“In November 2017, more than a hundred and fifty prospective buyers had camped out overnight in the parking lot of the sales center, in anticipation of opening day for down payments. The parking-lot scene was on brand: it had a festival air, with tents, a steel-drum band, food trucks, and stacks of pizzas. A movie played on a giant screen: “Jurassic World,” in which Buffett has a cameo as a bartender rescuing a couple of margaritas from an outdoor table before some pterosaurs swoop in. Strangers befriended one another and decided, overnight, to become next-door neighbors.”
This contagious frenzy is eerily reminiscent of sixty years ago when Del Webb’s Sun City had miles-long lines of “Golden Years” seniors putting down their deposits for a gray utopia in suburban Arizona. Both retirement communities made the same pitch: freedom, fun, frozen daiquiris, and fairways in the case of Sun City. In the case of Latitude Margaritaville, it was Frampton and Foreigner, or anything with a flavor of 70’s music.
But there’s something rotten in Denmark…or Arizona or Florida. If we use Stanford’s Dr. Phil Pizzo’s lens, which suggests that healthy aging has three foundational principles—Purpose, Wellness, and Community—the only principle woven into these two communities’ design and experience is the last one.
One could argue there’s wellness if you want to count golf or pickleball, but it’s balanced by no abbreviation of inebriation. And, where’s the spiritual wellness? My guess is The Villages is full of churches, but Margaritaville’s only pastor might be Jimmy B himself. And, where’s the intellectual sustenance that so many of us seek as we start enjoying some “time affluence.”
The principle that feels most absent in all these retirement communities is purpose. Yes, there are political groups amidst all the frivolity. Still, there’s not one word in this New Yorker article about how these Boomers are giving back to their local community beyond their gated walls or how the residents are finding programs that give them a new sense of purpose in the final few decades of their life. On a deep level, this pains me. Is our primary purpose reliving our adolescence when we’ve hit our middlescence? I hope not.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for having a good time, and, as many of you know, I’m quite purposeful in my pleasure-seeking. But, where’s the sense of legacy or generativity? “I am what survives me” has morphed into “I am what stimulates me.” Thank goodness for my MEA partner Jeff Hamaoui’s vision for Regenerative Communities, which has a very different ethos than what you’ll read about in this New Yorker article.