The Orange County Register, August 20th, 2006
On a pleasant summer evening, I’m walking the dog in the park when I see the two guys: One has a skateboard, the other a video camera.
The guy with the skateboard is poised above four concrete steps leading into the park. The other is going to video him as he leaps the steps and lands on his feet on the rolling board.
Except he doesn’t, of course. He lands on his tush, grunts loudly, grabs the board and starts all over again.
Nothing special about the game except the guys look to be in their late 20s. By their age, their fathers had put aside the toys of teenhood and shouldered responsibilities of adulthood already. They were dads.
Who are these Peter Pans, determined to never grow up?
Author Christopher Noxon calls them “rejuveniles ... people who have tastes or mindsets that are traditionally associated with people younger than themselves.”
Time magazine labels them “twixters.” The won’t-leave-home kids who inhabit a new land between adolescence and adulthood.
And as they extend youth, so are we extending age.
Lu Molberg, head of the Riverside County Area Agency on Aging, says everyone is taking longer to grow up at both ends of life’s spectrum.
Here’s how she pegs the ages:
0-29 – emerging young adult.
29-40 – young adult
40-55 – adult
55-75 – middle-aged
75-95 – seniors
95 plus – elderly
“This started before the boomers,” she says, “but look for the boomers to move it along.”
Longevity is the key to it, Molberg says. She recently attended a futurists conference in Toronto where experts argued that some of today’s babies will live to 125.
Futurist Ken Dychtwald agrees. In his seminal book, “Age Wave,” written 17 years ago, Dychtwald argued for pushing “old age” back to 80.
“There’s a new landscape,” he says today. “People are staying younger longer, postponing adult responsibilities, and adults are remaining vigorous and vital and postponing the aging process.”
He would eliminate the word “senior” from the age definitions, he says. Instead, he would call them “older adults.”
The conundrum occurs when these older adults want to claim so-called old-age benefits long before they embrace old age, Dychtwald says.
He refers, of course, to Social Security, a program that not only provided some financial security for older Americans but also defined 65 as the beginning of old age.
Add the word “senior” to the 65-plus definition of “old age” and you cause real trouble, in Dychtwald’s view.
Can you move the marker of “old age” without creating a horrific national backlash? If you call people in their mid-60s middle-aged, should you stop giving them old-age benefits?
Dychtwald ducks the question like a politician in the middle of a hot primary.
Me? I’m going to wallow in the middle of my middle age.
