Ageless Stories are Timeless

One of the reasons KarenSands.com is set up to provide information for post-50 women as well as the people who serve them is that these goals are intertwined. Many boomer women are entrepreneurs or considering starting their own business, and those who aren’t are likely to work for companies that will need to pay close attention to the boomer market, especially boomer women.

I also genuinely care about businesses learning more about this market and catering to who they are, not to the stereotypes of aging, especially aging women. These stereotypes damage us all.

I want to change the conversation around aging, and it just so happens that doing so is also a profitable move for businesses as well as being a necessary social change for all of us, at every age and stage. (That’s also why I wrote Gray is the New Green and The Ageless Way)

Finally, my approach to these topics is firmly rooted in my work as a professional futurist, which involves studying trends and developing probable alternative scenarios with an eye on the aspirational alternative scenario, the ideal, as well as preparing for its opposite, the worst-case scenario.

As individuals, we all strive for positive aging, which means in part challenging our own assumptions, beliefs, and expectations about aging so that we can shed the myths and make room for an ageless perspective. Businesses must do the same if they are to serve the genuine needs of this audience and market to who they are and who they can be, rather than the all-too-common unintentional insult of portraying boomers as a caricature of themselves and of a view of aging stuck in the last century.

Similarly, as individuals, we all can learn to use the tools of foresight to develop the most probable scenarios for our futures and more clearly define the changes we can make to nudge those futures toward the most aspirational scenario possible.

Businesses can do the same by focusing on who boomers really are, by understanding and leveraging boomer stories.

For we all have a story to tell, and often, when we dig deep, we find that this story has a much grander, more visionary ending than we ever imagined possible. In fact, the best stories stand the test of time.

The best stories are ageless.