What’s This All About?

Two inter­est­ing trends have begun con­verg­ing recently, pro­vid­ing a very inter­est­ing set of lifestyle options for indi­vid­u­als who are inter­ested in tak­ing advan­tage of them.

Firstly, infor­ma­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, col­lab­o­ra­tion and social net­work­ing media have become eas­ier to use, cheaper to buy, and more sta­ble and secure. The result of this trend is that more peo­ple of all ages have become adept at using these media for a vari­ety of per­sonal and busi­ness reasons.

The sec­ond major trend that is occur­ring is that baby boomers are ‘get­ting ready to retire in droves’. Well, not quite. There are an amaz­ing num­ber of indi­vid­u­als reach­ing the age where they could retire, but not very many of these indi­vid­u­als want to retire — or even can afford to retire. Stud­ies are show­ing that what baby boomers want to do is to con­tinue work­ing, just under dif­fer­ent circumstances.

What baby boomers are look­ing for is a more bal­anced lifestyle — less effort on work and more effort on other things, like travel, vol­un­teer­ing, learn­ing, par­tic­i­pat­ing in sports, etc. Even the type of work stud­ies are indi­cat­ing that baby boomers are look­ing for is chang­ing — away from the high pres­sure, high income cor­po­rate world, to the slower-paced, more purpose-driven careers. In fact, an increas­ing num­ber of boomers are opt­ing for self-employment, even if it means becom­ing tech­no­log­i­cally lit­er­ate to do so.

A lily pad on a sunny day.

This isn’t really sur­pris­ing, con­sid­er­ing that baby boomer women have already affected con­sid­er­able change on the work­place over the past cou­ple of decades. There is every rea­son to believe that boomer men and women will achieve the changes in the work­place they are look­ing for — includ­ing greater flex­i­bil­ity to become remote or tele-workers.

At the same time that these two social trends are tak­ing place, baby boomer’s kids, the twenty– and thirty-year olds known as Gen­er­a­tion Y, are also tak­ing advan­tage of the increased free­dom and flex­i­bil­ity that new media and tech­nolo­gies pro­vide. This gen­er­a­tion is the highly prized “Cre­ative Class”. Intel­li­gent, cre­ative, demand­ing and impa­tient, many mem­bers of this gen­er­a­tion are not will­ing to play the tra­di­tional cor­po­rate game, and are also increas­ingly tak­ing their skills on-line and becom­ing self-employed.

The great thing about run­ning an online or vir­tual busi­ness is that you can run it from any­where! Any­where in the world!! And many baby boomers and Gen Y’ers are doing just that. Finan­cially and per­son­ally suc­cess­ful careers can be run from remote loca­tions, small towns, medieval vil­lages; from recre­ational vehi­cles and sail­boats; or from cot­tage country.

This website/blog is my action research project — I am set­ting up a loca­tion inde­pen­dent lifestyle that is sup­ported by a vir­tual enter­prise. You are very wel­come to fol­low along and learn from my mistakes.

The website/blog Age­less Explorer, located at http://www.agelessexplorer.com, is devoted to explor­ing more gen­eral lifestyle design, and is par­tic­u­larly focused on Baby Boomers who might be strug­gling to deal with their cur­rent or impend­ing retire­ment.

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