The Savvy Boomer

State of the Baby Boomer

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Repost-This is how boomers connected in the `60s and `70s

OK, for those of you locked in the sights of the Twitter generation, you probably haven't given much consideration as to how your parents or others who were either teenagers or in their early 20's connected 30 or 40 years ago because what could they possibly have to communicate that was of any interest?

For starters, if they didn't connect, most of you in the"need to know it before it happens" generation wouldn't be here.  It may come as a shock to you that we somehow managed to communicate without smart-phones, texting, emails, twitter, facebook, skype, you tube, google etc. etc.  Yeah, it was pretty slow and lame compared to the insta-communications of today, but you know what?  That's what made you cool-knowing what was going on because you were "connected."  When we heard about something interesting, we didn't feel a need to yell it out to the world.  Indeed, we usually felt a need to only share it with a few others.  And no one ever gave a flying crap what anyone else other than their close friends and maybe family were doing at any given moment in time.  And even then, no one much cared.  In the 60's, if you hung out at the A&W, you could pretty much stay in the loop. 

 

Website for "silver travellers" misses the mark

I've always felt that commercial websites dedicated to the 50+ crowd could only be successful if they were niche oriented ie: investing, travelling, tech etc. (I ranted about this 3 years ago.) So when I read about Silver Travel Advisor on the 50+ marketing  website, I was anxious to look at it.

Review of "Stayin' Alive" by Michael Adams

Disclaimer:  While I get quite a few offers to review books on this site, I seldom do: a) because I'm not interested in the topic. b) I really have no reviewing skills other than saying what I like and don't like.  I was recently offered 2 books to review published by Penguin.  The reason I accepted is that they both concentrate on boomers and therefore interest me.  I still have not improved my issue of b)

I will review the second book," Leslie Beck's Longevity Diet" in a future post.

Michael Adams is the 64 year old President of the Environics group of research and communications consulting companies.  While he has offices in both the U.S. and Canada, "Stayin' Alive (How Canadian baby boomers will work, play, and find meaning in the second half of their adult lives)" has a marked slant towards Canadian boomers although I believe that many of his findings will also apply to U.S. boomers.  Since Adams has a research background, there are a lot of statistics quoted to prove his points, sometimes too often.  As such, there are occasionally some results discussed that I find hard to accept but most of the time, I either agreed or had an "AHA" moment. 

Stayin' Alive groups boomers into 1 of 4 different categories or tribes as he calls them.  Whenever I see this approach, I attempt to classify myself into 1 of them.  The problem was that I felt I had traits and characteristics in 3 of the 4 and while I guess I was able to classify myself as a member of 1 of them more than the others, I never really felt comfortable that I fit totally in any one of them.  So I'd like Mr. Adams to consider a fifth group.  Since he gave names to the 4 groups- Disengaged Darwinists, Anxious Communitarions, Connected Enthusiasts and Autonomous Rebels, I'd like to suggest to Mr. Adams that he calls the fifth group-Savvy Boomers.  Well, what did you expect me to suggest?

Each of the groups is constantly compared as to how they view issues such as family, health, politics, other generations such as X and Y, religion, immigration, technology, and of course retirement.  Since each tribe has a different outlook on life, the most important take-away is that you can't throw boomers into 1 pot (other than the traditional born between  '46 and '64 demographic.)  I've always maintained this and as such, the author has summed up much better than I have ever been able to as to why Social Media websites aimed specifically at the boomer demographic will never establish a "Facebook for boomers" type of traction.

I recommend this as an "interesting read" for all boomers and a "must read" for retail marketers, politicians, insurance and financial companies, technology companies, H.R. managers, retirement community developers, travel agents, and other generations (well, only if you want to understand what really makes your parents and grandparents tick.)   My favourite line from the book:

"This paragraph has been authored by a sixty-three-year-old male who thinks he has the body of a forty-year-old, the mind of a twenty-year old, the spirit of a child, and life expectancy close to infinity."

 

 

Older Boomers, Younger Boomers

This article about another Pew report points out the fact that age is becoming an irrelevant factor in who is online these days.  It states the obvious that older users are using the internet almost as much as younger users and in some cases we are the heaviest users of certain types of sites and applications.

What I found most interesting about this article however is that the author finally differentiated the 18 year spread of the boomer generation (those born between 1946 and 1964) as older boomers (ages 56-64) and younger boomers (ages 46-55.)  After all, like it or not, we are all boomers.

That was easy.

