{"id":1579,"date":"2003-06-05T19:34:22","date_gmt":"2003-06-06T00:34:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2003\/06\/05\/redefining-age\/"},"modified":"2003-06-05T19:34:22","modified_gmt":"2003-06-06T00:34:22","slug":"redefining-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2003\/06\/05\/redefining-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Redefining Age"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Let&#8217;s see&#8230;hobbies and pastimes&#8230;OK. I snow ski, windsurf, scuba, cycle (both single and tandem) and run. My usual cycling workout is 20 miles, 3-4 times a week, alternated with a four mile run on the &quot;off&quot; days. I&#8217;m a volunteer camera operator for our televised church services, and I build websites for money. Anything else? Hmm&#8230;I do digital photography and a little MIG welding, I&#8217;m learning to play the guitar, and I just completed courses in CSS and search engine optimization. I thought MatrixRel was inferior to the first one, and I can&#8217;t wait for T3 in July. I&#8217;d rather watch any of the &quot;Alien&quot; movies than anything with Orson Welles. I think that about covers it.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, yeah&#8230;I almost forgot. I&#8217;m over 50. Not much, mind you, but still&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s up with the self-disclosure? Well, it seems that Joe Territo of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cleveland.com\/weblogs\/nationalinterest\/\">National Interest weblog<\/a> is aghast because <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cleveland.com\/weblogs\/nationalinterest\/index.ssf#002237?\/mtlogs\/nationalinterest\/archives\/2003_06.html\">AARP tried to recruit him for membership<\/a>. Joe&#8217;s only 34, you see, and as far as he knows, he doesn&#8217;t have any &quot;pastimes or hobbies&quot; (AARP&#8217;s words) that would put him on their radar screen. His post started me thinking: what does the typical &quot;senior adult&quot; look like today? Is there such a thing?<\/p>\n<p>I guess I&#8217;m too busy to do any serious investigation in this area, but I can tell you that my &quot;fifty-plus&quot; is vastly different than my dad&#8217;s &quot;fifty-plus.&quot; I also can&#8217;t imagine anything more boring than the kind of retirement that his generation &#8212; for the most part &#8212; looked forward to. Is my definition of life after 50 better than theirs? No, I don&#8217;t think so&#8230;it&#8217;s just different.<\/p>\n<p>My advice to Joe is to just chill a bit. So far, life on the far side isn&#8217;t a heck of lot different than on the near side, and I suspect that the demarcation between young and not-young will be increasingly blurry.<\/p>\n<p>To paraphrase a previous clich&eacute;: in the blogosphere, nobody knows you&#8217;re an old coot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Let&#8217;s see&#8230;hobbies and pastimes&#8230;OK. I snow ski, windsurf, scuba, cycle (both single and tandem) and run. My usual cycling workout is 20 miles, 3-4 times a week, alternated with a four mile run on the &quot;off&quot; days. I&#8217;m a volunteer camera operator for our televised church services, and I build websites for money. Anything else?&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2003\/06\/05\/redefining-age\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Redefining Age<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}