Where We Got Wrong About Aging and Work

Featured Sponsor

Store	Link	Sample Product
UK Artful Impressions	Premiere Etsy Store

After the death of Martin Amis, the newspapers were filled with reminders of the celebrated writer’s most memorable thoughts.

in 2021, he told The Guardian that he had found it difficult to finish things during the pandemic, but doubted this was due to Covid. “It’s just age,” he said. “In the old days it came faster, prose. Now it’s a battle.”

Amis was 71 at the time, but the number of people who mentioned this quote to me in the past week suggests that his words resonate well beyond his own generation.

And they would. In an age of rampant ageism, Amis was admitting the unconscionable: When we get older, we’re not always as good at our jobs as we used to be.

This is depressing thinking on so many levels, especially since it’s not entirely true. we deteriorate with agebut not always in the way that is widely imagined.

In fact, we get a lot of things wrong about aging and work, which is strange considering that there are now more seniors on the planet than young children for the time being. first time in recorded history.

To begin with, we assume that older people are weaker than they are.

The parts of the brain that deal with things like working memory can degrade in midlife, but general age-related cognitive decline is usually not pronounced until you reach at least age 70, and only 5 percent percent of people over the age of 65 show signs of cognitive decline.

Those numbers come from research compiled in a pre-pandemic report for the British Medical Association which was made to help doctors tackle a UK workforce with more people over the age of 50 than ever before.

It showed that the auditory, visual, and muscular strength of older workers may not be what they were. But for most people in their sixties, any deterioration in mental capacity and mental alertness is “mild,” the effects being offset by experience and established skills. In fact, the ability to process complex problems and some types of language skills can improve.

There is also no consistent evidence that older workers are less productive than younger ones. Rather, the report stated: “The main finding is that healthy older people perform just as well as their younger counterparts.”

In other words, many assumptions about older workers are misplaced.

There is another misconception about age and work that is fueled by some older workers, including many who may be reading this article.

I am referring here to wrestlers who have enjoyed years of professional achievement and are dismayed to find that their career is stalling or that it has not brought them the satisfaction they hoped for.

As many of these workers would say, they don’t deserve jars of sympathy. They have done much better than others. But they are emblematic of a broader dilemma: career decline comes sooner than expected and therefore requires more careful management for more workers than is generally assumed.

This is not some modern corporate woe. For a long time it has fed some of our best literature. As the British theater director, Nicholas Hytner, saying by Henrik Ibsen not long ago, many of the great Norwegian’s later works deal with the feeling that “the high-achieving, high-achieving man looks back on his life and, despite the depth of achievement, feels somewhere deep level that he is a mess”.

However, the dilemma persists. It’s no coincidence that one of the biggest nonfiction best-sellers in the US last year was from strength to strengtha book on coping with career decline, by Harvard’s Arthur Brooks.

It’s full of data about how quickly people go downhill in a variety of fields. Investment advisers peak between ages 36 and 40 and chemists at 46. For writers, it’s a more encouraging range between ages 40 and 55, which is similar to mail sorters.

Brooks believes the answer lies in recognizing the inevitable and switching to a job that relies less on “fluid intelligence,” or raw intelligence, and more on “crystallized intelligence,” or wisdom, acquired later in life.

He is undoubtedly right. And as with so much about aging and work, the first thing to do is figure out the difference between perception and reality.

pilita.clark@ft.com