Gransnet, a social networking site for Britain's 14m grandparents, aims to counter deeply ingrained ageism
Back in 1965, the chief executive of Elizabeth Arden wrote in Forbes magazine: 'We don't want to be connected with older women.'
Not much has changed. Today there are more than 20 million Britons over 50; yet, despite our numbers, we can be forgiven for feeling that we are ever so slightly embarrassing.
The ageing population is almost never out of the news, but the fact that we're all living longer, which really ought to be a good thing, is always seen as a problem. The country can't afford the pension bills or the social care. We're threatening the social fabric with our healthcare costs and our housing wealth. David Willetts, minister for universities and science, has written a book, The Pinch, claiming the over-50 baby boomers have stolen our children's future. Two bright young journalists, Ed Howker and Shiv Malik, have written another book identifying themselves as the Jilted Generation. Thanks to greedy boomers and their incessant needs, we appear to be heading for intergenerational warfare.
Last week Gransnet was launched as a social networking site for Britain's 14m grandparents. It is the offspring of Mumsnet, which has, in its 11 years, given a voice to a group – parents – that was previously somewhat disenfranchised. We're hoping that we may be able to do something similar for people in the second half of life. Yet it's fair to say that when we approached advertising agencies before the launch, many of the young people we met looked at us blankly. Like, you mean, old people?
There's a paradox here. At the same time as older people are presented as a threat, they are also widely ignored. That older women feel invisible is a common complaint, of course, in a society where a bit of cellulite on a celebrity thigh is cause for scandalised newspaper articles, and in which Miriam O'Reilly was advised to get Botox before being removed from her job as a television presenter.
But men also suffer from a similar sense of vertigo, especially once they have retired. Between the ages of 50 and old age, who are we? What's our purpose? It appears we're not even wanted as consumers. We can feel as though we exist in a kind of identity void.
After 50, you join a group that might as well be on another planet when it comes to marketing. Advertisers think in demographic blocs of 18-49, or, at a push, 25-54. It's as if there is no adulthood beyond that. This is very short-sighted because, by 2030, over-65s are going to account for a quarter of the consumer market in Britain. Presumably the assumption is that we'll only be interested in buying insurance and cruises – and they all have the same advert anyway. It's that picture of a silver-haired couple walking along a beach.
It will need to be a very long beach. One-fifth of Britons alive today can expect to see 100. Increasing longevity and improved healthcare mean that many people over 50 are fit and capable. And they are confidently looking forward to all those spare years and wondering what to do with them.
We hear an awful lot about the ageing population, but the real story is that there's an explosion of people in late middle age. We mid-lifers have very few roadmaps through the new phase that has opened up. All the assumptions about life courses were made for a different time, when childhood was followed by adulthood, retirement and, then, in fairly short order, decline and death. In the 20th century, as lifespans began to increase, the 'golden years' were invented – a time for the golf course, for that beach so beloved of advertisers and, er, that's it. In the 21st century, that looks rather boring and, frankly, a bit infantilising.
It may be that many mid-lifers will continue to leave 9-5 jobs in big companies (to 'make way' for younger people, who are, not entirely coincidentally, cheaper), but that doesn't mean we don't want to go on working or volunteering or being involved with our families. We still want to be a part of things.
One in three working mothers relies on grandparents for childcare; in practice, grans and grandads are crucial to the smooth running of busy families. Some of us are also founder members of what has been called the club-sandwich generation caring for elderly relatives. Our lives can be complicated. Mumsnet has demonstrated that if you are overloaded the best place to get advice, information and support is from other people in a similar situation. We hope that this will also be true for Gransnet; in the process, we may even find that we are not a homogeneous horde, but as diverse as any other group.
On the first day on Gransnet, people were posting about growing basil outside in England, their daughters-in-law, swearing (annoying or not?), political militancy, grandparents' rights when families break up, and a lot of other things. The age group turns out to be as diverse in its preoccupations as any other.
As it happens, 10% of grandparents in the UK are under 50 and half are under-65. But age is one of the least useful ways of segmenting people; identity and interests are far more important, for older people as much as for the younger ones whom advertisers assiduously segment into tribes. As someone has said, 'once you've seen one 80-year-old, you've seen one 80-year-old'.
A number of people, looking at Mumsnet's track record in influencing the political agenda, have asked me what I think our first campaign will be on Gransnet. That depends on what the members care about and what emerges from the forums – it's not my decision.
What is clear, however, is that because mid-life has never existed as a stage before in quite the way it does now, we lack rituals and established routes through it, which can be unnerving, although also exhilarating. As the US writer Marc Freedman has argued in his new book Shift, we need gap years for grown-ups and more backing for mid-life entrepreneurs (who have a great track record of establishing successful businesses) as well as internships to help older people make the transition from one stage of life to another. Freedman has gone some way towards this by setting up internships for executives from Silicon Valley to move into third-sector organisations when they retire.
Until all that happens, mid-lifers will continue to suffer from prejudice. Ageism is so deeply ingrained that most of the time we don't even notice it. The words 'young' and 'old' are often used simply to denote good and bad – think of 'sunset industries' and 'young cities' and 'ageing infrastructure'. It is acceptable to speak of old people in a way that would be unthinkable about race or disability.
The actor Harriet Walter, who curated an exhibition of photographs of women aged from 48 to 97 last year, marvels at this obsession with newness.
'We are terribly dismissive of experience. Everything has to be the latest,' she says. 'I am in the business of human wisdom: I speak words written 400 years ago which cannot be improved upon. But there is scant respect for wisdom nowadays.'
Ageism fuels the idea that older generations can't or won't learn to use technology. I've lost count of the number of people who have asked me whether enough grandparents are online to warrant a social networking forum all of their own.
Of course, it's true that many of the digitally excluded are old. That's a serious problem and I don't want to minimise it. But not all older people are digitally excluded and, in fact, those over-65s who are online spend on average 42 hours a month on the web, more than any other group. And the over-50s are the fastest-growing group for internet usage.
So, we live in exciting times. We are in the middle of two social revolutions, one to do with longevity, the other with technology. I don't think it's too much to hope that we can make them join up.
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