Pi-Consulting

Ah, retirement. Our sunset years are supposed to be like going to heaven a couple of decades before we actually get around to dying.

You’ve seen the ads, of course. We all swan around in blue blazers with gold buttons, white duck trousers and deckshoes, only pausing between cruises and bridge weeks for long enough to survey the financial pages with quiet satisfaction. Our wives can be identified by their candy-pink suits and gold shoes, and their tendency to fret about not having enough fingers to put all of their rings on. And of course we’re all so busy living a perfect, carefree existence that we don’t really have time to actually do anything.

Sounds like just another fantasy from adland, right? The peculiar thing is that this silly picture, or something rather like it, actually seems to be coming true for a significant number of older people. The difference is that the Zsa Zsa Gabor fashion-sense from the ads has given way to snappier modern styles. The significant thing is that the “after work experience” from now on has less and less to do with cats and carpet slippers. A whole generation of prospective ‘retirees’, far from slowing down, is set to take on a new lease of life.

The demographic group of particular interest here is the ‘baby-boomers’. These children of the post-war era, who were teenagers in the 1960’s, are the biggest-ever wave of people to come up to retirement age. They now claim to have invented both youth and sex, and, unlike the generations which went before them, they hark back to their mis-spent youth, and seem determined to grow old disgracefully.

Your blog-writer should know, since he seems to be one of these people himself. A glance in the mirror reveals a grizzled and timeworn face. But it’s all a ghastly misunderstanding, I tell you. Your columnist can now reveal that he is in fact a 27-year-old, trapped in the body of someone who turned fifty quite a few years ago. I first noticed the mistake most people make about my ‘real’ age five years ago, when a mania for Latin salsa music — and now Reggaeton, lord save me — began to eclipse my previously long-standing taste for 19th-century romantic opera. It suddenly dawned on me that my life was running backwards. And I don’t think I’m the only person in his mid-50s to have observed this strange effect.

An illustration of the change comes from international statistics on the number of people who carry life or health insurance. In America, uptake of such insurance policies goes on increasing as you go through up through the age ranges, with the highest figures seen among the over-65s. The same seems to be true in France. But in other, seemingly more carefree, parts of Europe like Germany, Spain and the UK, ownership of life and health insurance peaks among 45-54-year-olds, then tails off noticeably among the more senior groups. What can this mean? Is it a reluctance — or inability — to pay the premiums? Or is this evidence of a new devil-may-care attitude among European oldsters?

Advertisers who write off the boomer market as a mid-life crisis followed by twenty years of acquiescent serenity (read senility) are in for a rude shock, not least because, unlike the generation which went before them, this bunch of senior citizens complain when goods and services are not to their liking. Lurid stories of “Rave Mums” out-bopping their offspring on club dance-floors can no longer be written off as a freakish aberration. Britain’s popular daily newspapers dubbed them the “SSKINS” (for “Seniors Spending the Kids’ Inheritance”).

Your columnist recalls attending a market research conference in Bruges, that handsome old city in Belgium, to which a Belgian patriarch of the industry, rapidly approaching his 79th year, turned up on a Harley-Davidson, resplendent in full leathers. He thought nothing of it, and, as time goes on, nor will the rest of us.

Bubbly, old thing? “No thanks”, we’ll say. “But I wouldn’t say no to a tequila slammer”.