birthday

The fourth quarter begins

/ jim fetig / 11 Comments

Kensington, MD, April 23, 2024 — It’s common for people to list the age of 100 as the aspirational length of their life. Centenarians are widely celebrated has having achieved greatness in just about every human culture. Why not?

Today the calendar marked seventy five years since my birth. That means three quarters of the aspirational century is now in the books.

If sports were a metaphor for life, today I started playing in the 4th and final quarter of the game. The difference is that the human fourth quarter is literally sudden death overtime. You never quite know when the clock will run out. The only thing you do know is that life can dunk on you at anytime it wants. You won’t be taking the final shot.

The logic works sort of like this. My broken wrist will take 9 months to completely heal, restored to pain-free, full function.

When you’re 18 months old, 9 months is half of your life. That’s a long time. When you’re 38, it’s more or less a blip. However, when you’re 75 and don’t know how much time remains on the clock, the functional deprivation can seem like a disproportionately huge fraction of the time you have remaining.

You’re back to square one. At 75, time matters more than ever.

When I turned 65, I was on my AT thru hike. I posted a birthday blog, the premise of which was that at 65, my utility to the American economy was about the equivalent to a snotty Klenex – useless. No longer was advertising or other marketing targeting me at that age, in spite of the fact that I had more disposable income than ever and was blowing through the Appalachian Trail like a kid in a hurry to catch the school bus. Consequently, I might as well have been dead.

Here’s the post: https://jfetig.com/2014/04/23/mourning-bells-on-madison-avenue/

Things have changed. Seventy-five-year-olds are a valuable demographic. Now, suddenly, folks want to sell me lots of stuff – senior living condos, Depends, prepaid funerals, walk-in Jacuzzi tubs, hearing aids, power chairs, retirement annuities, life insurance and Medicare supplemental policies and, of course, cures for all those supposed aches and pains.

Really?

To be honest, decrepitude is evermore visible – except through a gauzy lens. The aging body is protesting from time to time. But, I can still keep time with the fifty-somethings. (Nobody says ever 70 -something.) I’m slightly slower up the mountain on occasion, but I’m always on the summit, lugging my chainsaw, when it counts.

April 23 is a birthday shared with Shakespeare, Shirley Temple, Prince Louis of Wales, William Penn, former U.S. president James Buchanan, and others.

I wish I could write like Shakespeare…

Sisu

Mourning bells on Madison Avenue.

/ jim fetig / 9 Comments

Image

Boiling Springs, Penn., AT NOBO mile 1117.5, Wednesday April 23, 2014 — The mourning bells are ringing on Madison Avenue because I died today.

Really?

As members of the original Pepsi generation, advertisers promised Boomers we were never going age. We weren’t supposed to trust anyone over 30.  Our uniform was going to be Levis, mop tops, and sandals!  We were forever young and the most coveted demographic of all time.

Given the degree of indoctrination we endured, I don’t know if this was a shared Boomer experience, but I felt a little strange when I woke up the morning of my thirtieth birthday and nothing changed. I didn’t look or feel any less trustworthy. Same thing when I reached a few other magic milestones that society commemorates with sacrificial candles.

This morning yet another of my life’s supposedly defining markers slipped by. Yup, another birthday.

This time something is different. I really am dead.

Dead, you say?  Like a doornail?  How could that be?

It’s actually a metaphor. As someone who worked in the marketing and PR world for many years, it’s like this: I know that I might as well be dead. 

Here’s the logic.

In some circles, being in a coveted consumer demographic is high status. Everybody wants to talk to YOU. They know that ME is the most important word in the English (advertising) language. 

Oh yes, you’d better be talkin’ to me!

If that’s the case, it’s over for moi. I’m not in anybody’s coveted demographic anymore. 

I’m tuned in, but Madison Ave. dropped me out.  Studies say that most of my brand preferences have been locked in – like NRA paranoia – for decades.  They think I’ve stopped thinking, because I can’t.

Ha!

It’s ironic.  By the time you reach a certain age, overnight the ad industry writes you off – you’re  a non-entity completely unworthy of ad service. In short, you don’t count in the ratings.

Nielsen, I know you don’t love me anymore.  It’s okay. You can have your box back.

As boomers, mainstream advertising no longer covets our eyeballs and ears. Our music has faded from the soundtracks of hit TV shows, and from the commercials that pay for them.  

Our generation’s stars have been reduced to playing grumpy and eccentric grandparents on the new TV shows.  Even the E-D ads target younger men.  To know that all you have to do is look at the age of the women who play the wives.

In the modern American consumer economy, when nobody wants to sell you anything, what’s left for you? You might as well be dead.  As far as the sales department is concerned, you are.

Big deal.  Life’s interesting.  I can personally attest that the mirror lies like a dog.  My hair isn’t gray, it’s only color-challenged. I mean, I’m glad to still have some.  But hey, I hear the Fountain of Youth is somewhere over the horizon, but that’s not why I’m walkin’.  (Or is it?)

“They” think the bell is tolling for me. They are soooo wrong!

Being retired is like perpetual vacation from school.  There’s a lot of time to fill, and there are a million things to do. If you didn’t notice, our generation has accomplished a lot and we still have talent. Most of us aren’t willing to go quietly into the great good night either.

Guess what Mad Men?  There are better roles in daily life than playing manipulated consumers whose primary benefit to society is buying stuff.  Boomers are born activists.  Remember the 60’s.  I know.  If you can remember the 60s, you weren’t really there.

Buckle your seat belt.  As more of us retire with too much time on our hands, it could get interesting, so let’s get ready to rock and roll.

Enough rant.  There’s something more important to say on this, my first birthday without my mother.

“Thanks for the birthday mom. Without you, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to become uninteresting to advertisers.  I’ll always love you for that alone.”