So, I read an article this weekend in Futurist magazine that completely blew me away, and has already had me rethinking various parts of my arts center's business plan in a fundamentally new way. For those who aren't familiar, Futurist is exactly what it sounds like - a magazine where intellectuals examine the trace data just now coming in regarding certain subjects, and try to guess at what this is going to mean for this subject ten years in the future, twenty years, fifty years. It's a fascinating type of exercise, I think, and in many cases you can really learn things from these articles that are directly applicable to life, business, etc., which is why I always read each issue. (In fact, I nearly went to graduate school in the early '90s to study how to do such analysis myself, but in my case through the ephemera of popular culture. Yes, I was going to study at Bowling Green State! Where else?)

Anyway, so there's an article in the new issue by Ken Dychtwald, a veteran of the wellness movement and a professional advocate for political issues involving seniors. (In fact, the article's reprinted at his website, if you want to read it yourself.) If his name sounds familiar, it's because Dychtwald just really gets around - he's always showing up on CNN, always testifying on an age issue for a congressional committee, just got written up in Forbes, etc.

The article is in general about all the issues that the Baby Boomer generation face as they enter their traditional "elderly" years, and how so many of these issues are different now from what previous generations dealt with. And the article goes into the wellness movement, of course, and talks about Social Security and a bunch of other things. But the thing that really got my attention was when he started talking about the "four waves" of retirement thought that have progressed throughout human history, broken down simply into the following stages:

Dawn of man until 1900: There was no such thing as retirement; you just kept working until you died.

1900-1950's: Because of the changes of the Industrial Revolution, a mandatory "retirement" from the workforce is necessary. It is seen mostly as a social experiment, to see if the government can help its most elderly and infirmed citizens get the care and housing they need in old age.

1950's-1980's: As "retirement" moves into a stable, mature phase, it is seen as more of a right, an entitlement; by no coincidence, this is when the phrase "golden years" is born.

Dychtwald then argues that we're now moving into a fourth wave of thinking about retirement, and the relationship between old-age and career. And it's been sparked, basically, by the Baby Boomer generation being the healthiest, most long-living generation of seniors in human history, plus being so populous in size and having so much of the wealth and other factors. But in a nutshell, it's basically this - that a growing amount of Baby Boomer seniors are not ready to do a traditional "retirement" at 65 or whatever, where they play golf and collect porcelain miniatures and basically sit around waiting to die.

Dychtwald quotes this interesting statistic from a survey his consultancy did; that 27 percent of all current retirees they interviewed see themselves as what Dychtwald calls "Ageless Explorers;" that they see themselves as still youthful and active, want to contribute to their community, enjoy learning new things and making new friends, and doubt that they will ever see themselves as "elderly," or at least how the traditional definition of it goes. These seniors, Dychtwald argues, are looking at retirement as something different - not a duty to sit back and no longer contribute to society, but a chance to reinvent themselves, to delve into an entirely new industry or profession (what he calls "rehirement"), and especially maybe something much more creative or artistic this time, now that the pressure to make money and raise a family is gone.

Well, gee, sound like any arts center I'm trying to put together these days? Reading this article, in fact, made me realize that there is a huge untapped market here, staring me in the face, when it comes to this center I'm trying to put together and open here in Chicago these days; just thousands upon thousands of new seniors, who have decades of business and tech experiences behind them, but now suddenly want to be spending their time working on the arts. And over the last two days of thinking about it, I realize that there are at least three distinct ways for seniors to get involved with my center, if I make the process easy for them, and that all three ways would let them decide how involved they wanted to be, from minimal part-time all the way to full-time.

There is firstly, of course, just the opportunity to hire a senior for one of our full-time or part-time positions, which I guess I had just been assuming this whole time would only be held by young people, because I frankly won't be able to afford to pay people too terribly much ($25,000 the first year, for example, to a full-time director), so just figured that a seasoned veteran wouldn't be able to accept that kind of money. But if you look at these "rehirement" people, as Dychtwald calls them, that's actually part of the point he makes - that these people made a pretty decent amount of money in their old lives, and that many of them are the product of the Kennedy generation and actually got their big fat pensions at the end of it all, so don't need to be making job choices anymore based on salary. (I mean, this is certainly the case of my dad, now that I think about it - he was an engineer for a civilian military contractor for forty years, and now is a part-time professor at a community college. In fact, I think my parents are kind of a textbook example of this "Ageless Explorer" Dychtwald is talking about.)

