Persevering even when mortality stares us in the face.

Written by expert Lou Macaluso and originally published in Life After 50 magazine.

“This is scary—being on the threshold of senior citizenship,” I said just before blowing out the single candle representing the 56 birthday candles that, if lit, would have melted the chocolate frosting and set off the smoke detector in our dining room.

“Cut it out,” a colleague in my age range said with a note of seriousness and fear in his voice. “We’re not senior citizens; we’re middle-aged!”

“Yeah, and how many 112 year-old people do you know?”

Baby boomers are now the 50+ through 60+ generation. Our mortality stares us right in our faces, and many of us deal with it the same way we were taught as children of the 1950s to deal with uncomfortable issues—we ignore them, don’t talk about them, bury them within us until they develop into irrational fears.

I’m not the first to recognize death phobia among baby boomers; however, researchers and writers have focused mainly on its sister fear—aging phobia.  FIND/SVP, a research company, did a study in 2005 for marketers of baby boomer products. Among their suggestions for advertisers:
• Appeal to boomers’ self-image (and aging phobia)
• Try stealth marketing and new descriptors—Boomers don’t like to be called seniors or even middle-aged.

Ray Lesser’s article “Baby Boomers Will Become Immortal,” in the online magazine Funny Times, uses Ray Kurzwell, author-inventor-entrepreneur, as a prime example of aging phobia evolving into death phobia: Kurzwell, now 56, could be a poster child for the baby-boom generation… He believes he’s already given himself the body of a 40-year-old.  “I’ve been reprogramming the biochemistry of my own body for 20 years.  I take about 250 supplements each day and weekly intravenous therapies.”

But is he the prime candidate to become the world’s first death-defying immortal or is he a death-phobic hypochondriac?

It isn’t really fair to say that baby boomers’ death phobia stems from not talking about death when we were kids. We talked about death—TV death.  “Bang, Bang… You’re Dead!” And what did that mean?  It meant we tried to emulate the TV character’s death scene:  Hold the wound… no blood… tightly grimace the face muscles for the close-up… zoom out so the stunt man could fall over or through a railing… somersault onto the gambling table of the saloon below… cards, coins, and poker chips fly everywhere…  how cool!

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