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Baby Boomers face concerns about finances, their health and the state of the world, but their exuberance is undiminished. It's not as if they're getting old.
To say boomers expect to stay young isn't just a figure of speech, it is a statistically verifiable fact. "Baby Boomers literally think they're going to die before they get old," says J. Walker Smith, president of Yankelovich Partners, the polling company, which found in one study that boomers defined "old age" as starting three years after the average American was dead. People 60 years old today have an actuarial life expectancy of 82.3, but boomers don't consider themselves bound by the laws of statistics; they "fully expect that advances in healthcare and genomics are going to enable them to live past 100," says Smith.
The boomer credo in a nutshell: there are good years left. A 60-year-old who expects to live to 100 is only halfway through adulthood. They are intent on refuting Pablo Picasso's maxim that "one starts to get young at the age of 60, and then it's too late." For boomers, it's never too late.
Source: Ready or Not Boomers Turn 60, Newsweek, November 11, 2005
