am i old yet?
The business advantages of aging, and the conundrum of preserving youth.
I was at the airport once with my boss on the way back from a work trip. At the gate, I turned toward him and asked if he had any feedback on my performance during the meetings we had.
He took a moment to think, told me I did well. Nodded his head as if confirming. No critique? What would you critique? I asked. (I’m always one to pry for answers.) Another second to think, scrunching his nose. I looked around for a moment, pretending to fixate on rushed airport-goers walking by, the aroma of fast food from a restaurant behind us. A woman spoke over the intercom in a soothing voice about another flight boarding, somewhere in Latin America. He opened his mouth to speak, said something like: I tell this to the others, but the older you can present yourself, the better you will be.
You’re young, he was saying, which is both a subjective statement and an objective fact (depending on who you ask). In our industry, older is better. Older is preferred. Years mark experience, and experience marks knowledge, seemingly proprietary with the passing of time. It’s older with an asterisk—you wouldn’t want to be so old as to no longer have motivation, the drive. A motor. Youthful, unlimited energy with an aged presence, like a bottle of zesty zinfandel from decades before.
Though I’ll never know for certain, when he told me this, I interpreted it as something in between the subjective and the objective: You’re young, it’s an unfortunate and unavoidable reality, but also, maybe find ways to act less young.
I tried not to smile. A subtle yet significant indicator of being worlds apart.
As a child, I was fascinated with adults. Starting around third grade, I began to develop tight bonds with my teachers, almost always more naturally than with peers my age. I’d hang around the classroom in fifth grade, sometimes skipping recess, to delve into topics with Mr. Smith. These included the evolution of Dell Computers and the latest unraveling of my deep research into Jane Goodall’s work in Tanzania (chimpanzees were a deep interest of mine in elementary school; I once checked out every library book that mentioned her name in the index and wrote her a long letter about my fascination with her research). I spoke to adults as if they were my age, and they spoke to me as if I were their equal. Or at the very least, I recall feeling respected despite my age.
My peers, on the other hand, would speak down to me. My shirts were cheap-looking, and my obsession with Harry Potter and tendency to bring a copy of the latest release around like it was my pet was peculiar to them. Judgement around my way of being only seemed to increase as I went through middle school and high school. I was aware that others found it odd how much time I hung around teachers to engage in conversations about the world and whatever I was obsessing over at the time (animals, books, a political event), but I couldn’t help myself. I was having fun and my brain was on fire. While I had great friends in my childhood and young adult years who were around my age, there always seemed to be a noticeable difference in the pit of my stomach when I was around adults; a lift off my shoulders of sorts. A lack of thought to the way I “needed” to talk, no longer scrutinizing over my words before I spoke.
Maybe it was because we weren’t vying for social status in the same social environments (as humans naturally do) or because these adults had already reached personal enlightenment (which I define to be the moment when one establishes a removal of internal fixation on how others perceive them and begins to operate solely on personal instinct; call it free living). Maybe I also gravitated towards adults because I was already bored from an early age about the notion that as a young woman, I had to care about clothes and makeup and boys and how I looked. Maybe it was because I wanted to be judged for my thoughts and ideas and my fascination with the world and not the flatness of my stomach or the sound of my voice.
Adults seemed to have these things figured out.
My ability to speak confidently and comfortably to adults was quickly rewarded. In college, I attended tech conferences where I’d walk right up to any booth and start conversations with older folks who had extensive professional life experiences. Maybe they knew at the time that I was only 19 or 20, couldn’t even buy a drink at a bar, but if they did, they did not seem to treat me any differently than other adults around the table. (Or, you think I am oblivious, and I was just too nerdy at the time to notice, but regardless, fortune favors the bold.) These adults listened closely to my startup ideas and business observations, my thoughts on blockchain and how technology could improve public transit. They were encouraging of my ambitions and curiosity. I also excelled at interacting with parents, to the point where it would sometimes become a point of internal shame, as if I was overstepping my boundaries. Once, at a dinner I was invited to with a college friend’s parents, I spent the entire night talking to her dad about a startup idea I had just pitched in my entrepreneurship class in the travel space (he was a venture capitalist). I remember leaving the dinner feeling equally embarrassed for not engaging more with the rest of the table (my actual friends) and exhilarated from how interesting the conversation was and how much I learned.
