Boomers in denial about their aging

We attach great meaning to meaningless labels.

Labels and brands have become critical in how we perceive our world, possessions, selves and others. But labels are never more cruel or clueless than when applied to age.

Generations dismiss each other across the divide. The phrases, “He’s just a kid” and “He’s an old geezer” inevitably conclude with, “so what does he know?” Mutual need and respect are deemed irrelevant.

Our culture encourages us to refute our own ages. So children insist they are fully mature and older adults dress like teens, some surgically “plasticizing” themselves until they weirdly look younger than they did decades ago.

No one seems to want to be their age.

I mention this because a grave social crisis has arisen.

The first baby boomers are turning 60, and God forbid we boomers should ever be “not young.” We’re not “old” yet (we think – more on that later), but young is an appellation being wrenched from our desperate hands.

Raised in a narcissistic consumer age, we boomers are now fretting about how to comfortably market ourselves.

We need to feel secure in our hipness by continually redefining life stages (kind of like having a perpetual binkie).

The hand-wringing has Parade Magazine sponsoring a contest for a moniker for aging boomers that reflects their pathfinder status.

We must come up with upbeat alternates to “senior citizen,” “old,” and “elderly,” terms that have come to smack of doddering has-beens, unacceptable to a generation that lustily sang with The Who, “hope I die before I get old.”

In our society, old is the worst thing anyone can be, or be called.

How will we, the most self-defining generation in history, brand ourselves in our mature years? Existing terms seem ruined or passé.

And we want to always feel good about ourselves. We’ve been saturated with the importance of image.

No “old” for us! As the saying goes, “We’re too precious for life to treat us this way.”

I find this labeling business incredibly funny.

But at 54 I’m not yet middle-aged. Middle age, see, keeps creeping mysteriously up the age chart.

Several years ago boomers were defined as having reached “midyouth.” (What’s 75? Advanced youth?)

Categorization once infuriated young boomers. We were “free to be you and me.” Then we came to desire identification with our consumer choices and ideology.

Now we want to be “not old.” So we need a term that reflects the ever-youthful us, us, us!

We have to be the most controlling generation ever. And so we’ll raise another unrealistic bar of expectation on what aging looks, acts and feels like.

Those who don’t fit the profile may be perceived as failures. And those who do are increasingly living in a fantasy world.

Watching Mike Love’s version of the Beach Boys on PBS’ “Capitol Fourth” last July was excruciating – musical pitch gone with the hair.

And men who qualify for Medicare bouncing around singing horny adolescent songs is plain creepy.

Why cling unrealistically to vanished youth or fixate on perceived self-flattering terms? Shakespeare wrote, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Let’s quit stinking up the place by fussing over labeling and improve it instead with the fragrance of acceptance, leading worthy, satisfying, generous lives.

After all, a label doesn’t define the quality of a garment’s life. And all garments wear out eventually.