It’s Time Ageism Got Old

You’re in your fifties, or older. Though you’re only halfway through life your ability to progress in your career has ended. You’re not physiologically challenged or mentally incompetent. But society believes your ability to excel has passed its expiration date.

It’s time we stopped accepting ageism and dealt with it as we would any other form of prejudice. Perhaps then we can start to reverse the damage it has done to careers, mental health, corporate performance and the economy.

It’s not only among the self-important, woke-not-woke social-mediocrity where dismissive memes and attitudes about older people proliferate. The mainstream media and big-brand advertisers are guilty too, often concealing demeaning condescension inside a wrapper of caring respect.

In the mushrooming of fake news and infauxmation today, there seem to be more and more articles which tacitly endorse ageist stereotypes, some even invoking psychological or physiological studies. They suggest that only people under 30 have any real value to organisations and that once you hit 50 you’re doomed to plummet into the abyss of irrelevance.

Here’s an example, from The Atlantic, which maintains that your work peak is earlier than you think.

The assertion that professional decline in people over 50 is neurological and inevitable is the worst kind of gaslighting. It causes millions of people with a great deal to offer the world of work to withdraw prematurely; it influences employment policies and practices to be prejudicial; it erodes experienced people’s confidence and credibility, which in turn deprives them of access to promotion, funding or opportunity; and it asymmetrically does the reverse for younger individuals.

Business values the hired knowledge of youth more than it values the earned wisdom of experience. But ageing people are not liabilities; they are assets. If you could put human capital on the books in the same way you can account for financial assets, organigrams would look very different.

The world of work denigrates age, and often regards experience as an obstacle to innovation. The myth that competence declines with age has two victims: experienced people, and the organisations which employ them. Tragically, many older workers have come to believe the prejudice, and play along with it instead of kicking against it and proving it false. There is often even a perverse snobbery in senior employees labelling themselves dinosaurs, as if the turmoil of modern life is unworthy of their consideration.

In an era of increasingly perishable youth skills it is important to reaffirm the appreciating value of wisdom.

There is no denying that career drop-off occurs with age. And yes, there is a mental health component to it: if you stop learning, you start ageing. You become increasingly alienated from your chosen profession and from “modern” life in general. This can lead to despondency, cynicism or depression, which are unlikely to be good for your job performance or your career prospects.

Generally, though, professional decline after 50 is not caused by cognitive collapse. It results from a combination of HR policy, legal requirements, organisational environment, management bias, cultural expectations and traditionally accepted discrimination. All of which can harm mental health.

What is more, as life expectancy increases, four decades of employment have to provide for four decades (or more) of post-employment. We have to see the aged as a potential economic engine, rather than a social burden.

For the employee, decades of anticipated “slowing down” become self-fulfilling. Pervasive media, popular music and advertising misrepresentations of people over 50 as frail, vulnerable, confused and mentally inept further buttress this acceptance of inevitable diminished capacity. In any other area this prejudiced characterisation would inspire a string of outraged class action defamation lawsuits, with protective legislation to follow. Perhaps that is yet to come, though in some generous-pension countries the political pressure to lower the retirement age reveals a workforce not eager to challenge ageist myths.

In the article linked to earlier, the author states that “the likelihood of producing a major innovation at age 70 is approximately what it was at age 20 — almost non-existent.” This conclusion is based not on studies of ordinary people in business, but on Nobel Prize winners and “major inventors” going back a century. Seriously? The chances of anyone at any age winning a Nobel are infinitesimally small, so you cannot use this data about extreme outliers as a basis for predicting business capabilities in the general population. And if successfully producing a major innovation is the only test of competence, companies should consider firing most of their employees, including those under 30.

The false impression that everyone in the under-thirty demographic is a latent world-beating innovator stems from the popular media obsession with young celebrity tech entrepreneurs. These business rock stars are outliers, and are not remotely representative of most twenty-somethings. In business as in music, for every star there are millions who are not good enough to top the charts. In popular mythology the success of a few under-thirties has somehow become false evidence of the universal brilliance of youth, and proof of the general dullness of maturity.

