomers’ recasting of what used to be considered “old age” or one’s
“senior years” carries enormous cultural freight. By continuing to work
and live active lives for as long as physically and mentally possible,
boomers are blurring the lines between middle age and older age, in the
process making the fi nal phase of life not just a postscript to one’s pro-
ductive years. For the next couple of decades, anyway, the word “boom-
ers” may even come to serve as the defining term of people who are in
their mid-fifties or older, an interesting possibility. No one was ever really
comfortable with the terminology associated with older people (“seniors,”
“matures,” “elderly,” and newly politically correct labels such as “sea-
soned citizens,” “wellderly,” or “superadults”), making such a scenario to
me an attractive one.
The possible end of old age as we know it also poses major conse-
quences for boomers’ role as consumers. Should organizations even con-
tinue to think in terms of a market segment made up of “old” people? Will
such a market continue to exist given boomers’ determination not to look,
act, or think “old”? I think not, and argue that organizations should no
longer view older people as a specific demographic based on age. Rather,
as this book makes plain, marketers should see boomers as that same gen-
eration of people who now happen to be moving into their third act of life
