Baby Boomers

Mount Baker at sunrise.

Us 'boomers' sure are a pesky bunch of people. We have been causing trouble all our lives. It all started when we began filling up the schools and there was not enough room for us. Then we started taking all the jobs, but on the bright side of that, we started paying a lot of money into CPP so that our parents could have old age security. Then we became big consumers and drove the economy for most of our working lives. We borrowed, we spent, we worked, and now we are being demonized. We are now starting to wreak havoc on the medical system.

But that is just the tip of the boomer ice burg. In North America, over the next eighteen years, there will be 10,000 of us per day retiring! And what do we do when we retire? We cash in our stocks and RRSPs. Imagine what this will do to the status quo in the markets. Old men do not spend when they have lost so much of their wealth in the last few years, and going forward, dead men do not spend at all.

Take Japan. They have a declining population and in the next 30 years, some 20 million Japanese are going to disappear. Today, there is a 4 day waiting list to get a body to a crematorium.

One thing is certain. The generations that follow us will have to do something different. I believe we have lived in an unprecedented time in history. Nothing will ever be done again, the way we did it. Those methods, on so many different levels, will simply not work in the future. How will we be remembered? We may care now, but when we are stacked 4 high in the cemetery, we will not care.