Turning 40 - It’s All About the Journey

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I think the buzz/hype around youth is two-fold.

First, I think this in large part a product of the entertainment media. If you step away from the light of entertainment (including most professional sports) world, the ‘real life’ interactions between 20somethings and older people mostly favor the older people. The older people are usually the ones with more power, money, and stability through social bonds to family, colleagues, and social organizations. In other words, in day-to-day life, it’s the older people who usually have what the younger people want [even though they might not admit it - I mean stability, ugh, that sounds so boring!].

I am in tech, and rode the Internet wave as a fresh college grad in the mid 90s. The late 90s were so interesting with the dotcom era because for a while this dynamic was tantalizingly flipped around with recent college graduates (or dropouts) or otherwise generally not qualified people left and right founding the next great thing company. Of course, why the VCs went for this so often I’ve no idea, but they were acting like the entertainment industry, motivated more out of fear of being left behind than what was necessary to build stability.

Well, that didn’t last. It couldn’t - the leadership & life experience to create organizations with longevity was largely lacking. A few companies (and their founders) made it perhaps due to a combination of luck, some truly breakthrough tech, or sheer perseverance, but most failed. And people in blue-suit traditional companies either looked on with bemusement at what was going on, or wondered if they were missing out.

The entertainment industry is one place in our society where life experience doesn’t usually mean a whole lot, at least on the public side. What seems to matter most is cornering ‘the next big thing’ under your label, in your movie, on your team etc.

The 2nd part is I think young adults (loosely defined as late teens through mid twenties) are particularly influenced by pop culture - because at that age we are for the first time able to make our own choices yet so unsure of what choices to make. It take some time to sort this out and get on a path of any kind. Most of us will continue to reevaluate and adjust this throughout our lives, but we’ll do so with some perspective and hindsight as a foundation.

I guess, what I mean is - if one wants to see a society that values youth seemingly above all else, pop culture is a ready way to do that. But if one wants to see a society that values age and wisdom and life experience, that’s just as available. So, I’d ask why do you care about what the pop culture portrays