This is how boomers connected in the 60s and 70s

OK, for those of you locked in the sights of the Twitter generation, you probably haven't given much consideration as to how your parents or others who were either teenagers or in their early 20's connected 30 or 40 years ago because what could they possibly have to communicate that was of any interest?

For starters, if they didn't connect, most of you in the"need to know it before it happens" generation wouldn't be here.  It may come as a shock to you that we somehow managed to communicate without smart phones, texting, emails, twitter, you tube, google etc. etc.  Yeah, it was pretty slow and lame compared to the insta-communications of today, but you know what?  That's what made you cool-knowing what was going on because you were "connected."  When we heard about something interesting, we didn't feel a need to yell it out to the world.  Indeed, we usually felt a need to only share it with a few others.  And no one ever gave a flying crap what anyone else other than their close friends and maybe family were doing at any given moment in time.  And even then, no one much cared.  In the 60's, if you hung out at the A&W, you could pretty much stay in the loop. 

How did we connect?  Well-it all depended more on who you knew, and not so much on what you knew.  For example, a lot of people didn't know about the greatest get-together of the 60's (maybe ever) called "Woodstock" until days or weeks after it happened. You may find that hard to believe since today, almost everyone on the planet knows everything about every potential "happening" thing within seconds of it being announced.

I found out about Woodstock because I happened to be in Montreal at the time and someone at a party we were at, had been at the local Playboy club (remember them?-now if you were able to get into a PB club, you were really connected)  and had overheard a musician talking about Jimi Hendrix playing in some place called Woodstock NY, the following week.  Hendrix was not mainstream back then but one of my friends who was plugged into music told us that he was great.  Good enough for us-US roadtrip- Hell yeah!!  We were off. 

The sad story is we never made it because the VW van (how classic was that?) we were driving just had no cajones left.  So after it broke down, we spent the weekend trying to drink all the COLT 45 we could find in Albany NY where it turns out one of the guys in the van met a lovely lady and last contact I had, still lives there  after he married her.   Although he was a Canadian, he still had to register but luckily, his draft lottery number was never called.

Everyone who was "connected" just seemed to know when there would be a great party, a bitchin street race, a cool protest, a much needed brawl (no weapons involved back then), a sporting event not to be missed, an awesome concert etc etc.

The point is, we didn't need or want something like a social media website to connect us to these kinds of events back then because we had our own network and methods for finding out.  If you didn't know what was going on, that's because you weren't connected either because you didn't want to be or didn't deserve to be.  Today everyone "thinks" they are connected, but those of us who lived in the 60s and 70s had to use something more than a gadget to connect and if you don't understand what I mean, I feel sorry for you. 

Reality check time.  Do you really care what anyone else is doing right now-other than your family and Obama? (and CNN pretty much has the latter covered 24x7.) 

NOTE:  Notwithstanding the above, I have several gadgets which I use to "connect" now, and I use Twitter, FB, Linked-In and of course blog.  However, I still look back on the ability to make connections the "old school way" as understanding how connections are really made.

Fashion Reading Glasses for Savvy Boomers

We've discussed reading glasses a few times on this site over the past couple of years so when I was approached by Fashion Reading Glasses to review their products, I thought it would be more of the same.  However, I was pleasantly surprised not only by their fun and trendy styling, but also their incredibly low pricing.

Just because our older eyes require some assistance to read all the small print, doesn't mean that we have to wear nondescript glasses.  Take a look at the  pictures below (the polka dots are my personal favorites) and you'll see why I think these glasses are great value-most of them around $15.  I gave a couple of pairs to boomer friends who had much the same reaction-both had been using glasses they paid close to $50 for and had zero styling so of course, they were thrilled with these.

Here's the best part.  Order 2 pairs from the Fashion Reading Glasses website and if you mention this post in the comments section of the order, you'll get a 3rd pair free.  In other words, about $30 for 3 pairs of fashionable reading glasses or the same price that you'll pay for 1 old fashioned pair from your drugstore.  A nice touch is they have matching cases.

Also, for our Canadian readers, they are Canuck-friendly with not only Canadian pricing but also no worries about clearing Canadian customs as they also ship from Canada.

Boomers embracing technology faster than ever

For the past two years, Accenture has been conducting in-depth research about the usage patterns of various types of consumer technology products and services among U.S. consumers. 

The research was completed in the winter of 2008/2009 and provides direct comparisons with last winter’s 2007/2008 research data. The goal was to determine if there had been any changes in usage between Baby Boomers + (age 45 and older) and Generation Y (ages 18 to 24).  The research uncovered several interesting trends.

You can view and download the whole report in a pdf file.