‘He kept going until he couldn’t’: why do boomer men refuse to slow down?

Originally published in The Guardian

My friend Jeremy’s father has always taken pride in doing things himself. When Jeremy (whose name I have changed for his privacy) was a kid, he watched his dad, an architect, painstakingly renovate their entire family home – ripping up floorboards and laying tile.

Today, Jeremy’s dad still insists on climbing up a ladder to clean out the gutters; he wants to fell deadwood with a pruning saw and move heavy furniture around the basement. But now 80 and living with Parkinson’s disease, his drive comes with higher stakes, every strenuous task increasing his risk of preventable harm.

“My dad doesn’t know anything else,” Jeremy says. “He’s always been the person who fixes the hole in the roof.” Now he does it in spite of family members desperately trying to convince him to let them do it instead or pass those responsibilities to hired help.

Being a doer is his identity. “He hasn’t handed off control,” Jeremy tells me. In fact, as the years go by, Jeremy’s dad seems increasingly fixated on his to-do list – something Jeremy interprets as an effort to reclaim a displaced sense of wellness.

This story is part of a much bigger demographic shift. After a century of rising life expectancy, people in the west are living 30 years longer than they did in 1900, on average, with 75% now reaching their 65th birthday and beyond. For those born in and around the baby boomer generation, this means entering the longest phase of elderhood in history, full of potential but also fraught with challenges.

This story originally appeared in The Guardian, December 2024. To read the full story, click here.