Oh, I realize this isn’t earth shattering news for anyone. The boomers (of which I am a proud member) are all getting to retirement age and many of us are fortunate to have septuagenarian and octogenarian parents still hanging around. Reaching 100 is very achievable in this day and age.
In 1982, the median age of Americans was 31.7 (per the Census Bureau) and that’s about how old I was then, and by July of 2006, the median age was 36.4. It’s likely that when the Census is done in 2010, the median age will be very close to 40!
So it’s no wonder that companies are creating and manufacturing more items that cater to the comfort and well-being of older people. People who suffer from diseases that limit physical activity such as arthritis, gout, Parkinson’s disease, and fibromyalgia. Some newer inventions are the stair lifts — a seat that attaches to the hand rail of stairs to lift people up the stairs of their home, electric scooters to whisk them through stores, print-to-speech software that “reads” websites for people who are vision impaired and a walk in tub for people who can’t step over the side of a regular bathtub. All of these and more are available now and more are being invented every day.
All the science fiction books I read as a child are only partially right in their predictions. None of them ever projected that the entire populace of the world would be over 30 by the time 2010 came along. We did achieve space travel and landed on the moon. We’ve built a space station, although we’re a long way from putting a colony on any planet or moon in our solar system and we have yet to meet any aliens (well officially that is — my cousin up in Chattanooga swears he was visited by aliens one night — but that’s another story entirely!).
Lots to think about.
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