I’m staring down a 64th birthday this month, and, according to Paul McCartney’s “When I’m Sixty-Four,” that means I’ll be mending fuses, knitting sweaters, and weeding the garden from here on out.

Yeah, not happening.

Rather than going gently into that good night, my baby boomer brothers and sisters and I are going out kicking and screaming.

E-bikes, pickleball, biohacks and rock ‘n’ roll retirement homes are more the order of the day for a generation that refuses to grow old (or grow up).

Just saw Mick Jagger at age 80 still struttin’ his stuff to a packed-out arena in Denver (tour sponsored by AARP). Gonna go see the Beach Boys when they come to town next month for a concert, the youngest of whom is 80. The voice of a generation, Bob Dylan, is still touring at 83, and he’s the guy who told us all to stay “Forever Young.” (All of these musicians are technically a bit old to be card-carrying boomers, but they laid down the soundtrack of our young lives.)

Our two presidential candidates are 81 and 78 years old, respectively, and look like they have no intention of making way for a new generation of candidates.

Baby boomers are redefining what it means to be old, and they are also refusing to get out of the way of new generations. The debate over Biden running again has exposed a national nerve and prompted a broader argument about whether us boomers (and those even older) are hanging onto society’s steering wheel for too long. 

A new survey from the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies found almost half of baby boomer workers expect to or already are working past age 70 or do not plan to retire. Unfortunately, that’s making it harder for fresh college grads to find new jobs.

“Baby boomers have rewritten societal rules at every stage of their lives, including retirement. With aspirations of working into older age and a flexible transition to retirement, they are upending the notion that work and retirement are mutually exclusive,” said TCRS President and CEO Catherine Collinson.

More than 76 million baby boomers were born during the two-decade explosion of children in the years following World War II. Those of us born between 1946 and 1964 became the largest generation in U.S. history, accounting for 40% of the population at the time.

We still control 70% of disposable income in the country today. And now many boomers are holding onto their houses instead of downsizing because of the low interest rates they locked in a while ago, so the inventory isn’t turning over like it has in the past.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 50% of baby boomers engage in regular physical exercise, such as running, hiking, cycling and pickleball. The Physical Activity Council reports that baby boomers make up about a third of the fitness industry’s clientele. I know boomers who still do triathlons and the Triple Bypass bike ride over three brutal passes in Colorado’s high country.

I just bought my first E-bike last week, and being able to click on the “Turbo” pedal assist going up all those damn hills on the west side of Colorado Springs has made me feel like I’ve got the legs of a 20-year-old again. WOO-FRICKIN-HOO!

New technologies like E-bikes, titanium knees, ellipticals and Ozempic are certainly helping us boomers stay younger longer.

A recent visitor told me how boomers are reinventing retirement homes, too. America’s first rock ‘n’ roll nursing home opened not too long ago in Green Valley, Ariz.

“Given the demographics of the country,” explained Richard Sottleworth, head of the Oldies But Goodies Nursing Home, in a press release, “it only made sense to cater to the incoming generation of senior citizens. There is no way the old type of old-folks home is going to work with people playing dominoes and listening to Lawrence Welk,” explained Sottleworth. “What works best is to create a familiar environment for our clients.”

The company plans a national chain of rock-oriented care facilities, featuring 24-hour rock music and medicinal marijuana. The new nursing homes will offer electric guitars for residents, too. “They’re all deaf, anyway,” Sottleworth commented.

As a group, we boomers know our generation is getting old now, but we’re not quite accepting it individually — “Sure everybody else is getting old, but not me!” And you know what, my doctor tells me this kind of attitude is altogether healthy and good. In most cases, boomers say they feel about 20% younger than they really are, according to a Michigan State study of more than 500,000 people. The more active we are, the more “purpose” we have in our lives, the healthier we will be physically and mentally for longer.

Well and good for us, but not great for the generations behind us, probably. I’m picking up on a lot of cross-generational resentment lately. Half of Americans older than 55 say they are “extremely proud” to be American; that number drops to 18% among 18- to 34-year-olds.

That’s probably because all us oldsters are a growing economic burden for younger generations and for Social Security, which is expected to go bankrupt by about 2043 by some measures because of the cost of all us boomer retirees. Twenty-one percent of Colorado’s population will be over the age of 60 by 2030, an increase of 32% from 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Colorado’s senior population is then projected to double to 1.7 million people by 2050, according to the Colorado Health Institute, making the state’s aging population the second-fastest growing in the nation (behind Alaska).

We boomers all know we’ve got to step aside eventually, let new generations have their day.

And we will, we will — just not today.

Today, I’m ignoring McCartney and his sweater-knitting vision of 64-year-olds (he wrote that lyric when he was 14 after all, what did he know?). Instead, I’m gonna keep on listening to Dylan until I fall off my E-bike and expire right there on the trail:

“May your heart always be joyful

May your song always be sung

May you stay forever young.

May you build a ladder to the stars

And climb on every rung

May you stay forever young.”