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Getting On
Why ageism never gets old.
We tend to caricature the elderly as either raddled wretches or cuddly Yodas.
Early in his career, Paul Newman personified a young man in a hurry forced to wait his turn. His go-getter characters infiltrated the old-boy network, wore the gray flannel suit, and toiled away before finally, in midlife, grabbing the brass ring and coasting for home. In "The Young Philadelphians" (1959), for instance, Newman played Tony Lawrence, whose mother, over his cradle, gloats, "Someday, he'll take the place in this city that belongs to him." Young Philadelphians, it's clear, are merely old Philadelphians in the making. While Tony is at Princeton, a silver-haired Philadelphia lawyer so venerable he has a British accent tells him, "I'm confident that in due time you'll become a partner in Dickinson & Dawes." As Tony shinnies up the greasy pole at an even more eminent firm, he grumbles when old man Clayton has him work on Christmas and grouses that big clients are "reserved for the seniors" who wear homburgs and smoke pipes. Eventually, though, he makes partner and smokes a pipe of his own. Yay.
Times have changed. In "Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble" (Hachette), Dan Lyons, a fifty-one-year-old Newsweek reporter, gets his first shock when he's laid off. "They can take your salary and hire five kids right out of college," he's told. His second shock occurs when he takes a lower-paying job at a startup called HubSpot, where his boss is a twentysomething named Zack who's been there a month. Lyons arrives for work in the traditional uniform of a midlife achiever--"gray hair, unstylishly cut; horn-rimmed glasses, button down shirt"--to find himself surrounded by brogrammers in flip-flops who nickname him Grandpa Buzz. His third shock is the realization that the tech sector usually tosses people aside at fifty. A few chapters later, he advances the expiration date to forty. A few chapters after that, he's gone.
This sharp shift in the age of authority derives from increasingly rapid technological change. In the nineteen-twenties, an engineer's "half life of knowledge"--the time it took for half of his expertise to become obsolete--was thirty-five years. In the nineteen-sixties, it was a decade. Now it's five years at most, and,...