Right now, the LeadingAge Annual Meeting in Boston is underway. Thousands of senior living professionals are meeting and learning from experts thanks to dozens of sessions. There’s also the largest industry expo focused on aging. Attendees can network with everyone from CEOs to care staff to agency partners. But here’s the thing: everyone is talking about the senior living industry. Sessions focus on technology, architecture, staffing, the workforce, the board, CEOs, home care, and sales. But who’s talking about actually aging? Who is focusing on being old in a world that idolizes youth?
Old. Storytellers and pundits have a lot to say about it. Bette Davis declared it wasn’t for sissies. G.B.Shaw said you grow old when you stop laughing. Satchel Paige suggested it was a question of mind over matter. If only. But beyond clever word play, few address the eternal question: When are you old? Which birthday separates you from middle age and being old?
Whether you use cultural, social or individual milestones, defining someone as old immediately reduces them. During our work years, we define who we are by our job titles or our status as parents. Think about the last time you were introduced to someone new. Did it go something like:
- Hello, I’m Maribeth Jenkins, CEO of Cabal Strategy.
- Hi, I’m Angela and [child’s name] mom!
- My name is Natalie, and I’m the principal transformation officer for Sabal Strategy.
- Hey, I’m Wayne’s wife, Maribeth.
When you’re retired, and living solo, that intro gets truncated really quickly. It’s popular among a certain set to call yourself a “girl dad” or “boy mom” on social media. Is that still true and meaningful when your children are 40? Do you rely on clever word play when you speak about your career? Are you a word nerd, interwebs mechanic, data ninja, chief storyteller or cat wrangler? Or do you fall back on formal titles like CEO, founder, or director of sales and marketing? Here’s the point I’m making: at what point in our lives do we lose the human in all of this? Because without human identity, it’s meaningless blather.
And when you reduce your audience to someone who is just old, you’ve lost the heart of being human.
The recent passing of Diane Keaton moved @Heleneinbetween, an author, travel & lifestyle blogger to muse that Keaton’s death hit her hard because she [Keaton] “made getting older look like an adventure… Watching her felt like watching someone I knew…who reminded me that life doesn’t stop being interesting or funny or full of possibility just because you’re not 25 anymore.”
And that’s the conundrum of senior living and aging in a social media bite-sized world. Aging, aka getting older, is attractive when it’s seen as something active, fun, and full of possibilities. So we keep seeing images that look like this in our storytelling.
But how many people over the age of 65, an arbitrary milestone associated with “being old,” live their life like this? Think about your parents and your aunts and community elders. Think about your own life! Does it really look like this?
There’s a lot written about how to sell senior living. If you read our blog, you know our primary theme is that you need to speak to the right audience. Finding that audience is what we do better than any other data supplier. But every now and then, we need to stop and remember an audience is really just a collection of individuals. They might have gray hair or no hair. They were 20-year-olds who protested the Vietnam War or fought in it. Because when you look beyond age, net worth & assets, you’ll find better ways to explain why there’s a better alternative to aging in place. And that, my friends, is the difference between success and another lost lead.
