Introduction
Going the Distance

The tagline for the 2006 release of Rocky Balboa, the sixth installment in the Rocky movie franchise, says it all for Baby Boomers nowadays: “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”

The original Rocky, in 1976, made a mega- star of then thirty- year- old Baby Boomer Sylvester Stallone. Depicting a small- time boxer who gets by as a debt collector for a loan shark in Philadelphia, the movie follows Rocky Balboa as he trains for a long- shot, once- in- a-lifetime fi ght for the heavyweight title. But Rocky is realistic. All he wants is to go the distance, which, against all odds, he is able to do. Now, thirty years and four sequels later, the sixtyyear- old Stallone plays an aging Rocky who comes out of retirement for an exhibition fi ght against the heavyweight champ.

In describing the moral of this film, Stallone was quoted in a New York Times article as saying that while many of his Boomer peers are now feeling pressure to “step aside for the next generation . . . [t]his film is about how we still have something to say.”1 This is the Boomer attitude in a nutshell. Boomers will fi ght to make sure they continue to matter and have their say. They intend to go the distance.

The notion that Boomers are going to keep at it no matter how old they get runs counter to our expectations of old people. Yet this is the reality for aging Boomers. They have no intention of giving up on life’s possibilities. Boomers don’t intend to age; they want to be ageless. It is this continuing, emphatic engagement with life that is the future of Boomers and the subject of this book. [More]