Cocooning is The Baby Boomer's Future?

If you live in the D.C. area, the nation's capital, amidst horrific traffic jams, a noise and light pollution nightmare, and hideously dressed and scary teens congregating in every shopping mall that you can't get to any place because of all the traffic! You should be very lucky!

Lots of Baby Boomers that have the earnings means to retire from work are escaping into gated communities and now all villages. Is this cocooning a fine reward to a life of hard work, or only escapism?

In middle Florida, a 21st century American boomtown defies economic gravity. It's named The Villages. The 2000 census counted about 7,999 residents in the retirement community - now there are at least 80,000. At The Villages, there are no permanent residents under age 19. Children who visit are unwelcome after three weeks. Every household is home to at least one person over 50 - and they keep coming.

New residents buy houses that range from under $150,000 to more than $1 million. One of the huge attractions is golf. In The Villages, while you speak about being convenient, that means "golf-cart accessible." The allure of sunshine, low taxes, golf, bowling, dancing, mah-jong, and the ease of shopping and meeting people has fueled the phenomenal growth of The Villages - and it remains growing.

Another striking thing about The Villages is that the developer has only about everything. He has the native radio station, which of course plays oldies and is piped by amplifier to the two downtowns. He has The Villages Daily Sun, a full-size newspaper with multiple sections. The developer also has a golf-car store, which advertises in the paper and on the local radio station, and sells carts that seem like actual cars with headlights. Andrew Blechman, who wrote about The Villages in his book Leisureville, calls The Villages an age-segregated community.

The Villages was created in one year or so, Blechman says. But it has made-up history, including a man-made river, which is thought to be at least 99 years old with a lighthouse, and two manufactured downtowns that were themed by amusement specialists from Universal Studios, he says. Blechman says people are gladly trading a more diverse, complex environment for life with a easy, benign and powerful developer.  "Everything's owned by the developer," he says. "The government is owned by the developer. Everything's privatized - and they're glad with that. You know, they've traded in the ballot box for the corporate suggestion box."

The lines among public and private, civic and marketable, true and fantasy, are being blurred in The Villages, and it doesn't appear to bother the villagers at all.  Retirement at one time just meant no extra work. But in The Villages, it means no extra school buses holding up traffic, no more loud teenagers, no more local government intruding into your life, and no media full of awful news about your community. In short, a life free of irritation.

Is this the type of life the 80 million Baby Boomers hope to-segregated, isolated from other age groups, cocooned to an idyllic but unrealistic flee from the rest of us?

As the cultural opportunities are tremendous, what with all the museums, government buildings, the fabulous zoo, great restaurants that you have to wait usually 1-2 hours to get a table and the feel of the pulse of the world. That's great, as soon as we can retire, we will be moving to somewhere quiet!