WHEN IS MID-LIFE? MAY I PLEASE GO NOW?  

IS THERE A CHOICE?  

Emerging Trends:    

Once upon a time, living till 100 was considered a big deal. Today, in Florida alone, there are over a hundred people over 100.  Animal organ transplant, fetal cell organ growth, mind body research and gene engineering is working  to extend human life well past 100 years.  Soon gene therapies will start to become available in the next 5-10 years. The questions are already mounting. Who gets to avail themselves of the latest life extenders? The HMOs will not pay for all of it.  Even if you can live to a 125, what will be the quality of your life? Who will take care of you?  Not your children, they’ll be off playing entrepreneur in Mongolia. What if you survive your spouse and you happen to be a woman and the odds of finding a male companion suddenly drop to 1 in 20 or less? 

Sirtris a Cambridge, MA bio-tech co is in the human trial phase of distilling Reseratrol found in red wine into a pill that will preserve you well past 100. Time magazine in 2010 had a whole issue on living past 100 with a list of dos and don’ts to help you get there. Sergey Brin co-founder of Google at age 36 is racing against time to find a cure for Parkinson because his wife’s genetic testing company 23andme has found that he shares the genetic marker for Parkinsons with his mother who in her 50s has Parkinson.  That raises his odds of getting Parkinsons from 1% suddenly to over 50%. Knowing that many of us might live past 100 is hardly reassuring if you know you have a 50% chance to get a degenerative illness that could strike when you get to 50 and still have half your life ahead of you. 

Will longer life guarantee better health or simply longer misery? What if you don’t like what you find when you get to 80 and you still have another 35 years to live?  Tough questions lie ahead for us as a society who hates to talk about death and dying.  We’d better be careful what we ask for; eternal life might be just around the corner. It might be a living hell till we fine-tune the options of aging and dying.  In any case, the words “to die” as we have come to use it till now, might become obsolete by the middle of this century. Soon to be replaced by, opting out of life. 

Next Opportunities:   

Genetic testing companies like 23andme.com are poised to take off. I have got my genetic testing done. What about you?  Next will be counselors who are trained to help you navigate what you find out. And soon to follow will be early intervention medical treatments based on your genetic profile

Each day an average of 8,000 people in the US turn 60.  One third of Japan’s population is already over retirement age. Start by thinking of retirement communities that will call themselves anything but retirement communities!  Golf and tennis will be but just one of the many options that will be the focus of these communities.  They will come in all sizes, shapes, forms and combinations. Some will be on college campuses and will tie in to mentoring programs and continuing education especially for retired professors and professionals of all sorts.  Religious communities will develop with their own spiritual focus.  Others will be constituted of mixed age groups centered around a “ multi-generational village.”  Picture Sixties co-housing with various twists.  Many urban ones have already started up in (where else) Cambridge, MA and Berkeley, CA. 

 Mr. Erickson, CEO of Erickson Retirement Communities and Mr. Feeney, Atlantic Philanthropies, are just two visionaries who have recognized the burgeoning need and demand for improved quality of life as people age.  They are investing heavily in the research.

Many of these communities will focus on health and spirituality. In collaboration with spiritual coaches and physical trainers, health care professionals will be at a premium.  If you are a developer, be a pioneer and think past the current models of independent and assisted living housing for the elderly.  If you are a health care professional or coach specializing in aging, market yourself directly.  The “elderly” are the fastest growing segment of our population.  As boomers age they will want to control their destiny and they will buy all the self-help they can get their hands on.  In essence, throw out all that you think you know about aging and start again. Start planning for 2-3 re-inventions of self after age 50.  Retire the word retirement and think of “learning” as a life long activity.  

Be part of the re-thinking and re-shaping of the second phase of life in the 21^st century.

Let your imagination run wild.   

Create the future and smell the roses, it’s your move!

 LIFE AND DEATH PLANNING. 

         LIFTING THE LAST TABOO. 

     Emerging Trends:  

Until the sixties, sex was taboo.  And until recently, it was money. You never asked someone her actual worth.  Forbes magazine pieced the information together but rarely did anyone on the list of richest people confirm it publicly. Today ask any Internet millionaire his worth and he will proudly and loudly tell you in exact numbers including preferred stock options!  Or just ask Google or Zillow.  Why ask?  Foursquare and Blippy lets you instantly announce to the world, where you are and what you are buying. 

The next taboo to fall will be death. We don’t want to talk about it. Let alone face it ourselves. Cancer and AIDS changed that for a while in the 80′s but that too has changed in the US with the increasing number of effective treatment options.  But now, with increasing ability to plan and organize one’s own death, more and more baby boomers are looking to do just that.  Decide how, where, when and in whose presence you want to die. The gene research will soon let you know how and when you will die (unless you get hit by a truck first), and the virtual reality world will create ways of “staying alive” forever.  How, where, what and when have become much more open ended and within your control.  The biggest question of the new day will be deciding whether brain death or mind death is the real moment of death? 

