There is a rule of thumb in advertising which says you should communicate with consumers as though they are more sophisticated than they really are. The core market for Just 17 magazine, for example, used to be 13-year-old girls who were desperate to act older than their age. Boomers are the exception to this rule. ‘Boomers at 50 see themselves some 12 years younger than they really are,’ according to one report at http://bit.ly/BabyBoomer, ‘that means they don’t associate themselves with any imagery connected to being old.’
The phenomenon even has a name: Middlescence, the turbulent, rebellious middle age of the Baby Boomer generation. In other words it is adolescence a second time around. ‘Boomers may never mature,’ says the Boomer Project, an advertising agency dedicated to harnessing the grey pound; ‘… they reject any and all age-related labels to describe themselves.’ Forty years ago, our parents chanted The Who’s immortal line ‘Hope I die before I get old.’ In the end, they chose to postpone the inevitable by regressing to their youth. No wonder the anti-ageing business is doing so well. Terrified of maturity, they flock to spas for miracle treatments, and guzzle food supplements laced with magical elixirs for long life. According to a recent survey, at http://bit.ly/Boomersurvey, two-thirds of Boomers want to change their looks with cosmetic surgery and one in ten has already gone under the knife.
Middlescent Boomers, according to the think tank Demos, are ‘refusing to be constrained by expectations of “appropriate behaviour”’. That would be fine, if inappropriate behaviour was limited to dinner party spliffs and Rolling Stones concerts. Unfortunately, it is a great deal more harmful than that. If we can cite one good reason why our futures have been mortgaged to the hilt by our parents, it is because they cannot and will not live up to their responsibilities like adults.
It’s all worryingly similar to Peter Pan Syndrome. They want all the trappings of adulthood, but they shy away from the responsibility and the sacrifice that comes with it. Like Peter Pan, they break conventions to serve their own purposes, with little regard for the feelings and rights of others, and they justify it all with a sense of righteous entitlement.
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Tags: baby boomers, boomers, election, facebook, first-time, politics, student debt, voters
