You're Too Old to Believe You're Worthless After Fifty

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Centre for Ageing Better on Unsplash

Let’s stop buying the bullshit that our brains wither the morning we wake up at the big Five-Oh

In an ageist society, it’s not enough that we dishonor older people. We dislike aging women even more for the crime of no longer being curvy sexpots and mothers, and for men, grey hair is sexy up to a point and then after that, well. We’re not kind to them, either.

Yet time after time we are given irrefutable proof that aging people have so much more to offer. The belief that we lose our minds beginning at forty, which IBM apparently used to justify culling the herd if you will to bring in younger workers, is patently wrong.

In so many ways, many of us - and here I mean all of us, please-have gifts which only begin to evolve and blossom much later in life. However, if we buy the fake news that it’s all over by fifty, based so very much on sexist and ageist standards, we end ourselves before we even leap off the starting block.

This article acknowledges one of those stories but I want to explore the larger piece of how we can kill off our finest years by buying into ageist nonsense.

First:

This video link from Virginia Tech acknowledges the magnificent Gladys West, a mathematician whose career created the pathway to Global Positioning systems and advanced navigation.

If you use your GPS, kindly thank Gladys. She’s hardly done, either. Her fertile mind, coming from the fertile lands of a farm in rural Virginia, continues to hunger for more, to give more.

She received her PhD at seventy, a time when too many of us have already given it up. She is now 93 and still going strong. She is a Hidden Figure, if you will, and rightfully deserves recognition for the differences she made for all of us.

Too many of us see thirty, forty, fifty as the last-ditch chance to make a difference. To add value. If not, well then. We’re washed out. We didn’t create world peace at fifteen, we didn’t create that billion-dollar app, we didn’t… fill in the blank. If we haven’t made it by thirty, we’re DONE.

Really now.

Somehow we’ve bought into the idea that ONLY the young create new stuff, and ONLY the young can change the world. So embedded is this in our consciousness, influenced heavily by Silicon Valley, that we fail to realize what Atlantic writer and author Arthur Brooks explains are the two distinctly different kinds of intelligence that we display over the course of our lifetimes.

Let’s talk.

Brooks explains that the fluid, fast-moving intelligence that we enjoy as young people is highly creative, and that is what impresses us so deeply. All those ideas!!!! WOW!!!!

Here’s Brooks speaking to NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly in an interview:

…there's a very interesting set of findings that said that success early on is based on one of two types of intelligence. The first is called fluid intelligence, which gives you the ability to solve problems, to crack the case, to innovate faster and to focus harder than pretty much all the competition early on in your career. This is your Elon Musk brain.

And this increases through your 20s and into your 30s. But then it tends to decline through your 40s and 50s, meaning that you need to move to the second kind of intelligence, which is increasing in your 40s and 50s and even your 60s, and it will stay high for the rest of your life. That's called your crystallized intelligence, which is your wisdom, your ability to compile the information that's in your vast library to teach better, to explain better, to form teams better - in other words, not to answer somebody else's questions but to form the right questions. (author bolded)

This deserves repeating:

I can’t speak for you but that’s incredibly good news.

We can only dull that gift with abuse, ranging from substances to depression to mental illness and a terrible defeatist attitude. That’s no way to go out. We’re wasting the very gift that allows us to do much of our best work later in life.

The transition, however, isn’t easy or clear-cut.

Brook’s definition helps explain why there can be some real sadness right about the time we notice that our brains no longer have that mercurial, quicksilver swiftness- mine never did, thanks-and we assume we’ve lost it.

Hardly. We’re morphing in very important ways, so that what we have to offer has greater depth, insight and above all, wisdom, should we wish to develop it.

You and I are way Too Old to believe that we can’t make a dent, a difference, at any age, and most especially as we age. Because we’re aged.

For those bothering to notice the news, some of the very worst offenders with exceptional quicksilver intelligence (or so we thought) were all too damned young and inexperienced to deliver on their promises.

Sam Bankman-Fried, Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes, I could go on. Too many to list.

By leaping on the bandwagon of brilliant-but-horribly immature and untested young people, billions were lost, millions were hurt and we still haven’t learned our lessons.

That’s why we need older, mature folks at work along with all those juicy newbies. Somebody needs to steer the ship, and veterans know where the shoals are.

Brilliance and the ability to make a huge difference are not sole the purview of the young. It is the purview of all of us, should we stop barking at our sacred selves about the crime of getting older, being old.

Brooks’ book argues that one of the great keys to happiness is our ability to find deep meaning at all stages. For my very minor part, at 58 I wrote my first book, then another at 59, and both won prizes.

At 60 I climbed Kilimanjaro, then launched myself into an adventure travel career.

Today at 70, I get to look at the next decade and ask, as advised by Gandalf,

What shall I do with the time given to me?

I’m training my patootie off to get back in shape, but the next decade is likely to be much different from the last. Frankly, I CAN’T WAIT.

I may not change the world, but what I write about might change a few minds. I couldn’t possibly have done anything remotely like this at thirty. Even fifty.

I see- and absolutely understand- the struggles of those turning fifty. We watch our bodies change, we note that our minds don’t work like they used to.

Nope. They’re better.

Of course it takes work. But first and foremost that work begins with canning the crap about getting OLD at fifty.

If you and I want to use those improved brains, let’s remember that we have to house them in a healthy body. So let’s work out, work hard at our health, so that the brain we support can do ever so much more in its new, improved form.

What are you going to do with the time you have left?

Let’s play.

Fellow 65-ish runner getting ready for skiing season, used with permission. Photo courtesy of Nancy Lane

Your time is so very important. I hope these few minutes fed something essential inside you. If so, please consider

If you know someone struggling in mid-life who could use a bit of good news, please also consider

Whatever you do, do it well, do it with gusto and gratitude. A lot of folks didn’t wake up today. You and I did. Let’s do something wonderful with it.