 For example: I know if I find out in the next 2 years that I have pancreatic cancer, it is highly unlikely I will get treated.  Instead I’ll spend as much of my remaining active life outdoors at my homes in Nova Scotia and Gloucester. And when I am closer to death, I will slow down my life and reduce my social contacts to a handful of people to conserve energy.  And to focus on the transition into death I will spend part of every month in silent retreat at a monastery I have frequented during my life.  I would like to spend my last moments awake but in as little pain as possible in the quiet of my bed with only three or four of my dearest friends and family present at my home.  All this is written in my living will and stored safely away.   The opportunity to die just the way you want is already possible today and more and more people are realizing it and making it happen. Dennis Hopper divorcing his wife while on his death bed. It is going to get more surreal before it settles down.

Next Opportunities:

Bill Moyers series on Death and Dying on PBS in the Fall of 2000 was a start. It cratched the surface of many issues that lie at the heart of this topic that has been taboo for the last 100 years. Boomers like Moyers will break through this glass ceiling and make it accessible to all.

Opportunities you ask; starting with Bill Moyers expect more best sellers on this topic, like “Tuesdays with Morrie” by Mitch Albom, and then you have Timothy Leary’s video document of his last days.   There always have been the Dr. Kevorkians of the underworld who will help make it happen. Whatever it is: talking about death, walking the final mile with someone else, how to touch someone who is dying, helping a person let go. These related topics will soon be talked and disected and reconstructed till you are blue in the face.  We are a culture of extremes and will take this to an extreme before we are done.  Expect the next Damien Hirst of the art world to give it to you as the ultimate performance act.

Meantime, you can help create the structure or format for communities and families to nurture the dying or chronically ill within them. Create the “how to guide” for chronic care, or Death and Dying for Dummies. It’s going to be needed and some one is going to do it, might as well be you…if you have the experience and wisdom and sensitivity to handle these delicate multi-layered legal, emotional,  medical, practical issues.

Look for Chronic Care Communities of friends and families coming together around death and dying. Home hospice will mushroom.  What is relatively rare today, hospice insurance will become the norm as more people opt to die at home, away from cold hospitals, nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Others will opt for assisted suicide clinics like ones run by the Dignitas group in Zurich where the rich and famous like British maestro  conductor Edward Downes and his wife went in July 2009 when cancer and old age made them decide that they were ready to go to Zurich for very the last time.

Mourning Dove Studios LLC in Arlington, MA is working with Mount Auburn Cemetery in nearby Watertown, MA. the oldest large-scale garden cemetery in the US, to introduce your final carbon footprint with biodegradable caskets made of papier-mâché material. What could be better as your final act, tread lightly on the earth as you are laid to rest!  This concept that started with indigenous peoples across the globe has been in vogue in Europe for over two decades and is finally catching on in the US.  Check out a cemetery near you. Also, there is even a funeral industry blog, Your Funeral Guy and check out SimpleFunerals for funerals under $2000. That’s a steal!!

Rest assured, death is soon going to be on your mind.  The forces are converging.   It’s your life and it’s your death.  Make it happen your way.

Let your imagination run wild.

Create the future and smell the roses, it’s your move!

                 THE WHEN, WHAT & HOW

                                 ARE YOU READY? HAVE THE LAST WORD!

Emerging Trends:

Dr Leroy Hood’s Human Genome Project originally conceived in 1982 is considered to be the next and last big frontier for human discovery on earth. It is expected to change the nature of medicine and how we think of ourselves. Who knows what kinds of new twists this will bring: gene banks (like blood banks) for designer genes, gene donors with special traits that can produce certain proteins that may treat a certain medical condition, gene surgery, gene manipulation and combination.  Gene therapy is already well underway.

The long and short of it: sperm banks were controversial, but gene banks and gene tinkering will blow the lid off the whole concept of designer kids. Where do we stop? Like all things to do with medical ethics, the debate will rage on for years.  The marketplace will forge ahead heedless and render disagreement moot after the first crop of designer children, each with a life expectancy of 200 years, are unveiled to the world by 2020.

Next Opportunities:

There are obvious research opportunities for therapies: medical, cosmetic, and every other genetic nook and cranny, then there are legal tangles likely to keep ethicists and practitioners busy for years to come. Soon the debate over the Microsoft operating system will repeat itself when a fight commences over whether or not the findings of the genome project belong in the public domain or can be trademarked. Who will reap the riches made available by the Human Genome Project? No one seems to want to take the bull by the horns. If the Justice Dept does not want another Microsoft in 20 years, it better follow the research and set ground rules for what constitutes fair play on the new frontier. It will be fertile ground for lawyers as well as researchers for at least the next 10 years.  Just as the Internet has been, the Genome will become part of our daily vocabulary.

