A recent issue of The Atlantic featured an article by Arthur C. Brooks, the President of the American Enterprise Institute. His title warned “Your Professional Decline is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think.” When I finished reading, I lamented that there is no “required” reading list for people 50 years of age and older for the course in which we are all enrolled, called “life.” Brooks’ article could be on the list.
50 as an age has meaning for me. At age 50, I gave up a perfectly good job at a fine school in Sacramento to move to Maui, to a school recently rescued from mediocrity by a head who had departed to the East Coast. A few years later, I realized that I had been an example of an observation made by a professional colleague to his audience some years before: if you have a department (or school or company) in which a large number of the workers are men in their fifties, you have a department (etc.) in flux.
The observation might well apply to women but I am gender-unqualified to speak to the phases of life for women.
My colleague’s reasoning: By age 50, one has usually A) established oneself in a career field, building contacts and networks, reputation, achievements, etc.; B) participated at some level in the raising of offspring who are fast approaching, chronologically, appropriate self-sufficiency; and C) taken note of the fact that the usual age for retirement (at least when he spoke) is little more than 15 years hence.
These facts create questions. Should one continue with what one is doing up to age 50? Or should one strike out on a new adventure, one great last hurrah before settling into a well-earned retirement doing something. That “something” in retirement might not be clear then, but Wilkins Micawber assured us in David Copperfield, “something will turn up,” and usually something does.
So, when the illustration for Brooks’ article depicted a man standing atop a triangular staircase on a step labeled “50,” looking down at steps numbered “60” and “70,” I took notice. I am further down the staircase.
Brooks asserted that “the data are shockingly clear that for most people, in most fields, professional decline starts earlier than almost anyone thinks.” Then he offers more data to prove his point, examples from academia (research output), athletics (name your sport), policing, nursing, even (oh, the scandal of it all!) umpiring professional baseball.
People of a Certain Age, my friends and readers, we are all on that triangular staircase. We are all in professions or have been. We can all grok (wonderful word borrowed from science fiction as you probably know) what Brooks is saying.
Happily, Brooks does not leave readers in despair. So-called Western philosophy and his own Roman Catholic faith did not provide Brooks with the insights he sought. And the culture we share in the U.S. is not widely regarded for its creative ways of thinking about aging. So, he looked to the East and found a Hindu teacher to explain the ways that faith tradition thinks about the stages of life.
There are four stages, explained the teacher. The first is the early years, dedicated to learning, lasting until early adulthood. The second stage focuses on building a career, accumulating wealth, and raising a family. Brooks’ teacher noted that these are the trap years when some, perhaps many, people become attached to “earthly rewards—money, power, sex, prestige—and thus try to make this stage last a lifetime.”
Happy are those who escape the trap, moving on to the third stage, “usually starting around age 50,” when focus shifts to spirituality and wisdom.
I wonder. If one surveyed churches, service clubs, and similar organizations, would one find the age range of the most actively involved to be those between 50 and 60 years old? Maybe.
Such activities do not end when one reaches stage four, though, the teacher observed. The third stage is meant to be a time of “studying and training” for the fourth. In this stage, we are intended, so the teaching goes, to be “totally dedicated to the fruits of enlightenment.”
Brooks wrote: “As we age, we should resist the conventional lures of success to focus on more transcendentally important things.”
This insight into life that Brooks and his Hindu teacher share is not about something accomplished in a vacuum. Modern life is filled with sparkly distractions and enticing exhilarations. At times, transcendence can become lost behind the cloud of doing things; other forms of the “conventional lures.”
There are different ways of “doing” that match well with different stages of life. Brooks’ “professional decline” has an upside: growing understanding of the transcendental, if we are prepared to pay attention.
To share that understanding is the privilege accorded to people of a certain age. Brooks is a model: he left the AEI job to become a professor. There is a reason why so many cultures outside the U.S. venerate their elders—in Hawaii, we are called kupuna. We People of a Certain Older Age know things we have learned through living.
Folks just need to ask.
Daniel E. White
August 5, 2019