Uh Oh Spagetti-O

According to the Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences, boomers are demonstrating greater cognitive decline than earlier generations.

For the cognitively impaired, that means we’re looking at early warning signs of dementia. Boomers start having lower cognition scores than earlier generations at age fifty to fifty-four. We know this because the scores from these tests were compared with those from tests taken by people over the age of 50 in past generations.

This has serious implications for our future mental health.

Every two years, study participants filled out surveys. They also completed a battery of cognitive tests in which they were asked to perform such mental tasks as recalling words they had heard previously, counting backwards from 100 by sevens, identifying objects depicted in drawings and naming the president and vice president.

Sound familiar?

Person, woman, man, camera, TV.

What explains our decline in cognitive function? We eat right, pursued higher degrees, and often have professional careers. The study indicates it may have more to do with loneliness, depression, and psychiatric problems than a deprived childhood. Substance abuse too (think opioids) may be a factor.

A large percentage of boomers also have heart health risk factors, such as obesity, lack of physical activity, high blood pressure, stroke and type 2 diabetes.

In short, a lot of boomers are in lousy physical shape and therefore not in very good cognitive shape.

So it’s time to shape up. Doing nothing will only exacerbate the trend. We need more regular physical activity and pursuit of social relationships. In addition, we need to address underlying mental health issues as well as treat the cardiovascular diseases. For some boomers, even these remedial behavior/health changes may not impede their risk of dementia in years to come.

Person, woman, man, camera, TV.

Oh thank God. I was getting worried. A minute later and I can still repeat those 5 words. I’ve got nothing to worry about.

Unless they give me 5 different words.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.

 

Easy Marks

A number of TV critics have recently lamented how dreadful the portrayals of over-50 characters are in current television fare. These boomer characters dwell on flatulence, use vulgar language, share TMI about their digestive tract functions, and seem helpless when it comes to being able to use contemporary technology.

The saddest aspect of this trend is that these are some very fine actors who have been compromised into playing roles that make any sane baby boomer wince at the awfulness of the characters. Beau Bridges, Allison Janney, Ellen Barkin, Kathy Bates, Ed Asner, Stacy Keach and Robin Williams, to name a few.

I’m not suggesting that we go back to the day when every older character was the wise oracle (e.g. Marcus Welby or Father Knows Best), but I think the writers (some of whom may be baby boomers as well – traitors!) could scale back a bit on the cringe worthiness of these current characters.

Do I have any hope that this trend will fade? Nope. Quite the contrary. I think it’s going to get a whole lot worse. Face it…we’re easy marks. Bumbling idiots who share too much information about how our bodies are failing us and that we don’t know what a Tweet is or what Snapchat does.

As baby boomers mature, TV show writers seem determined to make us look immature. Some critics think that this trend is some sort of karmic payback by millennials tired of listening to baby boomer crap about our music, movies and cultural dominance. Honestly, I don’t think it’s that malevolent. As always, it comes down to the fact that we’re such a massive demographic that it’s easy to take us down a notch or two, or three or four.

In any case, we should get used to being the butt of the joke. Remember how we laughed at our parents when they didn’t know what marijuana was or that we were smoking it? How we were so with it and they were so out of it? How we knew who Jimi Hendrix was while they were stuck on Lawrence Welk? How we knew that the Vietnam war was a foolish quagmire when they were still on the fence about it?

Talk about karmic payback. If we thought our parents were such dummies, what do you think boomer offspring make of their parents? If you don’t want to be insulted by the portrayals of boomers on current TV, your best bet may be to use that Netflix streaming thingie (more proof that we know nothing) to watch All in the Family, MASH, Happy Days, Mork and Mindy and Taxi. That would be the same head-in-the-sand thinking that our parents used when they were clinging to their entertainment icons.

And we thought we could do better?

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, which therefore makes him a pre-published author.

Dimension or Dementia

I was amused to read Neil Genzlinger’s article in the Television section of the New York Times last week

He was licking his chops over the discomfort that some 20-somethings are soon going to feel as their progeny insists that their world must be 3-D or nothing. Genzlinger was going to take pleasure seeing them inducted into the Dinosaur Club.

There is a big change coming to television and the generational faultlines are already starting to groan. We all remember when TV went from black and white to color what a seismic shift that was. More recently, we moved to high-definition and that has helped us realize that everyone has bad skin. We just couldn’t see it until high-def came along.

Now, it would appear that everyone over 18 or 19 years old will be scratching their heads trying to figure out why we can’t get along with out 3-D TV. Never mind that constant viewing in 3-D gives most people a headache, it’s new,Retirement for Dummies book cover it’s here, it’s now, so we gotta have it.

If we needed something to drive the final nails into to the coffin of smart, dialog driven drama or comedies, 3-D is the perfect vehicle (or should I say villain). It’s made for action sequences where things fly off the wall or better yet, coming flying toward you so that the bowl of popcorn resting in your lap is tossed all over the sofa. Will it enhance the storyline? Doubtful. Is it the next big thing? Doubtless. Will you end up having to buy a 3-D TV in the next 5 years? Likely. Because there won’t be any 2-D TVs on the market anymore.

The only consolation in all this, is the same glee expressed by Genzlinger. The curtain is going to drop on generations that thought they were the cutting edge, only to wake up one day to realize that the edge has passed them by. You want to tell to cheer up. There will probably be a big catalog of 2-D programs that they can watch late at night when their 3-D kids have finally turned off all their high-tech toys and gone to bed.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept and at BoomSpeak. He's written a mystery novel, which therefore makes him a pre-published author.