Opinionistas

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed are not that of Daily Maverick.....

It’s boom(er) time — 70 is the new 50, so get up and get on with life

4 May 2025

Gone are saggy grans and gramps. Baby boomers are learning, having love affairs and wearing yoga pants.

Have you noticed how many movies, TV series, YouTube clips and adverts now portray old people as the protagonists and not just the doddering grandpa or hobbling, grey-haired granny?

There was a time, until very recently, where the silver-haired brigade appeared exclusively in adverts for medicines to treat age-related ailments, food – as in “as good as grandma’s homemade bobotie” – or financial ads with salutary tales of the need to invest early or the joys of reaping a lifetime of prudent investment.

Then there were ads for retirement communities and dietary supplements to prevent constipation, boost bone health or manage arthritis. Grandparents were mostly featured interacting with grandchildren or extended family, or else the old were condescendingly depicted in negative roles that used ageism as humour.

That’s changed. It’s official: seventy is the new fifty, so it follows that people with more trips around the sun are being shown in a different light.

If you have any presence on social media, you can’t have missed the trailers for a plethora of movies with older people in the cast.

There’s the upcoming movie The Thursday Murder Club. The book, written by Richard Osman and set in a peaceful retirement village, went viral, quickly catapulting it into the stratosphere. The movie stars Helen Mirren (79), Jonathan Pryce (77), Ben Kingsley (81) and Pierce Brosnan (71) as a group of oldies who become unlikely friends and meet weekly to solve murders.

Then there’s 80 For Brady in which a bunch of even older old broads – Jane Fonda (87), Rita Moreno (93), Lily Tomlin (85) and Sally Field (78) – go on a life-changing trip to see their football hero, Tom Brady, play in the Superbowl.

And mostly the old people are no longer, as a rule, portrayed in stereotypical roles. No purple-rinse brigade here.

age older people boomers This new vitality is attributed to good nutrition, frequent exercise and easy access to beauty treatments. (Photo: Vecteezy)

The young old women wear Lulu Lemon yoga gear for their downward dog mornings; they have sex and fall in love and suffer like teenagers when it all goes wrong. And the new old men? They behave like old old men: chasing much younger women when they’re not on the golf course talking about cryptocurrency. (Talk about stereotyping. Sorry.)

But it must be said that this new breed of old men has also been heard talking about feelings. Sometimes – like Anthony Hopkins (87) did in The Father – they even cry.

This cohort takes up the cudgels as they fight causes. The TV series Matlock sees Cathy Bates (76) play a lawyer getting justice for her dead, opioid-addicted daughter.

That television and film studios are pouring money into productions aimed at the not-so-young is no surprise. It’s profitable.

A lot of money has been thrown into researching this area, not least by the highly respected global financial agency, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which has produced a report that boldly announced, “70 is the new 50”.

Apparently, today’s baby boomers have the cognitive ability to work well past retirement age. And, curiously, someone aged 70 today has the same cognitive function as the average 53-year-old in 2000.

That’s a recent 25 years ago – the year my mother died, and I turned 42.

Memory, orientation and basic maths were tested in one million people aged 50 and older from 41 countries.

The IMF called it the “rise of the silver economy”: a world where people are living longer and breeding less, allowing older people to continue working, or fill positions in a job market threatened by a labour shortage.

Older people are remaining active in work, studies and hobbies. (Photo: Vecteezy)

Me and my fellow oldies, they found, are healthier than our counterparts of old. Among other things, like being cognitively superior to our parents at our age, our grip and lung function are better.

My dear old mom, who spent a large portion of her Catholic life on her knees, would have pooh-poohed the findings; she could still genuflect, get down to the ground with one knee and lift herself up without aid until she died at 76.

What would have shocked her is the behaviour of new old people. Mom had a long list of taboo subjects, the most prominent of them being sex, any bodily functions, blasphemy and the price of things. A running joke with my siblings was that we’d been born through immaculate conception.

The growing elderly population even looks younger, and I’m not talking about the red carpet at the Oscars, but shoppers in South African supermarkets and theatregoers.

That, no doubt, can be attributed to good nutrition, more frequent exercise and easy access to ever-improving beauty treatments.

As a young colleague recently observed: there’s no such thing as ugly, only poor. Women, and increasingly men, who can afford it (and those who make it a priority even if they can’t), are nipped and tucked into youthful versions of themselves.

Under-chin waddle – more commonly known as turkey neck or saggy jowls – and nasolabial and marionette folds, those deeply ageing lines that run from the sides of the nose, past the mouth to the bottom of the chin, are pulled back and pinned to create defined jawlines.

Droopy eyelids are snipped to remove excess skin and widen eyes. Foreheads are Botoxed into immovable obedience. And don’t get me started on teeth and the prohibitive cost of fixing and whitening them.

Even back then when I was growing up, my lovely mom – deeply lined at 60 – often pulled loose skin up with both hands saying wistfully, “if only”. But a facelift in Ladysmith in the 1980s was seriously not going to happen.

There has been a giant shift in the “getting old” zeitgeist: a change in our cultural perception of ageing. Old people are not let off the hook if they can’t stand on one leg. Chair yoga, aqua aerobics and walking are recommendations from eye-rolling friends. It’s okay to complain about a bad night’s sleep or a bad hip. It’s not to allow it to slow you down, or to stop you from joining a U3A (University of the Third Age) gallery walkabout.

And so, old people are walking the Camino and climbing mountains, going back to university, taking art classes, learning Mandarin, joining a choir, volunteering at shelters, doing the rigorous courses needed to become counsellors at LifeLine…

It puts pressure on those of us who just want to be, to have a cup of tea and a lie-down in the mid-afternoon, to not feel guilty if we turn on daytime TV.

It seems that until surgery or a hip/knee/shoulder replacement restricts mobility, we are expected to get up and on with it. Age is no longer an excuse.

It’s no use complaining. Having been entirely self-reliant (I’ve lived on my own for two-thirds of my life), I would dearly love to abrogate responsibility for some of the drudgery that I am tasked with – bill paying, getting the car serviced, sorting a plumbing problem, organising my social life (every single outing, holiday, event, dinner). It’s exhausting.

But that “seventy is the new fifty” voice is a constant refrain in my head. Get on with it! DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

Categories:

Opinionistas

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

Opinionistas