What Marketers Need to Know About Aging Boomers (Part 2)

The Top Priority in the Second Half of Life: Jung's Seven Tasks of Aging

Dance critic Jennifer Fisher wrote in an article in the LA Times several years ago, “I'm not going to start calling myself a "senior" any time soon, even if it gets me a few bucks off at the movies. I'm calling instead for radical measures: The baby boomers have to rename everything to do with age; we should throw our demographic weight behind denial, or at least an ironic obfuscation of the facts.”

Ms. Fisher, who lamented a friend her age moving into a Sun City for “active adults” wrote, “It's going to be hard to make old age cool, but baby boomers will give it the old college try.”

Amid all the blather about how boomers will age differently than their parents hardly anyone has examined boomers’ aging from a developmental perspective. Ms. Fisher is going through a stage and chances are she'll get past it and discover unexpected pleasures in life as an "old person."

One of my favorite homages to maturity is from William Blake’s Gnomic Verses:

He who bends to himself a Joy

Doth the winged life destroy;

He who kisses the Joy as it flies,

Dwells in Eternity’s sunrise.

Youth is inclined to capture and manipulate the butterfly; the elder is likelier to reject dominion over the lyrical being to find transcendent joy in letting go.

Yes, I agree with Jennifer Fisher that boomers will make old age cool, but not because boomers are any cooler than their parents were at the same age. And, my definition of cool in this context is probably at odds with how Fisher defines cool. By cool she seems to mean staving off the time-worn physical signs of age. By cool I mean the seasoning to rediscover in the later years the beneficent wonders of being a child when nearly everything new is astonishing, curiosity is boundless and the longevity of disappointments rarely exceeds an hour.

Those who refuse to act their age in the fall and winter seasons of life are not cool. Their penchant for masking their age indicates a decision to stop growing – to be forever encapsulated like a primitive insect in a bubble of amber: perfectly preserved but essentially dead.

Trust me when I say this: one of the greatest tragedies that could befall you would be to become permanently of any age you might choose. Age is the arrow of time that permits you to be more today than you were yesterday and more tomorrow than you are today. Unhappiness over aging is not to be cured by denying it, but by embracing it as a source of great fulfillment and joy. In fact, doing so is the first of Carl Jung’s Seven Tasks of Aging, which when well tended to bring more pleasure into one’s beingness than is imaginable at the earlier ages of life.

Jung’s Seven Tasks of Aging begin taking their place on one’s life agenda during the early days of midlife when people begin thinking more about their mortality.

Subsequent posts will discuss these tasks in the interest of giving readers a more accurate picture of boomers’ psyches than seen in the endless stream of research sold to clients as definitive depictions of aging boomers. The so-called boomer generation is not only the most studied generation in history it is the most misunderstood. Jung’s Seven Tasks of Aging are:

1. Facing the reality of aging and dying
2. Life review
3. Defining life realistically
4. Letting go of the ego
5. Finding new rooting in the Self
6. Determining the meaning of one’s life
7. Rebirth – dying with life

Pursuit of these tasks changes a person’s worldviews, lifestyle aspirations, needs and overall behavior in the marketplace; hence there is clear benefit to marketers in understanding them.

Comments

[sydney rice]

BRAVO!!! YES!

[Rain]

I like Jung and those look like 7 valid stages to me (at almost 64). I'll be interested in seeing your future posts on this topic

[Ann]

Thank you for this commentary and Jung's stages. I'm not a marketer, I'm a priest (a marketer of God??), and serve a young, healthy retired population (who become older and frailer as they attend my church); I'm also facing into these stages myself.

[Ben]

I gotta tell ya, I work in an industry where the aged are making a huge move into the marketing businesses. It's exciting to see the evolution into what is happening.