He Who Dies Last Wins

In April 2008, Michael Kinsey mused over the intersection between death and baby boomers for The New Yorker. Kinsey, the well-known journalist and pundit, was one of the few critics to recognize the social upheaval that is fast approaching as death approaches for this generation on a massive scale. “He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins,” the popular bumper sticker of the 1980s, may have aptly described boomers’ values then, he proposed, but no longer. Now “He Who Dies Last Wins” reflected the generation’s driving ethos, longevity a better measure of success than a nice car or big house. “What good are the toys if you’re dead?,” Kinsey sensibly asked, many sixtysomethings beginning to ask the very same question. “The only competition that matters, in the end, is about life itself,” he stated, the title of his article- “Mine is longer than yours”- the emerging mantra for baby boomers.

Kinsey’s bold thesis was grounded in baby boomers’ well-known habit of assessing their lives not in absolute terms but rather against those of their peers. Boomers’ values may have changed over the course of a couple of decades, he believed, but their notorious competitive streak remained as strong as ever. Staying alive would be the ultimate game for this generation, with beating the statistical odds (75.2 years for men and 80.4 years for women in 2004) the first victory. Factors one could control and those one could not would determine the winners and losers in the coming years, with boomers to be just as proud of having made it to ninety or one hundred as they were about their brand new Beamer during the Reagan years. How one aged too would be part of the competition, Kinsey predicted. Those seeming to be younger than their chronological age would enjoy higher status than those appearing to be older. How one looked, felt, and thought would matter even more, he envisioned; how much hair someone had left or the pace of his or her walk would be carefully scrutinized. (That such criteria varied considerably in one’s later years made them all the more important; a seventy-five year old could be highly active in all dimensions of life or institutionalized.) “Contrasts like these will be common,” Kinsey foresaw, with distinctions to be made between those in “independent living” situations versus those in “assisted living” and those in the bottom of the geriatric barrel, nursing homes. “Entering one of these places is entering a new phase of life as clearly as going away to college,” he suggested, a cruel, Darwinian fate awaiting the Woodstock generation.

Enduring a form of peer pressure more intense than that in high school is just one of many potential scary scenarios as the proverbial pig works its way though the demographic python. Ten thousand baby boomers will celebrate their sixty-fifth birthday ¬every day for the next nineteen years, a remarkable statistic that poses huge consequences for the future. Many of these boomers “have no intention of ceding to others what they consider rightfully theirs: youth,” wrote Dan Barry on New Year’s Day 2011 in the New York Times, envisioning heaven (or hell) for them to perhaps be “a place where the celestial Muzak plays a never-ending loop of the Doobie Brothers.” Unless our best and brightest really do come up with a way to turn us all into modern day Methuselahs, however, baby boomers will eventually be forced to concede they are no longer the eternally young generation. Along with the harsh realities of old age and chronic disease will come that of mortality, this even further off boomers’ current radar. Should baby boomers not go through some kind of radical transformation over the next couple of decades, America may be destined for a crisis of, without too much exaggeration, biblical proportions.