What Happens When We Grow Older in a Youth-Obsessed World
Last month I sat in a meeting watching younger colleagues repackage ideas that were by no means new. Someone called it fresh thinking and although I was agitated, I didn't bother to interject. What would have been the point? It would have been ignored anyway.
Time has taught me what battles are worth fighting. I often choose silence now because I remember the ignorance of youth. Offering an opinion or alternative would only fall on deaf ears—people can only receive what they are capable of receiving.
In formal terms, it would be called ageism. In everyday experience, it feels less clear-cut than that. More like being overlooked. A gradual sense that once you pass a certain point, your presence, opinions, and experience begin to carry less weight.
Ageism rarely arrives with confrontation. It shows up in tone, in assumptions, in who is listened to and who is not. And while the workplace is often where we first become aware of it, it is only one expression of a much wider cultural pattern.
Working Later in Life: Choice, Necessity, and Misunderstanding
Many people continue working later in life for different reasons. Some because they want to. Some because they need to. Many because life hasn't unfolded in the neat, predictable way we were once led to expect.
Living longer, healthier lives makes the idea of stepping away entirely feel premature. What often changes isn't our ability to contribute, but our relationship with work itself. We are no longer chasing status or validation in the same way. Experience has shown us what those things give us, and what they don't.
When I was made redundant at the age of 52, it hit me that work and other people were certainly not where you should invest highly. The need to separate what you do from who you are becomes clear as we age.
This shift is often misunderstood. A steadier pace is mistaken for a lack of ambition. Choosing not to compete is interpreted as disengagement. I've felt that sense of being looked down on, not openly dismissed, but subtly diminished. The respect I instinctively offered older people when I was younger is not always returned.
The Cult of Youth and the Discomfort Around Ageing
We live in a culture that idealises youth. Being young is framed as something to aspire to, something to preserve, something to centre. Ageing, meanwhile, is treated as an inconvenience. Something to delay, disguise, or move out of view.
Perhaps this is why older people are edged out of workplaces, conversations, and public life altogether. The less visible ageing becomes, the easier it is to pretend it won't happen to us.
And yet ageing is a privilege. The alternative is not something any of us would choose. Growing older means we are still here. Still learning. Still living.
When Priorities Shift
Later life has a way of stripping things back. Careers come and go. Roles change. Status fades. No one reaches the end of their life wishing they had worked harder or stayed relevant for longer.
When bodies begin to falter or minds feel less sharp than they once did, what remains is simple: love, connection, presence. The people we mattered to, and who mattered to us.
This doesn't mean we stop caring or contributing. It means we see more clearly. We understand that at work we are often replaceable, but in our personal lives we are not.
That shift isn't failure. It is perspective.
Living With Subtle Age Bias
Ageism doesn't live only in organisations. It appears in everyday interactions. In assumptions. In jokes. In advice from older people being brushed aside as outdated or irrelevant.
Being repeatedly overlooked, not because we lack insight but because of how we are perceived, can wear you down over time. The challenge is learning how to live well without absorbing that dismissal.
Because if they are fortunate, those who dismiss us now will one day arrive here too. Life teaches everyone eventually, though rarely in the way we expect.
So the deeper question becomes this: how do we carry ourselves when the lives we've lived no longer match the person we've become?
Caring Less About Approval
Mark Manson, in his book The Art of Not Giving a F***, writes that maturity is learning to care only about what is truly worth caring about. One of the unexpected gifts of ageing is how naturally this begins to happen.
With time, the need for approval loosens its grip. The desire to be admired, validated, or constantly noticed fades. What remains is a clearer sense of what, and who, truly matters.
Personally, I find I care very little about anything outside the small, meaningful world I've built. That feels like freedom. We stop performing. We stop apologising for who we are. We stop shrinking ourselves to fit expectations that were never designed with us in mind.
Owning Yourself: The Privilege That Comes With Age
The influential 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
This, perhaps, is one of the gifts of later life. We have lived enough to know that fitting in has a cost. We are done with chasing trends or trying to belong to something that no longer reflects who we are.
We know that to own ourselves fully, we cannot continue playing the game of life in the same way we did when we were younger. And while that can be lonely at times, it is also deeply freeing.
A Final Reflection
What we often call ageism is, at its core, a misunderstanding of value. A culture that prioritises speed, novelty, and visibility struggles to recognise the worth of experience, perspective, and discernment.
Youth brings energy and new ideas. Age brings depth, clarity, and an understanding of what matters and what does not. When society overlooks this, it loses something important.
For those of us living it, another truth emerges. We no longer need to convince anyone of our worth. We no longer need to be seen in the same way we once did.
Perhaps this stage of life isn't about pushing harder to remain visible, but about letting go. Stepping back from the noise. Observing the frantic striving of youth, and knowing that much of it will not matter in the end.
When I feel tempted to correct, to advise, or to offer wisdom I know will not be heard, I remind myself that it is not my job to convince. There are times, of course, when I feel I should prove something or offer my knowledge and experience. Then I remind myself that my peace is worth more than being noticed or given any form of recognition.
Life teaches everyone in its own time.
And perhaps the real freedom of ageing lies in trusting that.
