Baby boomers and the ‘live now, pay later’ consequences | Letters

As a baby boomer I am ashamed of many of my generation (My generation fought to be free. What happened to us?, 4 April). We are the luckiest generation of the 20th century. Born after the war into the NHS/welfare state, too young for national service, and the first teenage generation to have disposable income. We were witness/participants of the revolution of the 1960s. If we went to university, we had a grant. When we left school, there was almost full employment. Money has followed us as we got older. Yet many of my generation must have voted for Thatcher, Cameron and Brexit. The Tories should not have survived the 19th century, let alone the 20th, and now once again seem the dominant party.

I have voted in all three referendums involving England and found myself on the losing side each time. I voted out in 1975 but subsequently changed my mind when I found out that the only protection for workers during the Thatcher years was Europe. I voted for a change to the electoral system, and finally remain last year. When I was young we were proud of the welfare state. When did welfare get replaced by benefits and become such a dirty word to many of my generation? When will my generation wake up and remember their radical past and recognise that, as Harold Macmillan said, they “have never had it so good”?
Richard Ascough
Thames Ditton, Surrey

• Polly Toynbee wonders what happened to us. Being of a similar age, I also remember a 1950s childhood followed by the optimistic 1960s. The greater equality and better living standards that many enjoyed then may have obscured far more significant changes abroad. After the independence and partition of India in 1947, most of Britain’s vast empire disappeared between 1957 and 1968, while from 1961 to 1973 the UK was actively attempting to join the European common market.

The subsequent arrival of people from former colonies, of refugees from post-imperial conflicts, and then Europeans entitled to join them, all profoundly changed the daily experience of many urban citizens. Because we have not had to face our chequered history the way others (such as Germany) were obliged to, there is little collective consciousness of the close connection between revolutionary political events half a century ago and current cynical despair. That is what did not happen to us.
Dr Sebastian Kraemer
London

• Polly Toynbee asks why a generation that fought hard for equality and the liberalisation of attitudes is responsible for denying the same opportunities to those coming behind. I am a member of that generation and one who, along with everyone else I know, voted remain. I feel now that as well as a T-shirt announcing I am one of the 48%, I should have another to say I am one of those who have no wish to bring back the rope, cane or pre-decimal currency. Could it be that those who want to turn the clock back to the 1950s are simply grieving for their lost youth and hoping that by “taking back control” they can have the benefits of being young combined with the knowledge and experience of old age? Wave your blue passport in the air and jingle the pennies and florins in your pocket as much as you like, you will never be 16 again. We’re old, it’s not our time any more. To coin a phrase, get over it.
Lynne Copley
Huddersfield

• Polly Toynbee reminds me that I was born in the era of the ration book. I grew up in the era of live now, pay later. As we liquidated the empire and repaid the American lend/lease debt in its entirety, the “never had it so good” generation was funded by accumulating debt. Deregulation of the banking system allowed us to pretend debt could expand indefinitely. Politicians never found the courage to tell their constituents to live within their incomes. Austerity is the pay later era of live now.

Older people who want to bring back hanging, flogging and the rest of the 1950s nostalgia want to go through the last 70 years all over again because they cannot see any workable alternative. How we might pay for it all, with the debt already accumulated, is another matter. May and the Brexiteers are getting spiteful because they have seen the figures and know they don’t add up for everyone.
Martin London
Henllan, Denbighshire

• As I walked along Park Lane, as part of the march for Europe, I remembered that 49 years ago I had been a few streets away in Grosvenor Square, protesting about the Vietnam war. I was amused to notice that half of the EU supporters were old enough to have been there as well. We were vocal then and now, but never a majority. Perhaps what Polly forgets is that our generation was not one entirely made up of hippies and beatniks; there were also the mods, rockers, skinheads and diligent conventionalists. I suspect that baby boomers’ attitudes have not become significantly more or less selfish.
Martin Cooper
Bromley, Kent

