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I'm in my early 40s. One of the most difficult things I'm wrestling with is being typecast, people forming a rigid perception of what my interests and skillsets are. What I'm actually working on, interested in, and doing are often not inline with the schema people have in their head about "who I am." I feel this force of expectations pressing in, good and bad. To some extent, you can only make the best of the opportunities you have, and the opportunities that are thrown my way are all what people expect me to be doing, regardless of what I think of it. I have a job, but the politics and management are horrible, and I feel myself being boxed in by social dynamics and cultural factors. And then the effects of these politics are identified as being about me, rather than my situation, and it becomes kind of a vicious negative circle. My broader point in response to what you're saying is that I've grown deeply suspicious of claims to genius. Sure, there are brilliant people out there, and hardworking people, but there's also a huge element of luck or circumstance. I've seen this firsthand with people at the top of my field I am close to, very famous people, who had huge changes of fortune due to circumstances changing. They sometimes could reverse course, but only because they had enjoyed good circumstances earlier, and people could say "oh, X was brilliant--they just went through a rough patch." The people who got those rough patches early in their careers aren't afforded the same second chances, and are written off. There are far more brilliant, hardworking people than we give credit to. Most of the advances in our society are not due to single brilliant individuals, but due to incremental improvements day after day, by people who we never learn about. The politics of credit are soul-crushing when you see it up close. To me the single most pernicious problem with ageism is the stereotype that you are incapable of changing or learning something else. We want to put people into boxes, boxes based on vocation, and ability, and personality, and the older someone gets the more of a box we want to put them in. For people who have happened to land in the right places at the right time, aging can be a wonderful accumulation of security. But for the rest of us, it feels like being punished for your environment, or punished for the stereotype others have of you--it's as if you're being held to account for others' perceptions of you. To some extent, that is a valid stereotype, but to some extent it is not. I feel more vulnerable now than any point in my life, because I want more than anything to leave, to change, to improve my life and that of my family, but so far it seems impossible without making things worse. When I was 20, people seemed willing to believe I could do anything; now it seems people are skeptical of me doing anything different from what I've done. |