Weighing In on Aging Out
Turning 50 on at the brink of a global pandemic knocked my ass for a loop. I wasted three years of my life being Yoda.
They warned us as kids: no swimming for half an hour after eating. They told us to never swallow gum and that smoking would kill us. Wash your hands. Don’t leave dirty dishes in the sink. They made sure we knew no one likes a smartass. These and so many other worldly nuggets were placed in and around our burgeoning frontal cortex before we leaped into early adulthood. There was one thing they left out, though. And by they, I mean every adult that cameoed during my childhood years:
No one told me what to do when people eventually tell you you’re too old.
Inspired by Sari Botton and her online magazine, Oldster, I am writing a limited series of essays on Aging Out. By aging out, I mean—intentionally—transitioning out of youth obsession into optimum transmission, thus, having the health and clarity you need to create and maintain connection with others and the world, on your terms.
Who ultimately gets to decide when you’ve aged out of something?
Brace yourself: you do! I did not know that a year ago. 365 days ago, I walked away from an incredible 32-year career and found myself in a strange place. It took me 12 months to figure out what had happened and I am writing about it now to help others avoid a similar (and preventable) proverbial bear trap to the shin bone.
This simple and raw series of essays is framed into bite-sized chunks centered on “7 Kinds of Old” I witnessed among my peers since retiring from business a year ago.
If you want to tag along, I’ll share with you six nasty routes to aging that most people in their 50s slip into without knowing it: [h]old, [t]old, [s]old, [f]old, [m]old, and [c]old.
To keep things simple:
If you’re 50 and on Hold, you’re frozen in fear and doubt.
If you are Told, you’re continuing out of a buried or professed sense of compliance.
If you’re Sold, you (along with millions) have accepted a story you keep telling yourself.
If you are on the Fold path, you have chosen to give up. For good or bad, you’ve quit.
Now is where it gets nasty. If you think everything is just fine and there's no need to change, you don’t smell the staleness that is obvious to others around you, this, my friend, is Mold, straight up.
For the rest of us, myself included, the other kind of old I encountered is one that evolves from solitude to isolation. It’s dark. It’s lonely. It is Cold. This is where disillusionment deteriorates dreams and desires like black holes eat stars.
Any one of these six routes to aging can grind you down by stealing your joy and wrecking any sense of purpose that you’ve managed to keep safe in your pocket.
The seventh path is very different. It is a road less traveled. I call it [B]old.
Boldness is the thing that can get us to a joy-filled place of peace and contentment ON the hill, not OVER the hill. Where nearly every peer I know wants to end up, and yet, check-ins are rare. I call this state of being and doing: [G]old.
A Golden destination is different for all of us but it does has one common thread we all desire: freedom.
Freedom to live your life, to go and do as you please. Freedom to bless others. Freedom to be you.
By sharing some of my experiences, I hope to contribute to the growing idea that society is long overdue in its normalization and warm embrace of the human experience we call aging. Listen, more knowledgeable and interesting people are out there writing about unconscious and conscious age bias. Not me. I’m talking about Soul Bias. I want you to preserve who you are as a person down deep—your deepest loves and convictions—especially when people around us see us and treat us as disposable economic units.
You are worth a great deal. The world needs you. So please, keep your shit together until we land on the golden hill.