InsideOut Interview: Jeff Johnson

by Owen Lipstein March/April 2009

It turns out that with 75 million in the United States alone, baby boomers are the largest demographic on the planet, and yet, despite the traditional positive influence on confidence and career satisfaction that aging often delivers, most boomers feel trapped and stripped of choices. Jeff Johnson and Paula Forman’s new book, The Hourglass Solution: A Boomer’s Guide to the Rest of Your Life (Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2009), suggests a new way of thinking about choices that can transform midlife into a time of renewal and expansion, rather than restriction and stagnating with the status quo.

Owen Lipstein: For readers who haven’t yet read your book, can you explain your hourglass metaphor?

Jeff Johnson: The hourglass is really a visual metaphor for life’s options. The top half represents the wide breadth of choices that people have early in life, the neck represents the point where people feel stuck with choices [they] made a long time ago, and the bottom represents the widened options that we believe exist in midlife for those who are willing to go for it.
The impetus for writing this book was seeing all of the people we knew or worked with really feeling that when they got to be 45 or 50—they didn’t have any choices left.

OL: How are baby boomers different from other generations?

Paula Forman: We come to midlife with a lot of different assumptions about the way it ought to be. Boomers are a group of people who have had very high expectations, and have already demonstrated an unwillingness to give those up.

OL: Do you think boomers as a group are stuck on the subject of their own boomer-ness?

JJ: Well, I think baby boomers are unwilling to accept that personal fulfillment is not attainable. They are unlikely to gracefully accept a life stage that offers diminishing returns.

PF: We’re used to redefining every life stage that we move through, so in a sense, why would this one be any different?

OL: What about writing this book surprised you most?

JJ: First of all, what was most surprising was how pervasive this feeling was among boomers of being stuck.

PF: Yes, being stuck: feeling that basically, you had made your bed, now you must sleep in it. You know: You decided that you were gonna be an adman, or a publisher, or a lawyer, and that decision was made long ago, and you can’t change it.

JJ: It made sense that this feeling of being stuck, or without options, might be income-related, but even people with very high income levels, high education levels, felt that they didn’t have any choices left. That they were a lawyer, for example—and they couldn’t do anything else, no matter how much they might not like being a lawyer anymore. That was a surprise.

PF: It’s definitely interesting; everybody’s first thought is that it’s about money—even people who are successful in redefining their lives, in getting out of the neck of the hourglass, think that their ability to do so was financially driven. But it doesn’t necessarily appear that way to us. It seems like it’s a turn of mind. You know, we’ve talked to people at all income levels, and it wasn’t necessarily money that was the enabling factor.

OL: Let’s talk about what you call “Greater Adulthood.”

JJ: Greater Adulthood is our name for that point in your life that’s really after the age of 50, where you should know yourself better than you’ve ever known yourself before because you have 50 years of history behind you, and you should be able to make better decisions than you’ve ever made in your whole life. There’s an opportunity for you to make those choices and decisions, and to act on those possibilities in a way that you couldn’t when you were 20, or 25, or 30. Those possibilities are why we called it Greater Adulthood.

PF: I also think we wanted to differentiate this stage from traditional models of retirement. The word “retire” means “giving up.” It’s a diminishment—giving up power, giving up responsibility, giving up being center stage, giving up options. And Greater Adulthood is about the opposite of that.

OL: You wrote this book before the economic meltdown. How do you see the premise of the book in relation to the fact that baby boomers as a group will now have far less flexibility?



PF: Well, I actually don’t agree that it’s going to be more restrictive. Yes, everybody’s upset. Of course you’re upset. You lost money. And our choices are affected. But sometimes, it takes a big disruption to really provide the rag through the ears that you need if you’re going to rethink your life.

JJ: I think that the economic meltdown has made it even more imperative that boomers understand what’s really important in their lives, [so they can better] make these choices and decisions. The book actually addresses a lot about finances, and what the economic situation has simply magnified: the fact that you have to look more closely at what’s important to you.
And unfortunately, the opt-out decision for everyone is, Money is the thing that really determines the decisions I make in life. That’s a sad state of affairs for people, to make significant life choices—particularly at this point in life, when you really should have a little bit more self-awareness—based on money. That is a very limiting way to look at your life.

OL: Well, for all the people who were “stuck” because they didn’t have money before the crash, now there will be more. And you hope that there’ll be a different paradigm completely. Your book is very prescient in that regard.

