The Last Boomer Game

The Baby Boomer generation in America is thought to have found something approaching genuine happiness in material possessions.  A popular bumper sticker back in the 1980s read, "He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins."  This was thought to be a brilliant encapsulation of the Baby Boom Generation's shallowness, greed, excessive competitiveness and love of possessions. 

And it may well be all of these things.  But what good are the toys if you're dead?  "He Who Dies Last"---he's the one who wins.  The longevity game is the one that really isn't over till it's over.

Between what your parents gave you to start with--genetically or culturally or financially--and pure luck, you play a small role in determining how long you live.  And even if you add a few years through your own initiative, by doing all the right things in terms of diet, exercise, sleep, vitamins, etc., why is that to your moral credit?  Extending your own life expectancy is the most selfish motive imaginable for doing anything.  So, do it, by all means.

This is the game that really counts.  Ask yourself: what do you have now, and what do you covet, that you would not gladly trade for, say, five extra years?  These would be good years or at least years when you could still walk and think and read and drive.  You would still be a player in whatever game you spent your life playing.

The oldest boomers, born in the late 1940s, are just turning sixty, and the last boomer game is about to start--the game of competitive longevity.  So how are you doing?

In 2004, the most recent year for which there are final figures, life expectancy at birth in the United States was 77.8 years.  That's 75.2 years for males and 80.4 years for females.  But if you've made it to sixty, your life expectancy is 82.5 years: 80.8 for men and 84 for women.

The only competition that matters, in the end, is about life itself.  And the standard is clear: "Mine is longer than yours."

Source: Mine is Longer than Yours, The New Yorker, April 7, 2008