Weinstein So What If I'm 65

Get a Job, Get the Most Out of Your Best Years
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-615-62298-9
Verlag: bob\weinstein media
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 117 Seiten

Finally, a career and life guide for the millions of qualified 50- and 60-plus job candidates. Bob Weinstein, author of a dozen best-selling career books, has written a hard-hitting, information-rich guide full of tips, insider advice and strategies for his generation.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weinstein, Bob

Leseproben

Chapter 1: Old Is Uncool For the unlearned, old age is winter; for the learned, it is the season of the harvest. – Hasidic saying Chapter Snapshot •   Face it: No one likes us •   What age determines old? •   Old redefined •   Older workers victims of ageist stereotyping •   Stereotypes are hard to kill •   Billions spent on looking young •   Stop fighting Mother Nature •   So what else is new? •   It’s time to change •   “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore” In the parlance of our day, young is cool. Old is, well, uncool, but tolerated and respectfully acknowledged. Turn 50, and we’ve passed our prime; cross 60, and it’s time to get our affairs in order and prepare to hang up our spurs and retire. After that, enjoy life, because our days are numbered. Face it: No one likes us The worst thing anyone can say to another person, especially a woman, is that she looks her age; worse still, older than her chronological age. The best thing anyone can say to the same person is that she looks 10 years younger than her chronological age. Those are golden words, straight from the gods. The culprit is medical advances, which keep us younger than we look, and a youth-obsessed culture. “Anyone who has been exposed to U.S. culture, even peripherally, quickly learns that the USA has a cultural bias in favor of youth,” wrote Todd D. Nelson in a 2005 Journal of Social Issues article entitled “Ageism: Prejudice Against Our Feared Future Self.” “Movies, television, magazines and advertisers who support those media all cater to the youngest demographic in our population,” Nelson said. Why this relentless fixation on staying young? “Fear of aging,” Nelson said. “In the USA, we have a tremendous anxiety about the aging process and death. Old age is stereotypically perceived as a negative time, whereupon the older person suffers declines in physical attributes, mental acuity, loss of identity, loss of respect from society and increasing dependence on others.” What age determines old? The question I repeatedly asked myself while I wrote this book was, “At what age does a person become old?” When I was a teenager, I thought it was 65 or earlier. People I knew were retiring at that age. They withdrew from the workforce – the seminal connection that gave purpose and meaning to their lives – and received pensions and monthly Social Security payments. They either stayed home or moved to Florida, that warm spot on the planet with a perpetually warm climate – ideal for oldsters who couldn’t tolerate cold climates. When my grandparents and their friends bought condos in Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale, Miami and Sarasota, and either lived there permanently or spent their winters there, I assumed all old people did the same thing. They withdrew from life and vegetated until they died. In my teenage years, aging and death were so far removed from my everyday life that I never gave them much thought. And ageism? I doubt if I could define it in my mid-30s. But when I approached 50, I was made aware of the age issue each time I changed jobs. That’s when I was exposed to age stereotyping for the first time. Suddenly my age was a serious issue in my life. The message I was getting – and it wasn’t subtle – was that my age was a problem. Imagine that. Even though I had accrued all this knowledge and experience, and I was really getting good at my craft, I was less attractive to employers than I was in my 30s and 40s. What a strange, illogical twist of fate. If I was unfortunate enough to be running neck and neck with a talented candidate with excellent credentials 10 years my junior, odds are he’d get the job. Naturally, I was upset, but I chalked it all up to that was the way things were. The only solution was to bury my age and do everything I could to look, act, dress, think and talk young. I didn’t see any other way out. It wasn’t in my best interest to question the groupthink, the party line, and scream unfair and rebel. How irresponsible would that be? I had responsibilities – a wife, two kids, mortgage, bills – that had to be met. So I bought the youth-culture thing hook, line and sinker. When asked my age, I lopped off 10 years, and never