PF: I think as boomers, we’re really lucky to have lived through two periods of big social change; and I think the next 10 years are going to be as big, and as exciting, as the 1960s. I’m really happy to be the age I am while all this is happening.

OL: Why do you think the next 10 years are going to be exciting?

PF: Because I think that there’s going to have to be a fundamental change in values, and a change in priorities for everyone, for the whole country.

OL: Which is what your book is advocating anyway, right?

PF: Right. And a lifestyle, for example, that is defined through consumerism: That’s over, just over. It’s been over for a long time—but now it’s really over. And maybe the answer is that the people with the fewest toys also have the least baggage.

OL: Can you explain what work, being identified as what you do, and having different careers affect Greater Adulthood?

JJ: The issue of changing careers is really about defining for yourself what’s important to you, and understanding whether the job that you have is really fulfilling in that regard. And what people who have come through the neck of the hourglass found was that they needed to make some fundamental changes in their lives first, because that was the only way they were able to recognize what really mattered. A lot of times it was as simple as moving to a new location, and really understanding what that change meant.

PF: One of the advantages of being older is that work need not be as important. Building a career is one way that you build identity. You [generally] do that in your 20s and 30s, you are what you do, and the degree to which you achieve success is very important in terms of your identity. To have the opportunity to develop some other part of yourself, to put that kind of energy into something other than work, is a great bonus that you get at midlife.
When you’re younger, especially if you decide that you’re going to have a family, with all the responsibilities that entails—there are a lot of very real financial responsibilities that you’ve taken on. But you can decide, later in life, that work has a different meaning. You can decide, for example, that you have to work a little bit for a little bit of income, but it’s simply not going to be the defining factor in your life.

OL: There is also a health component to your book.

JJ: I think that the most interesting part of the research for us was that there really are three parts to overall health; that’s why we called one chapter “Energy.” Physical, intellectual, and emotional health all need to be addressed, because one by itself isn’t going to be sufficient to sustain an overall feeling of wellbeing.

PF: Energy was almost a prerequisite for every other kind of change. That chapter had a lot of different names over the time it took us to write it—

JJ: It started out focusing on the physical body—

PF: Right: “I don’t want to look old.” And boomers certainly have a big investment in youth; they invented the youth culture. But it became a bigger deal than that, and it also became apparent to us that the people who are most successful in Greater Adulthood are people who really paid attention to their overall health—their physical health, their emotional health, their intellectual health. Without that, it’s pretty hard to renovate your relationships, to do a different kind of work, to do the emotional and intellectual work that’s required to sprout new limbs late in life.

OL: Are you leading the lives you advocate? Have you changed
your lives?

JJ: Absolutely. I’m still working at an advertising job, but for me what has changed is what I do in the other 16 hours of the day, and where my focus is, and how much better I understand what makes me happy and what doesn’t. An hourglass solution doesn’t always mean you walk into work one day and say, “I quit. I’m moving to Mexico.” It can very much mean adjusting how you look at your job, and what you do on a day-to-day basis, even if you stay in the same one.

PF: Moving to Hudson was definitely a function of working on the book. My life was very different when we started this. We took a couple of runs at it, my husband Phillip and I. When Jeff and I first started working on The Hourglass Solution, the first thing it suggested to me was, Why are we still in New York City? Why are we living in the same physical footprint we chose 30 years ago? But I couldn’t move. I wasn’t ready to make the change. I tried to put the apartment on the market, but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it.
And then, a year-and-a-half later, it just was much clearer that a simplification was in order, that a different footprint was an important part of the solution for us. I do think that the easiest way to shake your life up is to move. It really is. You know, the sorting process that you have to go through, both physically and emotionally, inevitably produces change. I wouldn’t say I’m done yet. The physical move was a really big deal. Writing this book was a really big deal. But there’s more to do.

JJ: You asked before, “What was surprising about writing this book?” And I guess one of the things that was very surprising to me was how hard it is for most people to make these changes in their lives. When you look back at all the decisions you’ve made—you know, where to go to college, whom to marry, whether to have kids or not, whether to get divorced—all of these decisions were (or appeared to be) life-changing.
Now, at the age of 45, or 50, or 55, people are finding it very difficult to make life-changing decisions. But it’s really especially important now, because boomers have quite a few years left to live—and as the sands of life shall run, only those who can go with the flow will be carried through the hourglass, to a life half-full. v

[Ed. note: Paula is my (very slightly older) sister. She has been the resident expert on all things current ever since she ran the neighborhood as a 7 year old.]
Paula can be contacted at: www.thehourglasssolution.com