The pace of change continues to accelerate and with it the need for each of us to continue to grow and learn becomes increasingly important. A recent article in Smart Money, a monthly magazine from the Wall Street Journal, carried an article entitled “The Fountain of Youth.” It raised a point that is important for any of us who want to stay connected with people – that how we connect reflects our “cultural age” – a measure of how old we are within the flow of today’s culture(s).
Your cultural age is “the age of the youngest adult with whom you can have an informed conversation about what’s going on in the world – in music and movies as well as politics and literature.” In other words, if you know how to use Twitter then you are a bit younger culturally than if you are still counting message units on your cell phone (or don’t have a cell phone!).
Why is this important? One reason is that for many of us, as we age we get more and more isolated. This can be physical and geographic – we have less actual people contact. Or it can be relational – we simply communicate less with others and with less and less diverse kinds of people. For retirees, a cell phone may actually not just be useful in an emergency. It may actually keep them connected with friends and family and keep them happier and more alert longer.
But for those of us who are still at work in the various things we do, this has huge implications. As we age culturally, we find ourselves less and less able to communicate with people who are culturally younger than we are. Suddenly, we are marketing to people who think, act, speak and know what we know. And we have less ability to communicate with people who think, act, speak and know things less connected to us. If we are not careful, we can suddenly discover that we are only talking and connecting with a small part of our world. Our market shrinks and we find ourselves wondering what happened and why the world seems to have passed us by.
A classic example can be found in the decline of churches today. Congregations often find that their cultural age is collectively 20, 30 or even 40 years older than the population. They often bemoan the fact that younger people aren’t coming any more. But it is not that young people are not coming any longer which is the issue. It is that churches stopped speaking to younger people and have allowed themselves to age culturally to the point of being disconnected - even becoming almost completely irrelevant in many cases. And the same thing can happen to small businesses, non-profit organizations, and each of us as individuals as well.
There are some things that we cannot control completely – we can exercise our bodies and they still age over time. But we can control much of how we connect and communicate with others. Staying culturally young may not just make you seem to be “with it,” it may just keep you in the game and connecting with people and markets that you would lose otherwise. So for most of us a really purposeful question is, "Culturally, how old are you (really)?"
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