How Should you Spend your Retirement? DAY TWO

enroll in a Class

Continuing education is not just important for your cognitive health and keeping your mind sharp; it’s also an opportunity to meet other like-minded people with curious minds even if some people are fifty years younger and might have purple hair and a few have no hair at all.

For instance, go take a calculus class at a local university or community college near you. You will not understand a single word spoken by the instructor, of course, but you can be assured that none of your younger classmates will either because, hey, it’s calculus. However, they are likely to take you under their wing and anoint you as their mascot and ask you to pledge Beta Kappa Feta, one of the cheesiest fraternities.

How should you spend your retirement? DAY ONE

Join a book club. This will enable you to get together once a month with a sociable group of people who also aren’t sure how to correctly operate a Kindle. For an hour or so, you’ll spend time discussing the last book you’ve read and how the movie was better. Then, you’ll spend the next hour or so arguing about the next book you should all read before ultimately agreeing on a book nobody likes and nobody will finish in time for the next book club meeting. Then you will all start yawning because it’s almost nine o’clock and getting near bedtime. (See this site for further instructions.)

How Should You Spend Your Retirement? DAY THREE

Sign up for an online dating service if you’re single. First, carefully build your online dating profile, being sure to use a photo taken back when your hair was still black and your stomach still flat, if it ever was. (But probably don’t use the one where you’re wearing the bright green polyester leisure suit.)

In your bio, mention your Olympic gold medal and your Purple Heart. And just remember that if you feel slightly awkward about your embellishments, the individuals you meet online will almost assuredly not really look like the picture they used and also may not have won multiple Nobel Peace Prizes.

How You Should Spend Your Retirement: DAY FOUR

Join a travel group

With work no longer a factor, it’s time to travel! See Paris with others who haven’t figured out euros and think the French are snobby by insisting on speaking French! Visit Venice with people who can’t hold their Chianti! Voyage to the far reaches of the earth along with other intrepid voyagers who will spend most of the communal breakfast making sure they’ve taken all their pills!

How You Should Spend Your Retirement: DAY FIVE

Attend a protest.

Political activism is a great way to meet people with similar views and commitments in your area. Plus, there's a serious sense of camaraderie at protests and you’ll have lots of time to talk and get to know fellow protestors while waiting to be bailed out by your kids. In addition, you may finally be able to use some of the signs you proudly if inexplicably saved in the back of the upstairs closet from that 1974 antiwar march.

On the Difficulty of Remaining Young

After screwing up the world for the last 50 years or so, we baby boomers are clearly no longer lead players in our culture. We have become generic character actors, comic relief, like Chester in “Gunsmoke,” a reference surely lost on people busy streaming “Stranger Things” and “White Lotus.” We boomers rightly sense we have become irrelevant to the central story, unconnected to the moment’s gestalt, which many of us believe may be a digestive disorder.  

Is it surprising, then, that we have become the butt of “ok, boomer” jokes? Yes, admittedly, we have ruined the planet, despoiled the oceans and bear much of the responsibility for the success of “Celebrity Apprentice.” But does all that justify becoming the coronavirus’s target demographic, constantly referred to as the elderly, the fragile, the at-risk and worst of all, the dead?

Not that long ago—when old people were just called old people before the word seniors was invented—age and maturity were revered. Youth was something to grow out of, like tie-dyed pants and Nehru jackets.

Older generations consequently weren’t obsessed with staying young forever. They were content to watch the world pass them by. They knew they had wisdom, perspective and 5-percent off on senior day at the supermarket. They were OK with slowly fading away, as long as they could do it from their La-Z-Boy recliners. 

     Us boomers, not so much. 

No longer young, many of us continue wanting to seem young, trying to act young. And it’s not easy.

Inundated with how-to-stay-healthy advice, we use anti-aging face cream and regenerative moisturizer (SPF 132!) and drink bottled water from pristine springs rather than Mello Yello from god knows where. We eliminate gluten from our diet and try ingesting more antioxidants and fewer oxidants, if we could figure out which are which.

We hire a personal trainer, then check our target heart rate on a Fitbit as if we understood what’s a target heart rate. We play pickleball and are disappointed to learn no gherkins involved. We go to yoga and Pilates and Zumba and Tai Chi and would do downward dog if we could figure out how to do upward dog immediately afterward.

We play brain games to ward off dementia and do Qi Gong to ward off osteoporosis. We get new knees, replace our hips and swap out our rotator cuffs.

Awash in unfamiliar popular culture, we nevertheless believe we can distinguish between Dua Lipa and Doja Cat before admitting we have no idea who either of them is. We have a bunch of Spotify and Pandora playlists but also a stack of old 45s, Guess Who cassette tapes and three non-ambulatory Walkmans. We imagine we’d get all the references in Saturday Night Live skits, but of course it’s on too late for us to watch it live.

At sea in a high-tech storm, we Zoom with friends, Skype with former colleagues and WhatsApp with family but still don’t know how to find those digital photos from that trip to Greece. We’re finally on Instagram when everyone has migrated over to TikTok. We now have so many gizmos and a bounty of complex thingamagigs, along with several completely unnecessary doohickeys, but still can’t figure out how the QR code works. And when something goes wrong with our iPhone 32, we have to find a nearby 12-year-old to fix it.  

We do all this trying to hold on to our youthful past, but it’s hard, especially when our past happened back before we were paying attention. Plus, when you get older, there’s a lot more past to remember. And now there’s a lot more complicated present to deal with.

In addition to the traditional problems involved with getting older—increasing bodily frailty, faulty memory, root canals—our generation also confronts some unique challenges, including kale-flavored instant waffles, mounting LinkedIn requests from people we’ve never heard of and receiving mail with an invitation to a complimentary dinner where you can learn about cremation (I chose the salmon entree.).

We find ourselves living in a world where the print size of menus seems to have become smaller and restaurants appear to have become louder and frequently we feel much less capable of dealing with it all, particularly if there are acronyms involved. How do we navigate this scary world and make believe we really understand text messages that end with KMN?

I looked it up; it’s Kill Me Now.

FIHNI. (Frankly, I Have No Idea.)

Blog Post Title Two

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Blog Post Title Three

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Blog Post Title Four

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.