April 3, 2019
"When you see a fork in the road, take it."
So allegedly said the ballplayer, Yogi Bera, in a classic blooper quote.
I can relate to the sense of wry that line implies, standing perplexed at a junction with no road sign. I am now at a fork in the road of my own life, facing a junction in my “encore" career where I have some hard choices to make about my retirement life.
In a nutshell, I need to decide fairly soon whether to call it a day here at bouncingbabyboomer or to revive and refresh this site.
Bear with me while I muse about that out loud with you.
On the upside, there could be a hockey stick
When the lady host of Generation Bold, Adriane Berg, invited me to be a guest this month for an hour of Boomer lifestyle radio chat, I was both pleased and pained. Pleased because such an invite is a real compliment when it comes from a host who’s had a lot of interesting guests. But pained because it also requires me to choose what to do with this space that floated away after a death in the family.
If I believed in omens, I’d have to grant the timing of the invite could be a seen as a sign to bring this site back to life instead of letting it go. To be offered a chance to mention an especially relevant web site to an audience full of especially relevant participants may be too hard to resist. I love win-win encounters with simpatico allies.
No shortage of timely topics
I still have no shortage of timely topics to offer. After more than a decade reporting elsewhere on science, health and digital trends, I have a golden Rolodex and plenty of content to share. From healthy aging and home tech to trends in Boomer living, to fashion, fitness and food, there is always something new to see in the Boomer aisle, and when it comes to leading edge science or tech I may even be able to share a scoop or few.
The harder question will be how many other curious Boomer eyes will find us and stay tuned in?
If they do swing by this web address, will they ask for more and subscribe? That will also be a potent sign.
Still a big need for good Boomer voices
When I began down this path late last decade there was a ton of speculation about what Boomers would want in retirement, but nobody knew, few were predicting, and those who tried were rarely speaking as Boomers themselves. Most retirement pitches made to people my age were about as appealing as pablum on toast. Few of us wanted to dance to that beat. We never wanted to be that kind of elderly.
Today, as I am sure my radio host also knows, details have changed. Yes, there is more competition in any niche you can name. But at the same time, lots of people are also taking about about "Aging 2.0" which could be headed for its own "hockey-stick" spike in growth. Meanwhile I have since grown old enough for Medicare and sprouted more gray in my hair. I have now fully joined the demographic I intended to write about.
So when it comes to holding on to this blog, I can still make a case either way.
But on the downside, drowning in sound bites
On the flip side, it is also easy to make a case that everyone is already overwhelmed with too many interesting things to read, see and think about. So many kinds of content have been untethered, unbundled and set adrift to either sink or swim. The information universe has become a swirling waterspout that is always drowning us headlines and sound bites.
Or as Scott Adams, of the Dilbert strip, once moaned, it too often feels as if a firehose has been aimed at your tea cup of a brain.
It takes most of what we can muster just to sift through this blizzard of input for what feels important to catch, watch and retain. Forget any space for added depth and perspective. We are lucky to note the bare who, when and where.
For authors and writers like me, it's now too easy to think we should put down our pens. There are already too many words chasing too few readers out there. But then, most of us picked up those pens in the first place because we believed we had something extra to say that might make an extra good difference somewhere.
We didn't lose that drive to help and share simply because it is harder now to be seen. But we do have to accept that every writer today has to find both their own best words and their own best readers.
Are we better equipped to see?
If any generation should still be able to summon an attention span, it might be my cohort, the wave of early Boomers born in the first post-war decade. We were lucky enough to engage our young minds and brains at a more leisurely pace. We grew up in the Leave It to Beaver era when it was possible to linger over a fishing pole, smell the roses or track shooting stars.
Today, my cohort still enjoys our long reads and our insightful magazines. Aiming streams of perspective at people like me who are just starting to age just might have a good shot at sustaining an audience.
Delivering depth and meaning in ten minutes or less was also my focus back when I had a page two column in print. As a systems analyst who managed big data sets, and a girl geek building networks of allies online since '85, I pitched a proposal to write about the more personal impacts of all the change rippling out from Silicon Valley. Thus my journalist phase began and lasted for most of a decade.
Two years into that gig, I was deeply enmeshed in this frenetic new sphere called "cyberspace," and I was calling myself an “info junkie” about to “OD” from a daily diet of too much to digest.
That joke thinly masked a strong sense that my life was about to get increasingly more intense due to the Internet. Talk about omens and foresight. For the almost three decades since, I have been rapidly shifting gears into and out of the fast lane.
Paradox served on more wry
As the 90s progressed, the Internet buzzed, and names like Netscape and Yahoo reigned, I could see a near future in which the forces that fed me would also devour big chunks of my life. I was often conflicted about how to divide my time both on and offline.
I began to use the phrase "c22" as a frequent piece of shorthand. Drawn from the ultra-ironic book, “Catch 22,” the phrase came to be my own sardonic way to describe feeling jammed between a rock and a hard space.
A Catch 22 traps you in a can’t-win-for-losing kind of paradox, where to make things better can be to make things worse at the same time. Its not entirely different from the fork in the road with no sign at the top of this page.
The more the Internet gave me to go, see and do, the more it drained time and energy. The more I enjoyed it, the worse I felt about any other loose ends untied. The high points were too great for any lasting regrets, but it still exhausts me to remember it all.
Fast forward to now, newspapers in print are all but dead and I have become what my peers like to call “semi-retired.” I work when there is pay, or the aim feels so rewarding that the money feels irrelevant.
Well, I guess by writing this whole long essay when I was tempted to pull the plug I have arrived at an answer. Or at least an answer for now. This blog felt like a natural niche when I started it, and it still feels quite good to pick up this pen. Once again, I cannot resist.
So yes, please hit the subscribe button in the right column if you’d like to see future monthly updates from me, and thanks very much if you do. Together, we just might uncover some very interesting ways to keep on bouncing along while we age.
Until next post, all best.
editor in chief, bouncingbabyboomer.com
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picture credit: unsplash.com
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