Baby Boomer Secrets

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After a high school reunion, author and Baby Boomer Rix Quinn started wondering what answers he would get from his contemporaries if he offered them anonymity to discuss their Boomer childhoods. He compiled a list of questions designed to find out what they had learned over four or more decades. Here are some lessons he learned from the answers to the survey. 

If your birth certificate says you were born between 1946 and 1964, welcome to my world. You and I are officially considered "Baby Boomers."

What do we have in common? Well, we’re over 60 (most of us), but not yet over the hill. Sadly, a few of our unfortunate members are under a hill somewhere, taking the eternal dirt nap.

But the rest of us share a unique time and space. We were born in the middle of the 20th century, and hope to live to the middle of the 21st. When our earliest members were born, only 141 million people lived in the U.S. Today there are over 295 million.

Just about every fourth person you see at the dentist, carwash, or leg waxing salon is a Boomer. This means that (1) we still have some of our own teeth, (2) we may drive around aimlessly, and (3) some of us grow hair where we don’t want it. It also means we’re vitally important to the media who want to reach us, to the nation’s retailers, to our growing children, and to our aging parents, if we're lucky enough to still have them with us.

We're becoming major consumers of all those geriatric products we’re beginning to stock now.

Think about what we’ve witnessed in the last decades. We’ve seen television grow into an enormously influential medium. We’ve observed a space program that took humans to the moon and returned them safely to the earth. We've seen the age of the smart phone and social media -- did all of that leave you behind or did you embrace it?

Where are we going as we age? Will we someday be viewed by our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren as a good generation? Or are we deserving of the jab, "Okay, Boomer."

One of my friends died prematurely, in his 40’s. But not long before he passed away, he told me one thing really bothered him.

"I haven’t done all I wanted to do," he mourned. "I wonder – if somebody cares to judge my walk across four decades – if they’ll discover I left any footprints."

What sort of footprints will you leave for others to follow?

Our generation has often been divided. By our music choices. By young men’s decision to grow their hair longer or keep it short. Then by the Vietnam War. Then by education. Then by political alliances. In short…we’ve stayed apart too long. To help us focus not on our differences, but on our similarities. For whatever time is left to us (hopefully decades), we could unite to change society for the better. With our time, training, and monetary resources, we could continue making great contributions to this world.

Understanding us

Here’s a personal story. It’s the early 1960’s, and we’re sitting in elementary school. Around 10am the school bell suddenly blasts three-and-a-half times.

Three rings means a tornado, and four signals an air raid. (Definition of "air raid": A nuclear attack followed by desperation, radiation, and vaporization.)

Because we’re not sure if we heard three or four rings, we don’t know what to do. In a tornado, we’re taught to open windows and doors. If it’s an air raid, we’re supposed to close them. So, we stumble over each other into the school hallway. If it’s a tornado, we’re supposed to sit against the lockers. If it’s an air raid, we put our heads between our knees, and cover our scalps with our hands. (This technique was known as "duck and cover." How it protects from nuclear explosion is a mystery to me.) Nobody knows if it’s a tornado or an air raid, so we just kill time until the principal tells us it’s a false alarm.

And that’s what we’ve been doing these last four decades…killing time between personal storms and false alarms.

Lesson # 1: We’re pessimists by nature, but we bounce back quickly from defeat because we expect it.

Frankly, after over five decades on earth, this Boomer particularly remembers ten lessons that really helped. Here they are:

1. Prepare for the future, but take time to savor the present moment.
2. The video of life doesn’t have a "rewind" button. You can’t correct yesterday. You can only try to do better today and tomorrow.
3. Treat your parents well if they are still with us. Without them, you wouldn’t be here. You'll want your children to do the same.
4. The four greatest gifts you can give your children are love, acceptance, encouragement, and preparation. The road of life can sometimes be an uphill climb.
5. Try to learn something new every day and try to teach something every day.
6. An open mind welcomes both sunlight and rain. Listen carefully to new ideas, and to people with whom you disagree. Every person you meet therefore becomes your teacher.
7. Life is a cooperative venture. Those who lived before us left us some wonderful instruction manuals. We call them "history books."
8. Inspire others to read and write better. These are two of life’s most important skills.
9. Nearly everybody you meet is dealing with some sort of problem. Be kind and forgiving.
10. Choose a career that fits your personality, and life goals that help others.

The author of several books, Rix Quinn went to work for his father’s business magazine publishing company in the late 1970’s, and eventually served as a magazine editor and publisher. Later he produced short features for both network radio and newspapers. He continues to write today, with a special focus on Boomers.