I spent a lot of my youth, particularly in high school and college, wanting to fast-forward to adulthood, believing that this phase of life would be easier (it’s not). I wanted to skip past the stage of life where I felt awkward and out of place among my own peers. It felt oddly easier to work on a startup idea and get critiqued by adults on the business model than to talk to other 21-year-olds at a party and feel critiqued on what I was wearing. When I was in my youth, I simply had no interest in youth. Not having an interest in my youth also had clear advantages in my career—indications that I was independent, more willing to give up my personal life, and a signal of my potential to speak to people of all ages. (After all, most durable industries will require you to interact with people much older than you when you are earlier in your career.)
This period of my anti-youth mentality lasted up until a couple of years ago, when I underwent a medical experience that shifted my perspective on the ephemeral nature of life. After recovering, I felt this intense desire for youth. I no longer craved being older and the perceived sophistication that comes with adulthood. I no longer romanticized life as a startup founder and instead, spent weekends going to movies by myself, drawing on my floor as the sun hit my face through the window with no semblance of time, and cuddling with my friends while we gabbed about crushes and reflected on memories from road trips.
I was becoming burned out from taking life too seriously from such an early age and always thinking about the future and what my next move would be. It’s an exhausting state of being—the feeling that you are always preparing. Children rarely do this—you go to school, spend time with friends, go to sports practice, make art. As a young child, I spent most of my days outside or wrapped up in books and despite having no plans for life, I did a significant amount of things on a daily basis. On any given week, I’d play multiple sports, read an entire book, go to school everyday, direct a music video in my backyard with friends, play capture-the-flag with neighbors, and make some cash training dogs in my basement. (This was also pre-iPad kid culture and pre-social media.) The focus on the present led to increased levels of energy that can be difficult to replicate in adulthood, where the next day and the next week and the next year always seems to carry so much weight.
It’s already a sad and nostalgic experience growing up and seeing life pass. Your parents get older. Family members start to die. Your friends move away. You start to realize you took those capture-the-flag games that bled into summer nights until the lightning bugs emerged with soft twinkles for granted. You no longer play sports every day (or even spend much time outside on a daily basis, for that matter). You grapple with versions of loneliness you didn’t know before. (As someone deeper in their career, I can now say that it is actually not good for you to forgo all of your hobbies and relationships to accelerate your career faster; you only have a limited period of time to spend with your college friends on a regular basis, which is a difficult reality to accept. You do, however, have your whole life to work.)
Youthfulness is marvelous and enthralling and visceral because it is. Why would anyone waste that on changing who they are in the present day, speeding up, instead of preserving a version of themselves that approaches life with unfettered excitement and fascination?
But what is chasing youth? Preserving youth isn’t preserving the smallest version of your body or the tenderness of your skin. It’s not maintaining the color of your hair or preventing wrinkles on your forehead. It’s the chirpiness of your voice—the way you used to speak as if no one was watching (and judging). It’s creating for the sake of creating because you thought building a bowl out of clay with your hands seemed cool in that moment. It’s going above and beyond even when it’s totally unnecessary, like staying up until midnight and dressing up as Hermione and waiting in a long line at Barnes & Noble to get a copy of your favorite book the day it comes out. It’s putting absurd and unjustifiable effort and attention into the little things, because the little things are what make life beautiful. Youth is camping in the woods somewhere and making elaborate hamburgers over a fire you started yourself, even if it takes three hours. It’s doing math for fun because it stimulates your mind and not for some immediately tangible and profitable gain.
Maybe preserving youth in adulthood is not being afraid or feeling embarrassment for doing things you once loved (and still love). It’s rewatching all of your favorite 2000s rom-coms and Disney movies. Maybe it is making some elaborate friendship bracelet, a reminder of summer camp. It’s feeling giddy every time you hug someone you love. It’s eating bagel bites that you microwaved when you don’t feel like cooking. It’s doing things in an old-fashioned way because maybe you never really wanted anything to change in the first place, returning to acts of intention, like writing letters and using wire headphones. Preserving youth is being unapologetic about self-expression. It’s posting a video of yourself dancing on the Internet or publishing a stream of consciousness on a blog site, without any thought as to who might see it or read it. Preserving youth is an intentional removal of “what ifs” replaced with “why nots.” It’s not even reaching a point of questioning; it’s feeling.
Preserving youth is not wanting to be any other age than you are.
a poem written by a man on frenchmen street in nola with an old typewriter.