Baby-Boomer Males Have Lost The Boom
The greatest worry of many bluecollar men in middle life is that they can no longer take their health for granted. Longevity is not alluring to them. Of those over 45, many have fathers who are already deceased. These men choose to take life-and-death chances with the second half of their lives by pretending that their bodies remain bulletproof.
Family Circle, the popular magazine with a mass readership of 26 million, helped me to study how new passages affect working-class men. In November 1993, Family Circle randomly distributed 2,000 of my Life History surveys to members of a reader’s panel that is representative of a national sample, excluding the very rich and very poor. Of the 1,024 who responded, 630 were women, 394 were men.
The average age of the men who answered my survey was 47. Most (94 percent) were married and had at least one child; 26 percent had been divorced. The majority (61 percent) were not college graduates. They were largely skilled workers and technicians or administrators/ managers who earned an average of $45,000 a year. What does 50 look like to them?
Most appear to be resigned to accepting life as it is: Two-thirds are not anticipating any major change, and one-third feel more concerned about just getting by. Half these men feel tired and as if they are “running out of gas.”
Like their wives, they sense they have little power in the outside world, although they do have more power at work than the women do. These men are not introspective, they have very few close friends, and they seem averse to admitting problems that might stigmatize them as being less of a man. In fact, 78 percent of them find it difficult to express their worries and almost impossible to ask for help.
Men’s bodies, just like women’s, naturally undergo changes in shape and stamina in middle life. After age 45, men who are sedentary rapidly lose lean muscle mass and, consequently, strength.
Studies show, however, that older men who do strength training (lifting weights or working out against resistance on machines) as well as aerobics can rebuild their muscle power, making it much easier to lose unwanted pounds and inches, and actually improve their physical and sexual prowess in defiance of their biological clocks.
As men get older, their immune systems also need support. We now know that untreated depression is correlated with the onset of cancer. Prostate cancer is a hush-hush disease that now strikes 1-in-10 men, a figure as daunting as the number of women who will get breast cancer. The difference is that if it is caught early, prostate cancer is 80 PERCENT CURABLE. Yet 35,000 men a year are literally dying from embarrassment, most of them because they were humiliated by the very thought of having the anal/ digital exam that, together with a blood test, might have detected a malignancy while it was still contained in the prostate gland.
An increasing number of men, however, are beginning to make major life changes to promote and take pleasure in their new longevity.
“Changes need to be based not on fear of dying but on joy of living,” says Dr. Dean Ornish, the pioneer of non-medical reversal of heart disease. His non-profit research institute in Sausalito, Calif., tries to teach people that illness or suffering can be a doorway for transforming one’s life in ways that go well beyond just prolonging life.
An ordinary man, once exposed to the right tools and techniques for reclaiming his health without surgery, feels a thrill of empowerment, perhaps for the first time. That experience often spills over into other areas of his life, says Dr. Ornish, and becomes a driving force that sustains him in making lasting changes.
Crises are doorways. Even Samson can benefit by stepping through and enjoying the transformation.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate