Fortunes Creator

I remember a conversation I had with my uncle a few years ago. He is a high-powered VP at a major US corporation who worked his way up from a stockboy at age 17 through all the ranks of the retail world to make it where he is today…extremely successful, maybe over-worked but definitely well-compensated. I’m sure he’s a millionaire a few times over, but I’d never ask, of course.

He was and is full of insight and inspiration to me, but one thing he told me during this particular conversation really opened my Gen-X eyes to the mindset of the rich. We got on the subject of retirement, and he being just a decade away from “retirement-age” at the time, said “I’ll never be able to retire. When I’m 80, I’ll be the cartboy in the Wal-Mart parking lot!”

We laughed at the thought of him trading in his $800.00 Brooks Bros. suits for a blue and white smock, but I knew it was true. Baby boomers can’t retire. Now, of course, in my uncle’s case it was not a matter of having to keep working to survive. He has more than enough to see himself, and maybe his children, through retirement. But the mentality of retirement seems to have eluded the baby boom generation.

The Boomers grew up with the post-WWII work ethic deeply ingrained in their collective psyche. Many (if not most) baby boomers have come to think of retirement as the short pre-cursor to certain death. It’s as though they’ve come to equate life with work, deriving self-worth from corporate productivity.

They’ve watched their own parents retire and then plunge swiftly into despair, bitterness, poverty, (prescription) drug addiction and declining health until they became a burden on their families, society and each other.

Of course, there are far too many cases of Baby Boomers not being able to stop working for financial reasons. Few have the financial nest egg built up to assure a safe and comfortable retirement. Outrageous health care costs coupled with the rising cost of living make it impossible for most to quit working altogether. As well, several “studies” have publicly declared that older people who keep at least a part-time job live longer, healthier and happier lives.

These studies rarely go any deeper than this…meaning few examine the fact that the Baby Boom generation has invested so much of their own “essence” into their working lives that they have lost the ability to enjoy the other facets of life for any prolonged period of time.

After all, they had the sixties. They did fun, love, art and music to the point where it quite literally killed some of the brightest minds of their generation. Perhaps it was a matter of being “scared successful.”

So as we watch our parents and older siblings redefine retirement for themselves (or ultimately abolish it completely), we Gen-Xer’s seem somewhere in the middle…we want to retire NOW, yet we also strive to be “successful” (whatever that means).

Growing up in the ’80’s, we were mindbent by the images of Wall Street raiders, big shouldered broads climbing the corporate ranks, and Ronald Reagan with his perpetually jet black pompadour preaching of American superiority.

Enter the ’90’s…age of grunge slackers and overnight internet millionaires. Then we watched as our musicians who told us to rage against the machine showed us around thier multi-million dollar cribs on MTV. We’re now a bunch of confused 30-somethings riding the fence between here and there.

We don’t like work but we want to be rich.

We love life, love having fun, can easily lay in the sun all day without feeling the least bit guilty.

We are desperately searching for ways to keep the money flowing in while we are out kiteboarding or getting our toenails painted.

Boomers think we’re lazy and unrealistic.

We think Boomers are slaves to the global corporate meat-grinder (think Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”).

So, what’s really working, anyway? Many of us think we aren’t working as we write blogs, push affiliate programs through email advertising and join the latest social networking site or YouTube knockoff to gain exposure for one of our ebooks we’ve written. But I dare say, we’re actually working longer hours than our Baby Boomer counterparts, even though we think we’re just “surfing” or messing around on the internet.

So, ask your best Gen-X friend if he would quit the internet if he was suddenly able to “retire” with all the money he’d ever need and you’d probably hear a “No way, man! Then what would I do with all my time?” Sounds suspiciously like the answer you get from a Baby Boomer when you ask them if they plan to quit working when they “retire.”

The author, JoAnn Roselli, is a successful living consultant, screenwriter, webmaster, entrepreneur, real estate investor and author of “How to Get High-Quality Plastic Surgery…CHEAP!” She resides in the Dominican Republic with her husband and their 12-year-old son.