Skip to main content

Ban the Over 60's!

Can there be a more meaningless term than 'the over 60's'?  Yes, the term can be easily applied to any person above that age - but what does it actually tell us that is of much practical use?

Age is no indicator of health or personality, of activity levels or financial stability.  Neither does an age grouping reveal a person's interests - unless it's the under 5's, when life mostly revolves around food, sleep, playing, parents and getting the hang of walking and talking.  While life for the 5's to 16's age group  tends to revolve around school, already more diversity is apparent.  The teenage world of angst, obsessions and first loves are, obviously, very different from, for example, a thirty year-old's ambitions to buy their own house.

No-one would lump together everyone under the age of 40 as one social group having similar needs and interests.  So why do this with the over 60's?

Most 60 year-olds are part of the work force and will remain so until they retire at the official age, (which varies; it used to be 65 but now it's more of a sliding scale depending on when a person was born).  Some people choose to postpone retirement to benefit from an improved pension.  Or maybe they simply don't want to retire; some people work into their 70's or beyond - and why not, if that's what they wish to do?

Many 60 year-olds are still paying off mortgages, paying to get their older children through university.  70 and 80 years olds run marathons, run businesses or home-school grandchildren while the grown-up off-spring go out to work.  They drive cars, travel the world - my 85 year-old mother recently flew to Australia by herself.  They do voluntary work and participate in a myriad of social, creative or sporting activities, and display a huge diversity of interests and tastes - and this continues for the rest of their lives, or as long as health permits.

So if you can reminisce about King Edward's abdication while chatting to a friend via a smart phone, it's obvious that you've seen a lot of social and technological change.

An increasing number of us will live beyond the age of 100.  According to The Centenarian, the number of people worldwide currently aged over 100 is estimated to be 450,000.  The aim of life-extension research is not just to extend 'being alive' but to enable people to enjoy vigorous physical and mental good health for as long as science makes it possible - and the point at which these cease to be possible is intended to be continually extended also.

Type 'over 60's' in a search engine, and a string of links for health tips and travel insurance are offered.  After all, everyone 'knows' that everyone over 60 feels an urge to travel before they keel over. Hmm, it's high time this empty-headed stereotype was wiped away, don't you think?

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi, just wanted to tell you, I liked this blog post. It was funny.
Keep on posting!

My web page bodybuilding lanyard
24 July 2014 at 23:55
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Cure for Aging?

"All that we profess to do is but this, - to find out the secrets of the human frame; to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventatives to the effort of time.  This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood.  In our order we hold most noble -, first, that knowledge which elevates the intellect; secondly, that which preserves the body.  But the mere art (extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigour and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret which I will only hint to thee at present, by which heat or calorific, as ye call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial principle of life, can be made its perpectual renovator...." Zanoni, book IV, chapter II, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first published in 1842. Oroboros keyring - Spooky Cute Designs The idea of being able to achieve an immortal life is probably as old as human life itself.  Folklore and myt...
15 comments
Read more

Remembering Richie Tattoo Artist's Studio

Richard in the street entrance to his tattoo studio in Liverpool. The vertical sign next to Richard is now in the Liverpool Tattoo Museum. Yesterday, my sister Evelyn, Richard and myself stood outside Richard's old tattoo studio and looked up at the few remaining signs, whose paint has now mostly flacked away to reveal bare wood. On the studio's window are stick-on letters which read, "Art", where once it boldly announced his presence as the city's only "Tattoo Artist".  I can remember him buying that simple plastic lettering from an old-fashioned printer's shop. This was in 1993, not long after he'd opened the studio and before he could afford better signs. After he'd patiently stuck them onto the glass we realised that from the outside the sign read "Artist Tattoo", so we had to carefully peel the letters off the window and have another go, laughing over having made such an obvious error yet worried in case we spoiled the letteri...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dear Diary...

Do you keep a diary? Why did you start it, and, if you started one then stopped, why was that? What sort of things do (or did) you write about? I ask as, as a long-time diarist myself, there is an interesting piece in The Guardian today which talks about one woman's diary habit, which she began at the age of fourteen. I started a diary around that age too, but destroyed it after my mother accused me of using cocaine.  A stern scene followed, with both parents perched ram-rod straight in their armchairs, while I was subjected to a heated inquisition. Where had I bought it, and who from? Didn't I know such things led to death and doom? I struggled to decipher their bewildering accusations, until Mum blurted out, "I read it in your diary!" To find my diary, Mum would first have had to rummage through my dressing table, obviously when I wasn't around to protest. Her intrusion on my privacy was assumed by both parents to be acceptable, and now, with this handwritten c...
Post a Comment
Read more