gave it a thought. And I made it a point to stay in shape, obsessively aware that survival meant being better than colleagues younger than myself. I lied to myself until I turned 65, once the unofficial age making us as old. It took me that long to see the world as it is. I didn’t like what I saw. I resented being dismissed and rejected because I was over 60. I didn’t like lying about my age, pretending to be younger than my age. I plied myself with questions: Why am I ashamed of being 65? Why am I going through all these humiliating pretensions to disguise my age? Why does our culture denigrate aging? Finding answers to those gnawing questions were the seeds for my rebirth, my awakening and transformation. It was indeed a rebirth. When I realized what has happening around me, I was sickened, appalled and angry. I allowed my culture, the society I grew up in, to do this to me. I had become an unconscious victim of a destructive culture that lauds youth and all things young, and disparages, puts down, anything old. I became a different person. Embarrassment and discomfort about my age turned to pride and strength. This newfound pride and joy in being 65 was the reason I wrote SO WHAT IF I’M 65. But it was more than writing what I felt could be a best seller that could do enormous good for my generation; I also realized that I had an important mission: to change the way Western cultures think about aging. My goal was to right the scales, educate the world about aging, blow age stereotypes to smithereens, and to give my generation a new purpose that helps them not only find jobs, but also a new sense of purpose and mission about who they are and how much more they have to accomplish. I want them to jump back into the ring and start fighting. So our reflexes are not what they were 25 years ago. We don’t have the stamina we once had. But we’re smarter and wiser. What we lack in physical strength, we make up for in mental agility. But don’t think we couldn’t hold our own in a street fight. Any street fighter will tell you that attitude, confidence and strategy win more fights than muscle and brawn. Old redefined But 65 is no longer the age separating young and old. It’s considerably younger. Depending upon whom I ask, it’s 55, 50, and as young as 45, according to many senior managers. It makes sense. History is only repeating itself. In upper-crust Roman society, in approximately 100 B.C. the average age of death was about 34 and in A.D. 300 was about 37. By the early 1600s, average life expectancy was about the same, approximately 35. Over the years, people started to live longer lives. By 1955, the average age of death had almost doubled, to 69; in 1965, it was 70; in 1975, it was 72 and one-half; in 1985, it was 74 and one-half; in 1995, it was 75 and three-fourths; in 2005, it was 77 and three-fourths; in 2015, it’s projected to be 79; in 2025 to be 80 and one-half; in 2035 to be 81 and one-half; in 2045 to be 83; and by 2050, according to projections, the average person could live to be 83 and three-fourths years of age. Older workers victims of ageist stereotyping Put all the pieces together, and it’s not hard to understand why older workers are victims of ageist stereotyping. It’s so ingrained in our culture that we’re not aware of it. My generation never gave it a thought until it barred us from jobs. Now it behooves every baby boomer to understand ageist stereotyping, the first step toward fighting back. Understanding ageism begins with asking this simple question, “Does it exist?” Nelson answered that question in a roundabout way. “Isn’t most of what we think about older people true?” he asked. “For example, they’re slower at pretty much everything; they don’t change their ways; they are grumpy; and they can’t or don’t want to learn new things.” These traits and characteristics “may be true for a number of older people,” Nelson explained, but “they don’t apply to many older adults. Anytime one assumes that a group shares a common behavioral or personality characteristic, they are engaging in stereotyping…. All stereotypes are incorrect by their very nature.” Stereotypes are hard to kill Stereotyping is wrong and dangerous, but it doesn’t go away. It’s so well-entrenched in our culture, we take it for granted. Boomers battle it every day on the job front. It’s wreaked havoc on their lifestyles and self-esteem. If the prevailing message blasted everywhere – on the tube, radio, Internet, on billboard-size advertisements – that looking young is good, looking old is bad (the precursor to bad things, such as sickness, disease, dementia and death), at some point in our lives we start believing it. Initially, the process is so insidiously subtle that we’re not even aware it’s happening. We start feeling aches and pains we...