This chapter fleshes out two prominent cultural figures: the familiar figure of the boomer and the more recently emerged figure of the zoomer. Whereas the boomer has long been a symbol of social prosperity and youthful vitality, its cultural meanings have shifted somewhat in recent years (Aubrecht 2015; Chivers 2011; Katz 2001; Twigg 2013). As those marked by the demographic category of boomer age, the figure itself has become increasingly tainted by a rhetoric of threat, danger, and burden (Barusch 2013; Gullette 2015; Marshall 2015). Vis-à-vis deeply affecting portrayals of economic dystopias wherein hordes of aging boomers languish for decades in sickness and disability, the “zoomer revolution” presents us with what Toronto media mogul Moses Znaimer calls a “new vision of aging in Canada” (“About Us” 2017). At the heart of this vision is the zoomer, a buoyant figure whose social capital, consumptive practices, flexible mobility, perpetual labour, and efficient choices work to ensure not simply a longer life but a life that entails neither social cost nor economic burden. I contend that the zoomer represents more than a mere rearticulation of the prosperous boomer. Whereas the boomer has long been marked by a sense of limitless growth, the zoomer is defined by an intriguing—and profitable—tension between growth and limit. The zoomer is presented in terms of its mobility along a graded spectrum of vitality, one that connects contemporary neoliberal notions of good life (i.e., possibility) with good death (i.e., limit) (McGuire 2017). Fusing familiar capitalist associations of boomer prosperity, affluence, and consumerism with optimistic neoliberal demands for personal health responsibility, bodily optimization, and cognitive enhancement, the zoomer names a uniquely vital figuration, one that is inextricably tied to the historical, economic, and political conditions of the twenty-first century.
McGuire, Anne. (2020). From “Boomer” to “Zoomer”: Exploring cultural understandings of aging with vitality under neoliberal capitalism. In K. Aubrecht, C. Kelly, & C. Rice, (Eds.), The aging-disability nexus (pp. 180–199). UBC Press.
