ENCORE: Finding Work that Matters in the 2nd 50 percent of Existence
By Marc Freedman
Published by Public Affairs; June 2007;$24.95US/$30.00CAN; 978-1-58648-483-5
Chapter One
The Freedom to Work
The year is 2030.
The youngest baby boomers are midway by means of their sixties and starting to claim their Social Security positive aspects. And none too soon, given that the coffers are practically empty. As several boomers say with only a touch of irony, at least we got ours.
The fittest boomers still boast that eighty is the new sixty, but the rest of the country has gotten tired of footing the bill for their lengthy retirement. Right after a seemingly endless run, America is ready for the baby boom generation to finally get off the stage.
With more than 1 in 4 Americans over sixty in this future society, generational conflicts abound. Walkers outnumber strollers; nursing homes proliferate while schools close. The millennial generation, now mostly in their thirties and forties, have taken “extreme working” to new heights, pulling extra shifts to support not only really needy kids and also the elderly, but also a vast cohort of “greedy geezers” spending one-third of their lives on subsidized vacation. California, using the nation’s largest population of people over sixty, is the very first to encounter the ethnic division exacerbated by the aging crisis, as an older, largely white minority confronts a younger and largely Latino majority inside the annual spending budget wars.
The nation owes a debt to the boomers, inside the form of an intractable deficit pushing the country ever closer to default. Spending on boomers’ pensions and wellness care has replaced practically all investments within the nation’s future. Not just children, but the environment and also the economy are suffering from these lost opportunities. America, like its swelling population of pensioners, is visibly and painfully well past its prime.
As the 2032 presidential election nears, boomer political power is finally on the wane. But the generation’s legacy is assured. Boomers will probably be remembered as a self-absorbed, self-serving horde of overindulgers who employed their votes and their dollars to push their very own interests to the forefront, posterity be damned.
Now imagine a diverse scenario.
It’s still 2030. The boomers are indeed starting to leave the stage. But their encore has been a rousing 1 along with the legacy they leave is far different.
The hysterical predictions of academic economists and assorted policy professionals that when dominated discussion concerning the inevitable demographic trends have confirmed false. Couple of even bear in mind concerns that the nation was headed to hell in a handbasket as a result of the huge population of “retiring” boomers. The feared “Gray2K” was a nonevent, just like Y2K just before it.
Instead, there’s a palpable sense of progress. Longevity, demography, human development, generational encounter, fiscal imperatives, labor market dictates, and the particular historical moment combined to lead boomers to contribute longer and to make use of their education and experience in areas with jobs to supply, deeper meaning to confer, and broader social purposes to fulfill.
Faced with the practical necessity of extended working lives, boomers have created it a virtue, acquiring busy on their next chapters, second acts, or Careers 2.0. A few of the ills that seemed intractable at the beginning of the twenty-first century are fading, and other people that appeared only to be worsening have produced a 180? turn — all thanks to boomer labor power, now known as the “experience dividend.”
Now, practically everyone looks forward to an encore career. The oldest members of the millennial generation, entering their fifties, are finding ready for their own second acts, and younger people clamor for “purpose-driven jobs” within the same way earlier generations embraced early retirement. The objective now is to have the ability to stop climbing the ladder and start producing a difference, to trade money for meaning, to have the latitude to function on issues that matter most.
Copyright ? 2007 Marc Freedman
Author:
Marc Freedman is founder and CEO of Civic Ventures. A former visiting study fellow of King’s College, University of London, a frequent commentator within the national media, along with the author of both Prime Time and The Kindness of Strangers, Freedman spearheaded the creation of Experience Corps and also the Purpose Prize. An Ashoka Senior Fellow, he was recognized in 2007 by Fast Company magazine as one of the nation’s leading social entrepreneurs. He is based in San Francisco.
Photographer Alex Harris traveled across the country to make the portraits in Encore. A 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, Harris is currently Professor of the Practice of Public Policy at Duke University, where he founded the Center for Documentary Photography. Harris also co-founded DoubleTake magazine. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
For more data, please pay a visit to www.encore.org