• Polly Toynbee is right to feel ashamed of our generation opting for self-interest in voting out of the EU. I try to cast the smallest pebble into the biggest pond by wearing an EU badge on my coat on all occasions.
Val Mainwood
Colchester, Essex

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Baby boomers and the ‘live now, pay later’ consequences | Letters

Why baby boomers are hitting the bottle like never before

As an 18-year-old in 1966, I would go to the pub on a Saturday night with five girlfriends, before an alcohol-free dance at the local “palais”. We each drank a half of cider and one green chartreuse because, while it tasted like an antidote to dyspepsia, it was 55% proof. That was it; that was all we could afford. Even if we had the money, shame, social convention and a fear of what the neighbours might tell your mother restrained female, if not male, drinking. Now, for young and old, we live in different times.

Last week Tony Rao, a consultant psychiatrist who has long campaigned on the dangers of older-age drinking, warned that the number of over-50s admitted to hospital because of the amount of alcohol they drink has more than trebled in a little over a decade.

Anyone over 55 who habitually reaches for a glass or several might like to steel themselves sufficiently to consider an alcohol-free day by reading chapter five of The Drink Less Mind: The Truth About Overdrinking by Georgia Foster. It lists the negative side of a bit of a tipple, which includes: impaired coordination, depression, heartburn, nausea, stomach ulcers, pancreatitis, high blood pressure, anxiety, falls, dementia, fractures (divorce isn’t on the list, but could be) and, of course, the cancers, including those of the mouth, throat and rectum. And still the booze appears to be going down the necks of the children of the 1960s and 1970s (but not their offspring and grandchildren) in ever-increasing quantities. The question is: why?

Alcohol has become the baby boomers’ very own form of Russian roulette. Everyone knows the magic figure, no more than 14 units of alcohol a week for men and women (previously, men were permitted 21). And yet more people are taking the risk of going over the top.

In 2015 there were 3,627 admissions of over-50s with alcohol-related brain damage, compared with 994 in 2002. Experts say that the condition could even be twice as prevalent as that, because it is poorly diagnosed. (It can also be argued that in the past older drinkers were more concerned to conceal their habit). “If an educated woman turns up at a GP’s surgery or A&E with a fall,” Tony Rao says, “no one asks about her alcohol intake.”

A study conducted by Rao, published late in 2015, found that 21% of over-65s – one in five – exceeded the alcohol limits then set at 14 and 21 units a week. Rao defines “a heavy drinker” as a woman who regularly drinks one large glass of wine a day (one and a half glasses for a man). Since denial is a major part of boozing, the first reaction of a drinker is obviously to lie about the size of the glass.

Alcohol is a relaxant. It’s a reward. In comparison to other countries, the UK can also argue it’s bad, but not that bad. According to the World Health Organisation, the country with the highest consumption of alcohol per person from the age of 15 is Belarus, with 17.5 litres (of pure alcohol) a year; then come Moldova, Lithuania and Russia. In Russia over-15s consume 15 litres of pure alcohol per year – the rough equivalent of 155 bottles of wine or 1,500 shots of vodka . The UK is 25th on the global list with 11.6 litres consumed per adult per year.

However, according to Rao, in England between 2007-08 and 2013-14 the number of hospital admissions wholly attributable to alcohol rose by 30% in the 25-54 years age group, and by 70% for those aged 55 and above.

Numbers are still relatively small (109,720 aged 55-plus in 2013-14), but baby boomers are only at the outset of what could be a very long journey into retirement that equates to an awful lot of time for habitual and escalating drinking, the side-effects of which cost the NHS billions. So Rao is right to ask that “a brighter light is shone on the scale of the problem”. But what might that light reveal?

Retirement is an issue. The reshaping of what can be 30 years or more of useful post-work life has yet to happen in the UK. This is unlike, for instance, the US, where baby boomers who seek more than decades of “silver fun” in “the third age” can retrain and have a second career and give something back to the community, leaving little time for hangovers.

