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PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE: Planned obsolescence is a purposeful strategy to ensure the current version of a product will become out of date or useless within a known time period.

If you’ve been following my GA group on Facebook you know I’ve been LETTING GO for 100 days.

LETTING GO is like going “on a diet” which is one of the things I AM LETTING GO.
This is a MIND DIET.

I pick things that have kept me STUCK for years.

Graceing Agefully™ is the TITLE of my journey through the second half of my life. For me the second half began at age 60. I am changing my ATTITUDE about getting OLD and sharing my journey with YOU.

I am getting OLD. I am NOT anti-aging. I will die one day—100% guaranteed physical death.
Caveat: I don’t know when, so, it’s important to me to live EVERY DAY to the fullest.

I have no children. Many of my peers consider their children their legacy. I have family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, followers, etc..

How many lives I will touch and may have already touched will not fill the head of a pin metaphorically.

Perhaps my words will be my legacy. Perhaps one day when archaeologists are digging up the remains of the 2020’s these words will be found. (Can you even imagine what a DIGITAL DIG might be? I’m picturing the landfill of hard drives and mother boards being unearthed…LOL!).

Meanwhile, I’m on to something. We are PROGRAMMED to become OBSOLETE physically and mentally.

Think about it.

What comes to mind when you think about getting OLD?

MEMORY LOSS, CHRONIC ILLNESS, LOSS OF INCOME, LOSS OF VALUE, LOSS OF INDEPENDENCE and more or should I say LESS?

This is what I hear people saying ALL THE TIME!! Their PROGRAMMING is becoming a REALITY.

What I hear often from fellow Baby Boomers:

“This getting OLD thing is NOT FUN!” OR “I’m just getting OLD”, followed by a sigh after they have difficulty taking the lid off a jar.

Guess what??? You HAVE lost your MEMORY and it has become SELECTIVE about your YOUTH.

Being YOUNG was REALLY HARD at the time. Everyone has graduated from some school of HARD KNOCKS, right? Now, do you only remember how great it was and wish you had it back?

Baby Boomers CREATED the YOUTH MOVEMENT.

This was NOT a conspiracy. We didn’t know we were doing it. It just happened on a group and cultural level. (Remember “Don’t trust anyone over 30”?). So, today when you’re bemoaning the millennials and their apparent disregard or disrespect for the OLDER generation…hold your tongue, you were just as bad!

The CULT OF YOUTH was enabled by the sheer size of our population. Baby Boomers were the largest bolus of babies born, at that time, in an 18 year period directly following WWII.

We became a MARKET. We changed CULTURE to a YOUTH CULTURE. We created a DEMAND for products for the YOUNG. We drafted what became a DE FACTO EDICT to stay YOUNG.

Following our early youth, in our YOUNG ADULT phase, we PROSPERED and created a DEMAND for UPWARD MOBILITY and its TRAPPINGS ( appropriately named TRAPPINGS. FAST FORWARD and we are TRAPPED today by those…just sayin’).

Remember the YUPPIE? (Don’t hear much about them these days, do we?). YOUNG URBAN PROFESSIONALS which morphed into YOUNG UPWARDLY MOBILE PROFESSIONALS.

Interesting sidebar, the dictionary definition of YUPPIE now includes this unattributed comment: “stereotypical 1980’s yuppies OBSESSED with material objects and financial success”.

We PAVED OVER our parents’ generation with GOLD.

Perhaps we should all take a break and go back to 1972 and read Ira Levin’s “The Stepford Wives”. Fiction is TRUTH wrapped in a good story.

Everything we’ve been through in our YOUTH has PROGRAMMED us. We’ve lived according to the YOUTH culture we created. We’ve lived according to the YUPPIE culture we created. Now we are GETTING OLD according to the PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE we created with the YOUTH culture.

NEWS FLASH: The PROGRAMMING of PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE is REVERSIBLE.

Graceing Agefully™ is a CONSCIOUS COLLECTIVE effort to DE-PROGRAM and UN-LEARN our VISION of OLD.

We have been PROGRAMMED by our own YOUTH MOVEMENT to BECOME OBSOLETE.

Our experience of getting OLD is a MANIFESTATION.

In retrospect, in history, we may be looked upon as a CULT.

CULT: “devoted attachment to a principle”. Move over Jim Jones, we drank A LOT of ‘Kool-Aid®’.

Now that we are in our 60’s and 70’s we need to DE-PROGRAM. We need to LET GO of attachment to the IDEALS that WE ESTABLISHED as a COLLECTIVE ENTITY.

As Baby Boomers we need to face the facts about our collective state:
We are: AT WAR WITH AGE
We are: ADDICTED, DEPRESSED, ANXIOUS, SICK, ANGRY and FRUSTRATED.

The war will end when we each find INNER PEACE. I know I know it sounds SACCHARIN, UNREALISTIC, OVERLY SIMPLISTIC. That’s your programming speaking.

Here is my STRATEGY and the first STEPS to recovery:

STRATEGY: Live a “WELL-INTEGRATED LIFE”

Definition: HONOR EQUALLY each of the 5 following categories in your life EVERY DAY.

5 CATEGORIES: PHYSICAL, MENTAL/EMOTIONAL, FINANCIAL, RELATIONSHIPS and SPIRITUAL.

STEPS:

1. ADMIT you have a problem (see 12-step program).
2. START where you are, don’t STAY where you are. Become AWARE of where you are by SCORING yourself in each category on a scale of 1 to 10. Describe why you have given yourself the score you have. Describe what a 10 would feel like in each category. Get accustomed to that FEELING.

I ADMIT, the first half of my life was SKEWED toward FINANCIAL. I was PURSUING happiness in the way I had been PROGRAMMED by YOUTH culture.

I am now DE-PROGRAMMING publicly.

I hope my JOURNAL of this process will make you STOP and THINK. I hope you see even a tiny spark of INSPIRATION and DISCOVER that you can COURSE CORRECT your path on the aging journey. I hope you DISCOVER it is NEVER TOO LATE. In fact, it’s NEVER TOO EARLY either.

OLD is not a dirty word.

OLD is when you SEE more clearly, when you GAIN vision.

OLD is when you LET GO of YOUTH programming.

OLD is when you get your metaphorical license to drive YOUR OWN LIFE.

OLD is when you GRADUATE from the HARD WORK and RESISTANCE training of YOUTH and you can live in FLOW and EASE.

This is Graceing Agefully™