To be frank, I'm still not seeing the possibilities being too high of our full-time directors being seniors; I could, however, easily see hiring tech-background seniors to do part-time work with our servers, help us patch together and run our admittedly wicked-complicated soundboard, run a special marketing survey among our members for us, etc. This would give these guys really cool stuff to do maybe once a week if they wanted, once a month if they wanted less, a way to really contribute and actually get decent money in return, but not having to take on something full-time again.

Then, of course, is something I see as much more potent, which is the idea of getting a lot more seniors involved as volunteers than I was picturing before. Why wasn't I picturing more seniors before? I don't know, but for some reason I just saw most of our volunteers as really young people, beginning slammers for example, who'd come in and help us collect money during shows, serve drinks, run the retail kiosk, be a liason for touring featured writers. But really, an Ageless Explorer type would be perfect for that too - and unlike the young person, would be a lot calmer, a lot more trustworthy, much more unflappable, and have a whole bunch of great stories of their own to contribute. Plus I can convince some of these Ageless Explorers, hopefully, to organize discussion clubs, perhaps sit in on some of our staff meetings and give us advice, based on their decades of prior business experience, things like that. Dychtwald has me sold - if you've got this huge pool of talent and experience, sitting around just wanting to be a part of something cool and new and artistic, why not take advantage of that?

And then there's a third way to get more Ageless Explorer seniors involved at the center, which I'm almost kicking myself about right now for not thinking of it sooner - of, duh, setting up mentor relationships between these seniors and young artists. Like, take my friend Nikki Patin here in Chicago, for example, a gifted poet and singer who has ended up doing much of her own administrative work over the years - booking many of her own shows, writing many of her own press releases. If my center was open today, then, one of the things I could do for Nikki is get her partnered up with one of our senior members, maybe someone who worked at a PR firm for forty years or whatever. And especially if we had an experienced senior attend a live show at a previous time and see Nikki perform, and say something like, "Hey, I like that kid." Which is of course another part of this overall complicated scheme, to get our members out to as many actual live shows as possible, and legitimately start building a community there between artists and patrons.

This would be more than the person simply passing on some tips; they'd introduce Nikki to the media contacts they have, actively work to get more press written about her, work with us to make her tours go more easily. This is a great untapped potential, I'm realizing, that a lot of people don't think about when they think about retired seniors; not just the raw talent, but the forty years of social networking under their belt, and all the people now in powerful positions who they've been buddies with for decades. At least, I had never really considered it until reading this article myself.

So yeah, this article has really opened my eyes, and I suggest that you read it as well, because it might open your eyes too. And I love it when I can come across just one simple magazine article like this and have it really make me see a whole brand new thing in a new light. I'm looking forward to working it formally into my business plan.

Some random notes, as long as I'm here:

MEA SORTA CULPA: Without apologizing for what I said, I did want to add some thoughts about my recent comments on the bicycle-advocacy group Critical Mass. I do want to reiterate that the attitude I was talking about (that "eye for an eye" retribution mindset I was complaining about) is not the official stance of the group as a whole, which I did say in that original entry but I'm realizing now not clearly enough. In all fairness, there are lots of people in CM who do not have this attitude, and who kind of roll their eyes like me at the members who do. As I was telling one of my correspondents, though, it's unfortunately the most radical elements of any group that tend to be the most vocal ones as well, which is why I think people equate this attitude so much with the overall group as a whole. But I didn't mean to imply myself that this was the case, so I wanted to clear that up.

--God, I had this weirdass dream last night, that I was a professional absurdist moviemaker, and that I was screening my latest movie in the editing room. And the only thing I can remember about the dream is this little five-second snippet from the movie; of this little seven-year-old actress dressed like Pippi Longstocking, getting dragged away by cops, screaming in her little high-pitched seven-year-old voice, "I'm Pippi Longstocking, motherfuckers!" Jeez - no more spicy sausage sandwiches before bed, I swear.