The reality is that the average age of a successful startup founder is 45 — even higher in non-tech fields. The success rate does not collapse at 50: the probability of entrepreneurial success in someone over 50 is far greater than in someone under 30.

If you want to know how to code, it may help to be in your twenties. If you want to know what to code, being in your fifties may give you an edge. Not that coding, or even tech generally, is a line of work representative of the general population, any more than song-writing is. But it’s become so associated with stories of rapid career success that parents now want their kids to learn coding.

Being a competent coder is no guarantee of career success, any more than a good grasp of grammar will make you a Booker Prize novelist. As AI and robotics sweep into the workplace, it is in fact more likely that the first victims to be replaced by machines will be younger employees with easily AI-tomated skills. The wisdom of experience is hard to model or replicate with narrow AI. Will AI lead to a renewed appreciation of the value of older people in 21st century business?

Ageism apologists sometimes lean on the work of Cattell, conducted some 80 years ago. But so much has changed in the nature of work, training, culture, and life expectancy since then. You wouldn’t try to use studies done in 1940 to justify gender-based workplace discrimination today. So why would it be acceptable to invoke such ancient studies to provide rationalisations for age prejudice?

Cattell’s 1940’s notion that “fluid intelligence” is more abundant in your twenties and thirties, so innovation comes easier to youth, seems crassly simplistic in the 21st century.

If some older people do indeed have trouble innovating, it is because they have been channelled for years in careers which condition them to conform and not challenge the status quo; or because they have hyper-specialised in a niche made irrelevant by disruptive shifts in tech or markets. In either circumstance it can be agonising to innovate.

It is often easier for people later in life to disrupt — to change their environment and step into a totally new role — than to fight to incrementally innovate in their current situation. And because older people may have a broader world view, their ability to identify opportunities for radical change may be superior to those of their more junior colleagues. They may not have great insight into opportunities in youth markets, but this should not be the only game in town.

The post-fifty demographic is a vast and affluent market, and it is massively under-served. Generally dismissed by young marketers as a grey homogenous mass of “the elderly,” little effort is made to research, segment or create for it. Marketing communication, product design and customer experiences typically reflect the simplistic prejudices of those in their twenties responsible for conceiving them. But the older demographic is a universe of many tribes, and the worn out and frail tribe is just one of them. The opportunities for older-aged entrepreneurship and innovation are legion.

Organisations die when their ability to adapt does not accelerate at the pace of change in their operating environment. Individuals, too, must adapt to stay competitive throughout their working lives. Those who don’t will be carried along in the bowels of the mother ship of their organisation, in increasingly marginal roles, till they are ejected into retrenchment or retirement. Those who disrupt, jump ship, or even mutiny, could be doing their best work into their eighties if they so wished.

If you don’t transition into work more relevant to the changing needs of your field and your evolving interests and abilities, you will naturally fall behind and lose relevance. Sprinters trying to win Olympic gold will perform better at 25 than at 55. But as they age, athletes disrupt their careers to become coaches, administrators, judges, ambassadors, writers, or journalists, and they do their best work in those fields at older ages.

In any field of work, to make disruptive shifts from your current income-earning activity to a new one requires initiative, vision and courage. It also requires introspection. If you have allowed your job title to define who you think you are, you may be doomed.

Failure to stay relevant is a consequence of your own inability or unwillingness to unlearn, relearn, and change. But it is also imposed by the way your professional environment dictates career evolution. If your employer has a policy of disinvesting in you once you hit certain arbitrary age milestones, your irrelevance is preordained.

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage against ageism. Don’t sit back and hope that ageism will get old before you do. Confound the prejudices. Challenge ageist attitudes whenever they are expressed. Dismiss the naïve stereotypes. Don’t be discouraged by those who would gaslight older people into believing they have nothing to offer.

Better yet, get out while you can do it on your terms. During your early career it’s important to learn enough to set yourself free, but not so much that you lose the ability to dream. Step into a more challenging space where your destiny is not in the hands of someone who sees you as an inevitably worn-out, useless human resource. Craft a role which leverages your experience, interests and energy. Deliberately re-invent yourself to thrive.

Disrupting your past life’s trajectory is never easy, but it can put you on a path to more sustainable mental health — and to increasingly rewarding future success.