Gray is the New Green

After a decade or more of mainstream urging, I suggest that nearly everyone who wants to “go green” has done so. Or has at least started down a greener path.

Green messages may have reached a saturation point, becoming ubiquitous so we stop noticing them. There are still fortunes to be made—even outside subsidy capture—but green isn’t cutting-edge cool anymore.

So what’s next?

Going gray:

Forty years from now, one out of four Americans will be 65 or older.
Twenty million will be over 85.
One million will be over 100.

This is an explosive deomographic shift. We’ll have throngs of older people who, although facing particular needs associated with aging bodies, will remain vital and capable of economic activity.

There’s gelt in that there gray! It’s the entire world that’s aging, after all, and that world’s in need of gero-tools, gero-think, gero-innovation.

The linked story paints the mature demographic as a market. It certainly is. But I see it, too, as a resource.

These people have the one thing money can’t buy: experience. Whoever brings together a set of technologies that allows that experience to be applied to future problems will open a gold mine.

And recognizing human potential that has been written off makes a powerful emotional statement. Going gray is a concept that will sell. Maybe even better than saving the planet.