There is a cultural and socioeconomic phenomenon happening with Baby Boomers today. There redefining retirement by transitioning into mid-life careers or finding work that fulfills their hearts, if not their wallets. These 50, 60 and even 70ish people can’t really see themselves hanging up the old spurs because they’ve still got another 20 or more good years in them. This generation is caught between a cycle where careers have either peaked, their jobs have evaporated, or they’re just ready to do something else. There’s still plenty of energy and drive to do more. This has created a category called the tweener years. Tweeners are somewhere between the end of a long career and the beginning of a new one, or a new avocation.
This book discusses how we came to this stage and how career changes are being made at a point when, in previous generations, people were handed their gold watch and then they contemplated old age. The energy is still there for most of us, and so is the drive to create and grow. We’re looking for new thrills and a way to fulfill our dreams which usually correspond with our interests and occasionally our financial abilities.
As this book reveals, there are many people who have become Tweeners in the last few years, we just don’t see them as a group. Many of us have encountered an occasional person wave met at a neighborhood barbeque, or maybe while we were vacationing, or perhaps wave just heard about the stories of these Tweeners from a friend of a friend. We just haven’t seen them en masse enough to realize that this is a cultural and economic phenomenon occurring around us.
Changing careers and lifestyles after several decades of habit and routine is not easy, but it has happened and is happening to millions of people all over the world. Some of the things that provoke change are myriad; loss of a job, health problems, a personal or family crisis. Some are not so obvious like boredom, routine; that insidious sameness that casts a gray gloom on your entire personality and you may not even know it’s there. You just know you feel like a hamster in a cage walking on one of those wheels that go nowhere.
