OK Boomer, face it, you’re now a senior

Being a blue-blood Boomer, I am now a card-carrying senior. I hardly needed reminding. It’s not the Commonwealth Health Care Card or the seniors’ cubby house emails that hit the inbox with all kinds of discounts, it’s something more subtle.

When international students offer you a seat on a tram it comes home to you. Forget vanity creep, you’re regarded as, well, old. Maybe it’s the grey hair? Perhaps it’s the “S” written in felt tip on the reverse of my renewed myki card by a helpful, pitying Metro Trains employee, or is it being asked from theatres to cinemas, “any concessions”?

We have a problem with age in our society. There’s nothing new in that. The problem though lies with older people themselves; seniors, checking out early. Mind you there are plenty of incentives available. Insurance deals for the over 50s, retirement villages or communities that are pitched promising freedom. Get in early and sign up, ensure your place in God’s waiting room.

Seniors have a choice, behave to type or defy perceptions of age. It’s far easier to give in to the allure of that cruise to endsville or the hope of landing upon the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the last tango in, if not Paris, Noosa than it is to keep squaring up to life … within reason. Fifty is not the new 30 and 60 is not the new 40. It may not be wise to take up skiing, jet or alpine, when you’re 75.

Nonetheless, there is a certain recklessness with some seniors. It usually ends badly. While the British rock band The Who may have sung, “Hope I die before I get old,” there is no reason to feel afraid of being old, or some sense of shame or embarrassment. So why do we as a society see seniors as defeated by years or dismissed as past it? We do not revere age, we fear it.

Michael Caine is 90 this year and still making movies. In a recent interview, he had this to say about his work: “I think if you retire, you’re sort of saying, ‘I’ve given up. I’m going to sit here and what am I going to do now? I’ll tell you what – I’m going to die’.”

Forget the cliches that you’re only as young as you feel. Or for that matter, whether we can “play by our own rules”. Haven’t we earned the right to say, “I don’t care, I love it?” Age is sneaky and insistent. “You can’t beat the clock” as Sergeant Murtaugh bemoans in Lethal Weapon 4.

One of the hardest pills for Boomers to swallow is that they are now old, and that it’s OK to be so. It’s cold comfort that poets remind us of what’s ahead. W.B Yeats observed: