Thursday 16 August 2007

Pic of the day: Better a late bloomer than a baby boomer!

Imaginary 2016

This is part of a series of fictional journal entries, each set one year further into the future. Yes, the day in the month corresponds to the year, so obviously this started on August 8.

Fiction starts here

16 August 2016: The Gray Wave hits

Actually it has been hitting our shores for some years now. Many of the baby boomers jumped at the chance to retire at 62, despite the pension reform that tempted them with higher pensions if they stayed longer. Perhaps they felt they had plenty of money anyway, which is certainly the case for most here in Norway, not that I've heard them say that before or after. Perhaps they were worried that they would not live long enough to enjoy their pensions, or at least not with a health that made "enjoy" mean anything. After all, their own grandparents were old and worn at 67. Well, things are not quite the same as in the 1960es. It's likely to be some pretty long years ahead for some of them.

But now it is getting serious. Even those who did not particularly want to retire are getting old. Recent bills against age discrimination mean your employer can't just boot you at 70 anymore, but it is certainly still expected. And work changes so fast, it is not easy for the old to keep up. The Flynn effect was still very active back then, making each generation around 10 IQ points smarter than the previous (or 3 per decade, in case your generations vary). This means that if you're a baby boomer and you just qualified for genius status (IQ 120), you are now utterly average. If you were average, you are now quite dim. Not quite retarded in medical terms, but most young people would be hard pressed to say for sure. So it is not really strange if employers encourage you to claim your well-deserved pension, if he has someone else to step into your work.

Of course, this is not always a sure thing. With tens of thousands more people leaving the workforce than entering it, young people can pick and choose. Well, bright young people can. The Flynn Effect has been more or less on hiatus for the last 15-20 years, and even in the 1990es stupid people were born, as has happened from the dawn of time. Also there aren't all that many menial tasks left. If you are not creative, there just may be a machine that can do the job better than you can.

When I was young, my workplace had a number of housewives - women with little formal education - sorting paper forms. Tens of thousands of paper forms that had to be sorted and put into folders. Twenty years later, those forms were electronic, and I only had to tell the computers to sort them into their right place. The job that those women had done was gone. Now a script tells the computers to do these jobs, and my old job is gone. I had the foresight and good luck to add to my education in the nick of time, and even got some paid time off at work. I was also lucky to be born very smart, so that even after all these years I am not lagging behind the average young person. Even so, there is no way I would get a job now. I happen to be employed by the state, which pays poorly but is virtually forbidden from sacking people. So I still have a job, just a very different and less pleasant job than I used to have. Not all people are that lucky.

Do we really need everyone to work? Obviously not! The proportion of people who actually work is smaller than ever. And not only because of old age: Despite the ever growing stigma, the number of disabled people is steadily rising. Most disabilities are vague and don't relate to any physical damage to the body. The plain fact is, people can't get a job, so they have to complain about some illness so they can get money. It doesn't need to be that you are stupid, although it certainly doesn't help. But even I, with a brain age of 25 still, could not get a job today. I am too old. And yet I am still too young to retire. Perhaps I will always be too young to retire, until I die.

Young people who don't have the talent to compete with a computer or a robot are even worse off. Most of them can't get a disability pension. So they just close the door to their room, hook up to their computer, and become "cyberheads". Movies, games and porn - it is all there in their own little world. As long as their parents are feeding them, they don't need anything more. And with their parents still having a projected 50 years left to live, these guys (and more rarely gals) have a lot of time to look forward to in their rooms. I am sure the world will look very different 50 years from now. I wish I could be there to see it. But I don't find that very likely.

I may be living a healthier life than most of the pig-like people you associate with my generation, but I am meeting my own gray wave now. The best I can hope for is to hang on to most of my health for some more years. Whatever miracles of biotechnology will come, won't come soon enough for me. Or at least they won't greatly extend my life. At best I can hope to reach the age of my ancestors, but even that is unlikely. The fat years and the decades of stressful office life will claim their toll. I am living healthy only because I am sick. That is not a good starting point.

The boomers are still waiting for the Elixir of Life, the Fountain of Youth, the Miracle Drug… the solution that will make them live forever and be young and irresponsible forever. But it won't happen. There is a steady trickle of new inventions. This is the decade of biotechnology, it seems. But it is a slow climb, a snail's pace, one small invention following another. From you first hear about some promising research it can easily take a decade before it makes it to a clinical treatment, and by then it usually does quite a bit less and works quite a bit less spectacularly than people hoped when it was just a promising new idea.

The baby boomers are growing old. They are not babies anymore. But neither are they helpless and decrepit yet. That time will also come, although it will come later than it did for their parents, and it will probably last longer too. But for the most part it is not yet. And it is a drawn-out process, with some more people getting sick each year, and some of the sickest people dying. (And some others too, of course.) So it is not like they become senile en masse, or die en masse, less so than they became pensioners, which was fairly massive. But it will still be a wave. And there is nothing like them. If we build new hospitals and nursing homes for them, those hospitals and nursing homes will be sparsely populated 30 years from now, then they are gone. But of course this is not a first. They left schools standing like empty shells, and then getting closed down. Lately, they have moved from their homes in the suburbs to flats in the cities and towns. Large, good homes are standing empty in some districts, because there simply is nothing else like this generation.

By European standards, we are pretty fertile. And we still take in immigrants (by any other name). But the population is declining now. The population who thinks of themselves as Norwegian even more so. When the boomers start dying off in earnest, it will become far more visible that we are a nation in decline. In a manner of speaking, at least. I guess quality is more important than quality, and I am not sure that the baby boomers were the height of quality, to be honest. On the other hand, I don't think it helps much for quality to randomly import people who didn't get along with others in their homeland. "Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior", and it should be pretty obvious by now that many of them still don't get along after coming here. The baby boomers may be lazy, greedy and selfish, but they are our lazy, greedy and selfish baby boomers.

For better and for worse, then, they really were a wave. But all waves have to ebb one day.