Over-50

Accelerated Aging: Could be side effect of depression

Since I have been a depressive from the age of 11 until a whopper of a breakdown in 2003 (Download Geezerguts), I should have the health of a 200 year old person.  Science has found, reports THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, that depression can result in "accelerated aging."  Prematurely, depressives find themselves with conditions which are usually associated with aging, ranging from heart conditions to dementia. 

But there is a loop hole.  Those of us who master coping skills like managing our thoughts could opt out of accelerated aging.  People still assume I am younger than I am.  Maybe I was coping pretty well, no matter how depressed I had been.

Baby Boomers As Worried Well: Heady times in therapy for "neurosis"

Circa early 1970s, we graduate students in the English Department at the University of Michigan and those in the Psychology Department found ourselves together at a party.  The hosts were a married couple, each getting a doctorate in 1 of those fields. Because it was a time when the meme was "get therapy, the more the better" most of us literature and linguistics scholars found ourselves in the same room with our therapists.  Mine was David W. Harder, now a Ph.D. and full professor at Tufts University Department of Psychology. 

Within about 20 minutes I fled.  I remained undone for weeks.  So did many of my fellow students in the English Department.  We talked about that seemingly forever.  After all, therapy came with the same overpowering mystique which had once been embodied in the progress GE made possible, the persona of Jackie Kennedy, and, of course, higher education as the tool for upward mobility.  We lived from therapy session to therapy session.  The only reality was what insights we acquired in that 50-minute hour.  And, the best of all, it was all about me.   Remember how we Baby Boomers became "The Me Generation?"

At the time, we who were really the "worried well" were primarily classified, at least for insurance purposes as "neurotic."  Mine read "Depressive Neurosis."  In his commentary in THE NEW YORK TIMES, Benedict Carey points out the term "neurotic" has fallen out of fashion.  Instead, given this time of upheaval generated by globalization and technology, what might have been diagnosed before as not-normal or dysfunctional has become, at least in many circles, the norm.  It is not necessarily aberrant to invest so much time on Facebook, be clever on Twitter, and blog compulsively. 

Actually, for me discovering blogging, with a bit of tweeting and connecting with my friends on Facebook  on the side, has been my new kind of therapy.   No matter how undone I become about clients for my communications boutique coming and going, paying or not paying, praising or being critical,  a centering force takes over through digital tools.  Those who follow my posts label me as "OCD," that is "obsessive compulsive disorder." They are right.  Did I always have OCD or did the syndrome take hold as blogging became more and  more the central force in my life - and mental health?  We will leave that 1 to the researchers in psychology and social media. 

Baby Boomer Memories of Being Fattest Kid in Class

Back when we Baby Boomers were growing up, it was hard to get fat.  We walked to school, carrying tons of books, without the convenience of a backpack.  Television was restricted to a few hours a week since our parents were told it would destroy our brains, morals, and eyes.  There wasn't a lot of money yet so no one could afford to pile on the treats.

Yet, I was one of the few who pulled it off: I was the fattest kid in class, beginning in the second grade.  I didn't have much company in that.  It was the era of obedience. Girls were instructed not to get fat since they wouldn't land a husband.  Boy were told fat would keep them off the team.

Between the sixth and seventh grade my parents sent me away, not to fat-girl camp which they couldn't afford, to my aunt's home in Virginia to lose weight.  I did, for the first of what would be many many times.  Despite other victories such as winning the Catholic Newark Diocese writing content and a full-tuition scholarship to Seton Hill University, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, my mother would burst into tears when my name came up among the yentas of downtown Jersey City, New York.  They all predicted I would never marry.  They were right.  

But, we fat kids, our families, our doctors, and our guidance counselors (more about that for another post) never considered weight-loss operations.  Currently, young roly-polys do.  They are part of the $6 billion a year business of providing radical solutions for a very human problem.  

One wonders what will happen to those who are taking this road increasingly traveled.  Some will gain back the weight.  Some will be grateful that the problem was fixed.  Others might commit suicide.  Excess eating kept me alive.  Without it, my shaky sense of self couldn't have endured the pressures of the 1950s and 1960s (get married, don't get pregnant), unrealistic career ambitions (to become a brandname writer, despite no pedigree), and frayed wiring (the family's crazy Eastern European genes).

Too much food served me well.  It still does.

Robots: No sweet young nurse's aide for Baby Boomers

We didn't get cheated out of Social Security and Medicare, at least not yet.  But it doesn't take a prophet to predict that we sure are heading to being shut down from the human touch.

The current generation of elderly who need a bit of help for the walk around the mall the medical doctor mandates get plenty of human assistance.  That's likely keeping them not only mobile but also playing with more of their market.  In the cards for us seems being assigned a robot.  After all, they can't unionize, call in sick, or tell us off.  Toyota rolled out its line of high-tech assistants for the global aging.  Here you can meet you future partner.

Baby Boomers: What we kept in closet now big biz

In the "Father Knows Best" ethos, all families were functional and happy.  Because of that meme, we Baby Boomers kept subjects like drunks and more in the closet.  Now, Generations Y and X are making a bundle packaging those family horrors for money and fame.

 
Among the most dependable formulas is discussing mom's or dad's alcoholism.  Jeanne Darst does that well enough in "Fiction Ruined My Family" to be featured in THE NEW YORK TIMES.

Should we start "coming clean" about our family secrets?  If we want to try that route to making money, then it would be wise to parachute in now.  The period of total self-disclosure, brought mainstream by Oprah, could be entering its last phase.  World economic and political problems have become so serious that the attention has shifted to the mundane issues of making enough to pay our bills and not being in the wrong place at the wrong time and offed by terrorists.

