WASHINGTON – First there was the name change. The American Association of Retired Persons is no longer the American Association of Retired Persons. It is AARP, and Horace Deets, its executive director, insists, “It is no longer an acronym.”
Then there was the gradual transformation of Modern Maturity, the AARP’s magazine. A year ago, the cover featured Betty White, 77, looking lovely but also, well, mature. The headline was, “Betty White, on Life, Loss and Laughter.” This month, the cover features Susan Sarandon, 52, looking like she belongs in an issue that is, in fact, headlined, “Great Sex – What’s Age Got to Do With It?”
And speaking of sex, the AARP released a survey last week focusing on the sexual satisfaction of Americans 45 and older. Before the news conference began, the nation’s largest senior citizens’ group played cuts from James Brown (“I Feel Good”) and Gladys Knight and the Pips (“You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me”) stirring up latent memories of college mixers.
AARP officials made much of the fact that over-45 boomers were still having sex and, by and large, would continue to have sex for many years to come.
Its officials make no secret of it: The AARP is trying to retrofit itself for the baby boomers, the next wave of the aged, who began turning 50 three years ago and thus became eligible for that fraught rite of passage, membership in the AARP.
Officials of the lobbying giant say they have no intention of short-changing older members, who have more traditional expectations of retirement and what they want from a senior citizens’ organization.
“We’re not just showing people on the cover who are 51 and 52 years old,” said Martha Ramsey, publishing director for the group.
But the boomers, those born from 1946 through 1964, are headed inexorably through the life cycle, and the mighty AARP’s struggle to adjust says a lot about how they will remake paradigms of aging and retirement.
“We get the benefit or the burden, whichever way you see it, of all the ambivalent feelings people have about aging,” said John Rother, the AARP’s chief lobbyist.
Already, the cultural collision between the boomers and what Modern Maturity cheerfully calls the “Big Five-Oh” has launched a thousand newspaper columns, essays, bad birthday greetings and late-night monologues, including Jay Leno’s ceremonial enrollment of Mick Jagger, 56, into the AARP two weeks ago. Leno produced a mock version of Modern Maturity with Jagger on the cover.
Polling done for the AARP and others suggests that boomers are beginning to think about their golden years – and in a very distinctive way. To begin with, lest you wonder why the AARP moved away from the word “retired,” 80 percent of the boomers say they expect to continue working during “retirement,” either part time, full time in a new career or by going into business for themselves, according to a 1998 poll.
And more than a third say they will be doing that primarily for “interest and enjoyment.” Even now, 40 percent of AARP’s members are still working.
Only a fifth of the boomers expect to move to a new geographic area when they retire – in contrast with the previous generation’s dream of a mass exodus to Florida – and only a third think they will have to scale back their lifestyles.
Big majorities say they expect to live longer than their parents’ generation, and that awareness makes a difference, said Dr. James Birren, associate director of the UCLA Center on Aging.
“Boomers are thinking more about how they want to invest all those years of the future as opposed to getting through them,” he said.
Ken Dychtwald, the president of Age Wave, a research organization and business focused on the “mature market,” says boomers will live a “cyclical lifestyle” – “going back to school, having multiple careers, retiring, rehiring.” He added, “They will not accept old age at all.” Previous generations, Dychtwald said, lived “linear lives” – from work to rest to death.
Boomers are also more health and fitness conscious, analysts say. And, not surprisingly, they tend to be more anti-authority and more skeptical of government.
What does all this mean for the 41-year-old AARP, which claims more than 30 million members? Officials say they are doing a lot of strategic planning these days, and a lot of research on the boomer generation.
The organization, long known for its insurance products as well as its formidable defense of Social Security and Medicare on Capitol Hill, recently spun off a subsidiary to explore new services and products for the over-50 population. And its magazine, which has long published different versions for the working and retired set (the sex report appeared in both), may be doing more such demographically zoned editions in the future.
Dychtwald, a critic of the AARP, asserts that the senior group will have a difficult time serving both the old old and the new old.
“One is worried about fixed incomes and entitlements, the other is worried about paying for their kids’ education and elder care and mutual funds,” he said.
But Democratic pollster Mark Mellman argues that the boomers will be traditionalists in one respect: their support for those New Deal-Great Society entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security.
The underlying question, of course, is how much old age will change the boomers, and how much the boomers will change old age.
