BouncingBabyBoomer.com

Living As If

A dear old pal of mine, Dave deBronkart, survived a very scary bout with kidney cancer last year inspiring all of his friends in the process. He is now doing great health-wise and loving his new role as an "E-Patient" advocate (my series on HealthCare 2.0 next week will include several mentions from Dave's E-Patient blog ). Dave also has a Google list he calls "Living As If Your Life Depended on It" which talks about living with added meaning.  I would like to take a leaf from his book and borrow part of his phrase to apply in a slightly different way.

I want to suggest starting right now, that we as a nation live "As If" we were already OK, and then keep that image in mind each day.

 

I don't mean casting back to the days of shopping until we dropped (if you ever did) or counting your extra money (if you ever made some) or sampling the best food and wine you can try. I mean casting ahead to where you -- as a person -- want to be when we finish this long march towards our recovery, and then living as if you are already there.

 

What do you intend to be doing with more prudence and less haste? Where will you be more sensitive or less driven? What will you simplify in your life to feel less burdened? Where do you plan to take more responsibility for how things work out? Where will you contribute to something larger than your own needs?

 

Whatever you imagine will be your new, better country and your new, better self in it, please keep that image near the front of your mind every day. It can be our own national version of "fake it until you make it."

 

It also has a much stronger chance of coming true that way.

It's the same 'ole low wherever you go

for the jr. boomer department...

If you're around 45 and feeling low, you've got lots of cohorts around the globe. So says Scientific American in one of its 60 Second Science podcasts, reporting on a study in the journal Science and Medicine. People from Bangalore or Boston all say they hit the pits for a stretch in between the peaks of well-being and optimism you feel in your 20s and should feel again after 55. They found this same U-curve wherever they went; culture, affluence, marital status all made no difference.(For text of this podcast, click here.)

I think I am going to file this snip in the bulging folder I've labeled "science confirms common sense."

The Gloomiest Gen?

According to a study recently released by the Pew Research Center, we Boomers are in a "collective funk." We are said to be more downbeat about our lives than the generations who came before and after us.

According to the Pew survey, Boomers rate their overall quality of life lower than their parents and believe it is harder to get ahead now than it was 10 years ago. We are also less likely to say our standard of living exceeds what our parents had at a similar age.

I don't know that this makes us more "gloomy." Perhaps it just makes us more realistic.

Consider that our parents reaped all the benefits of rapid American growth when the rest of the world was still recovering from all the wounds of war. The years surrounding our own birth were not only about a "boom" in babies; it was boom time everywhere in the States.The GI Bill provided college degrees that let our parents ride a wave that led to the largest middle class the US had ever known. There was low hanging fruit to be picked on almost every tree, from buying land and building things to a burgeoning service sector to an exploding market for all the new goods we were designing and making ourselves.

The largest mistake everyone made -- in retrospect -- was thinking that this prosperity would provide an endless ladder upward to more and more of the same.

What looked like a ladder was really more of a window of opportunity.

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