"100 Plus" - Working most of those years

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL has joined the conga line of media warning us that we can make it past 100.  The new book on that phenomenon is "100 Plus" by Sonia Arrison.  

The rub for most of us Baby Boomers in this curse or gift of longevity is how to pay our way through the years.  Most of us will have to continue working, be that as an employer or contract worker or through operating our own business.

 
Finally, at age 66, after more than the usual number of career crashes [here's the chronicle of one Download Geezerguts] I finally got a handle on how to keep working.  This has been helped significantly by the human beings who I coach opening their hearts to me.  Insight is not a solo sport.

Frame everything for the long term.  The knowledge base, skills, and contacts which keep us making a buck come from every bit of our experience, even if that has represented a setback, unpaid work, or a disaster. 

A corporation put on hold a white paper I had researched and had produced 15 pages for.  Yes, a disappointment.  But I had that knowledge base about network centric organizations [first pioneered by the Department of Defense].  I reconfigured the material I had written into a format I could use as writing sample, without violating any confidentiality.  I know for a fact, that one sample has brought in three new assignments.

Stay in now.  Henry Cloud is the best on the importance of constantly taking inventory of what we might be bringing into the present which should remain back in the past.  His book "Necessary Endings" describes with myriad examples how carrying people, perspectives, and expectations from the past drains our energy, makes us appear stuck, and prevents opportunities from being presented to us.  Once I gave up anticipating the kind of fees I had received pre-bust, my business exploded.  I had to change that mindset.

Forgive ourselves. The longer we live, the more "sins" we will commit.  That sure is a heavy burden of remorse to lug around.  Some of us can use the parish priest and make a general confession.  Some can work that out through a therapist.  I have access to the Twelve Steps of those Anonymous Programs.  In those programs there is a process from embracing the wrongs we have done, making amends, and moving on.

Text Messaging as Behavior Modification: Those nasty habits which keep us Baby Boomers stuck

There are those behavior patterns which can keep us professionally stuck, writes Henry Cloud in "Necessary Endings." What if that behavior could be modified - and on the cheap?  The answer could be text messaging several times a day.  We could, for example, subscribe to a text messaging service that had down cold how we screw up through not listening.  A few months of messaging a few times a day could just do the trick: We never not listen.

Studies in the ARCHIVES OF DERMATOLOGY and in THE LANCET, reports Lauren Indvik in MASHABLE, show that text messages can not only change behavior but sustain those shifts.  Examples include applying sunscreen and stopping smoking cigarettes.  So successful has this approach been that SELF Magazine has launched a social media program - log in here - which delivers 5 text messages a day about healthy eating habits.  The cost is $2.99.  That's cheaper than Weight Watchers.  Plus lots of money is bound to be saved from not indulging in empty calories.

Of course, text messages could be customized: "Jane, clients are begging you, 'Give us your ear.'" 

Google+ & Baby Boomers: Perfect for digital immigrants

Google+, sometimes called the "Facebook Killer," is just right for us Baby Boomers or digital immigrants. 

 
Unlike Facebook, which was originally configured for youth or digital natives, Google+ fits naturally with what we are already familiar with on the web.  At the top of the list of what we Baby Boomers made sure we knew about has been search engine optimization or SEO.  Here is my article on SEO which has had more than a million downloads [Download LinktoSEOarticlebyJaneGenova].

Facebook is a world unto itself.  It does not allow Google crawlers to enter its boundaries, analyze content, and then determine whether to link to it and what importance to give that link.  Those who wanted content on Facebook to make it into the search engines had to take an extra step and create a link.

Google+, being part of Google, is accessible to search engines.  In MASHABLE, Ben Parr explains:

"Whenever a user publicly shares a link on Google+, an annotation will show up under that link when it appears in a friend's search results.

Commentators on Parr's article note:

"Seo is the main reason Google+ might threaten FB"

"This is not a surprise, since it's Google's own product, G+ may give a heavier weight on SEO than the other social media sites"

Social media is a low-cost marketing communications outreach.  But it demands tremendous sweat equity.  Sooner than later, we Baby Boomers will have to make the decision where to invest the bulk of our labor: In Facebook or in Google+.  That could change the whole social networking game.

 

Baby Boomer Women: Were you sidelined by having more than 1 child?

It's now official: More than one child can sideline a woman in her career.  Two, she may manage to get away with, but three, and it's all over.  That's what a research study by Anna Zhu found.  Zhu is with the University of South Wales Social Policy Research Centre.

Of course, now that this study exists, many of us Baby Boomers of both sexes are retracing the careers of women who made it big and those who didn't.  Even back then, babies could be an obstacle to getting beyond just earning a living. 

 
I worked in the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, Jersey City branch, to put myself through college.  None of the females - and it was an organization which encouraged women - had more than one or two children.  They also tended not to speak about family life at work.  Later as I advanced in my career, none of the women in management at Gulf Oil [which became Chevron], Chrysler, or IBM had children, at least not that I knew of.   In consumer products company Kraft where I managed executive communications, some women had one child.  That one child was welcome there and the children were frequently integrated into advertising and special events.

Overall, I would say that ambitious women of my generation recognized that family and work could be a dicey mix.  Most didn't take the risk of adding children to the already difficult climb up.  Now, as the study shows, the mix is just as volatile. 

Let us praise nasty bosses

Most nasty bosses likely weren't born that way.  They probably learned that the nice get iced.  Far more effective to be strategically a power monster.  Recent scientific research bares that out.  Here is my post on the smart strategy of being a bad boss.