Twelve Things That Will Be Obsolete in 10 Years

By 2020, boomers will no longer be trendy, passing the torch to the younger, the cheaper, the healthier, the less demanding.

I remember, as a child, being dragged along by my mother for her weekly visits to my incredibly old grandmother at Toronto’s Baycrest Centre for the incredibly old. I was terrified. The elevator doors would open on my Mama Camilla’s floor and inevitably some poor soul would be slouched in a wheelchair, mouth agape, uttering some mournful sound. I clung to the pocket of my mother’s woolen coat. Forty years ago, we had already made that societal agreement with each other that for the most part we would not be keeping our elderly at home with us. We quietly, with considerable guilt (if my mother’s handwringing was any indication), had warehoused them in seniors’ ghettos with all the amenities of a college residence. Three squares, a shared room, and goofy activities on the main floor to keep the kids/elderly amused.

Now we, the baby boomers, are headed for our own trip downstairs for that weekly bingo game. In fact, by 2020, there will be just as many seniors as there are children in Canada. Right now, one in three Canadians is a boomer. I know all of this thanks to folks such as Moses Znaimer, who has rebranded us all as ”Zoomers.” Indeed, none of us will ever grow old, and vim and vigour will be the order of the day. The myth is that we’ll all be in great shape. But with rising rates of obesity, diabetes, and coronary artery disease and the proliferation of a multitude of cancers, we should all be, at the very least, humbled as we stand presumably with an equally spry mate in harness for a paragliding weekend on the precarious edge of our golden sunsets.

If we throw away the marketing brochures that assured us of such nonsense as Freedom 55 (I am personally on the Freedom 85 plan, having sired two more children in my early fifties), then we will see that the aged are no longer needed – they have outlived their usefulness. The younger, cheaper worker with fewer demands is more desirable. Our pensions are in doubt, our jobs haven’t been secure since the word “downsizing” was introduced, and we queue up across the country like so many used cars to get new hips and knees and hearts.

There is a natural passing of the torch as the parade of life marches on, and better that it be so. By 2020, the boomers will no longer be trendy. We will have had our day. Catered to since birth we will, as is the natural course of things, be obsolete.