How do you and I, Joe and Jane or Carlos and Carlotta benefit from this new frontier? We can buy in early on stock of companies at the forefront like Celera Genomics who have monopolized gene research and might be the next Microsoft in the gene world, but also in companies producing specific genetics research based products and services.  Companies in the world of genetic technologies are positioned like the Internet startups of 10 years ago.  E-mail was so cool then…we thought the world had radically changed…till the World Wide Web hit.  Now the big thing is real time streaming video.  Stay tuned for opportunities; it’s still a little early to fully flesh them out.  The public response and level of government regulation will define the field and control the speed and pervasiveness of its products.

One thing is for sure, the Genome Project has forever shifted medicine from being a reactionary field to one of the 4 Ps: Predictive, Personalized, Preventive, Participatory.

Let your imagination run wild.

Create the future and smell the roses, it’s your move!

                      NEW TECHNOLOGIES, NEW DIMESIONS

                                 HAVING THE LAST WORD!

Emerging Trends:

While Digital Domains is into re-creating virtual people complete with attitude, others are creating web-based possibilities for reaching people after you die.  In 2000 Todd Michael created a site, dead now, called finalthoughts.com on which you could leave instructions, letters, anything at all that you wanted to be sent to specific people after you die. Think of it as afterlife e-mail.  Spooky but someone was bound to think of it, and what better way to get even with someone you love or hate?  Keep those e-mails going long after you are gone. Spam from the dead … awesome or awful? Don’t believe me? Check out switched.com/2009/07/27/social-networking-in-the-afterlife.

Kooky as this particular idea might sound, it touches upon the next Emerging Trend. How do we want to plan our deaths and our presence here after death? Medical advances will allow us to know and prepare for how and when we will die. Technology allows us ways to remain here in spirit if not in person for a while longer, at least until someone deletes our virtual presence off the hard drive or server.  Or perhaps until the server dies!

Next Opportunities:

In multiple forms, the last word will be coming to the digital marketplace, some kind and gentle, others harsh and nasty. You might get flowers or e-greetings on your birthday for years to come from your mother who might die 5 years from now because she set it up via the web before she died, or you might get spammed by your ex-husband, perhaps exposing your weakest moments long after he is gone.

The days of keeping the urn of your parents’ ashes on the mantle will soon be replaced by an eternal virtual presence that will periodically appear to scold you or to empathize. And since their exact personality will have been decoded through their genes and physical documentation, you can have a chat in “real time” with them through their stored database.  Imagine a “live” conversation with JC himself or even Einstein. Sounds far fetched? A bit futuristic?  Not really. Watch for the first crude forms of this to hit a web site near you in a couple of years. Move over avatars…here comes the real thing.

Meantime you can choose to send your ashes into outer space.  Book a one-way ticket on Virgin Galactic. It’s happening!

Let your imagination run wild.

Create the future and smell the roses, it’s your move!

Now that we have conquered all that there is on earth, or so it seems, we are entering the last frontier of forbidden territories: The land of death and dying. And we will be hearing a lot more about this subject and all of its political, social, ethical, physical, and financial implications for the next 50 years as DNA testing and organ regeneration and nano surgery bring eternal life closer and closer to possible. Or at least make I00 years seem more like mid-life.

More importantly in the short term, we have some fascinating dilemmas to ponder as the human genome project wraps up the first stage of decoding every single gene in the human body. Along with the possibility of increasing numbers of genetic therapies for diabetes and heart and other ailments, one key possibility that will be available in the next 5-10 years or less is knowing what you are going to die from and when! A most fascinating and horrifying proposition all at once. It raises a slew of unthinkable possibilities and questions. Do I want to know? If I do, what do I do next? who do I tell? My siblings & children may not want to know because they may have the same gene and therefore may be predisposed to the same disease? If I know, then what do I do differently with my life?

Similarly, new technologies will allow us to have our dead loved ones around us, practically forever. Digital technology can now re-create a person with even her personality intact. Caleb Owens and Digital Domains, the company that did the special effects for both Apollo 13 and True Lies, are working on creating a convincing, animated double of James Brown…. ”It cannot just look like James Brown. It’s got to have the attitude, it’s got to have the soul, got to have the truth that is this guy.”  Or how about Todd Michaels of  finalthoughts.com who came up with the idea in 2000 of a site where you could leave notes to be sent to your family or friends years after you’re gone.

So what do we do now that we’ll know when and how we’ll die, and that we can even leave ourselves behind, attitude intact?