Ageism and its pressure to become time-defying, seventysomething Peter Pans might also provide reasons why the bottle becomes more attractive the older we grow. Other factors may be that drinking at home is far more common now than for previous generations; more people over 50 are living alone, partly because we are all living longer; and Rao suggests baby boomers may have been seduced by watching years of advertising about the glamour of booze before restrictions were put in place.

Anyone past middle age will remember the promise of what might happen with a martini in hand: sun, sea and summer in Monte Carlo was a promise repeated several times a week on cinema screens and television, echoed by the refrain of “a Double Diamond works wonders … ” without any health and safety warnings. Baby boomers ought to be smarter, but a lot can happen by osmosis with a large advertising budget.

Another major factor, however, goes back perhaps to the scale of disappointment experienced by a postwar generation that believed it was building a better, more equal world based not on the individual but a sense of collective goals. “What does alcohol mean to our generation?” asks Christina Fraser, a relationship counsellor with Coupleworks and herself a baby boomer. “We drink to fill a void. Our parents had a job, retired and dropped dead two years later. They worked hard and had fewer opportunities. The baby boomers were given the promise of a world that was full of possibilities. Instead, we are seeing that world close in.”

In Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, the economist Richard Layard says that what builds happiness at a community level is trust (in scant supply now), a lack of loss (tell that to the Remainers) and a “sense of shared purpose” (also absent), while a concern with status and envy about what others have contaminates the civic heart. “If your sole duty is to achieve the best for yourself, life becomes just too stressful, too lonely – you are set up to fail. Instead,” Layard writes, “you need to feel you exist for something larger …each person counting.”

Most of us can put the glass down rather than go for a refill – an excuse for another drink has always existed – but never before have so many of us had so long to drink ourselves under that table. And that’s a strange price to pay for so-called “progress”.

Why baby boomers are hitting the bottle like never before

What Child Boomers Want to Know About Overall health

As Child Boomers, individuals individuals born in between 1946 – 1964, proceed the aging method some certainties are beginning to emerge about this group of Americans. 60% of individuals between age 50 -64 suffer from at least one particular chronic condition. This indicates that the well being of the Infant Boomer generation will challenge the limits of social programs this kind of as Medicare and Medicaid to offer health-related care and meet other overall health related expenses.

As a Baby Boomer (the youngest who are age 50 in 2014 and the oldest who are 68) it is crucial to get charge of your well being and health selections. The choices you make in terms of diet regime, exercising, alcohol consumption and pressure management will have a massive impact on your finances and high quality of life into the potential. The well being care market, insurance prices and taxation policy in the U.S. and other places of the world are predicated on the expanding demands of Little one Boomers and the selections you make nowadays to enhance your health will influence these areas.

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Begin an exercise system that gives you with healthier rewards and are based mostly on your present level of bodily action. It is not necessary to go all out or push yourself past your physical limits. Start off slowly, taking care to warm the muscle groups and great down soon after your exercises in buy to effectively absorb the positive aspects of exercise without coming away from the knowledge a lot more reluctant to physical exercise the following time.

• Consuming and Overall health Effects  Binge drinking and substance abuse is prevalent and a troubling indicator for long term well being care requirements as Child Boomers age. A 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Overall health indicated that the use of illicit medication enhanced over a time period of a decade for those folks who are age 50 – 64. This, coupled with a binge consuming charge of eight.2% among grownups 65 and older and a hefty drinking charge of 2% and it is straightforward to see that alterations have to be produced among Child Boomers in their frame of mind towards drinking.

It is simple to locate data concerning the results of prolonged consuming and the related wellness troubles that come with years of alcohol consumption. Generating a dedication towards accountable consuming and cutting back can help prolong your lifestyle.

• Managing Stress Effectively  Stress management is crucial. Working in some substantial pressure employment possibility or carrying the weight of the planet on your shoulder can only lead to heart condition and stroke. Get a lot more time in terms of vacations and intervals away from the workplace or task and understand to relax more. Pushing back from a nerve-racking occupation, even if momentarily, can show critical in sustaining your sanity and your well being.

What Child Boomers Want to Know About Overall health