Should some jobs come with an ageism warning?

We need to educate the young, and not-so-young, about the transitoriness of lusted-after careers

Photo by Windows on Unsplash

“You got scared to come and talk without the village elders?”
Succession’s Lukas Matsson (to Kendall and Roman Roy when they show up to a negotiation with their wrinkly C-suite in tow)

Two decades ago, my then-wife booked a “dog psychiatrist” to sort out our misbehaving mutt. The canine psychotherapist turned out to be a stunningly attractive Chinese-Australian woman in her late forties. During a break from addressing our dog’s unresolved issues with authority, the woman told me she had once been an actress. In fact, she had appeared in the 1989 miniseries Bangkok Hilton. It wasn’t discussed, but it was obvious the woman’s acting career had petered out and she had had to find some other way of supporting herself.

Would this individual have still pursued an acting career in her twenties, and possibly well into her thirties, if she knew that, as with most of the other actors who appeared in Bangkok Hilton, she’d never crack the big time and would end up as a glorified dog trainer?

Well, yes, she probably would have. After all, despite the much-bandied-about stats of 95 per cent unemployment rates for thespians and the near omnipresent spectacle of fading celebrities desperately attempting, usually unsuccessfully, to reboot their tanking careers, the type of person who pursues a career in acting always believes they will be the one-in-a-million exception. For years, sometimes decades, they will remain steadfastly convinced that they will be the vanishingly rare success story who maintains a decades-long showbiz career, marries some of the world’s most eligible people and amasses a great fortune.  

So, I’m not sure we should feel too sorry for anybody who pursues an extremely high risk-high return career like acting. As the classic line from Flying High goes, “They bought their tickets. They knew what they were getting into. I say, ‘Let ’em crash!’”

But what about the much larger cohort of people who pursue a somewhat-glamorous career (i.e. public relations, advertising, social media influencing, event planning, fashion designing, DJing, being an airline stewardess etc) in the expectation they will be able to keep working in the industry they entered in their early twenties past their 40^th birthday?

Indeed, what about all those people who pursue a non-glamorous career and who still discover at some point in their forties or fifties that they are, for reasons out of their control, surplus to requirements?    

Sympathy for the prestige-chasing devils
Like actors, those who pursue an alluring career in the hope (secret or explicitly stated) of amassing fame, wealth and social status while still in the full flush of youth don’t deserve unreserved sympathy. At some level, even if they weren’t inclined to think about it too much, these individuals knew they were entering industries built around Bright Young Things. They would have soon noticed that – leaving aside a handful of greybeards in ownership or executive positions and maybe a handful of industry ‘rock stars’ – they had very few colleagues over the age of 50/40/30.

But even if you’re the hanging-judge type who believes this cohort also bought their tickets and deserves to crash, what about the capricious impact of technological change?

What if you opt for a ‘sensible’ job in an industry that hasn’t been particularly ageist in the past, but that becomes brutally so when industry disruption incentivises the widespread dispatching of older, more expensive workers?

If you’re still in Hanging Judge mode and are on the wrong side of 40, you may like to reflect on this last point especially thoughtfully in the ChatGPT era.    

Are there any second acts in Australian lives?
I’m not sure if it went viral exactly but Stephanie Wood’s recent Good Weekend article about being an underemployed journalist in her mid-fifties attracted plenty of attention among content creators of a certain age.

The TL;DR version of the article is that – as hundreds of Fairfax/Nine journalists have over the last 15 years – Wood takes a redundancy payout and departs Good Weekend in 2017. At first, everything goes swimmingly. Wood writes a book and gets a job first with Australian Story and then with the Department of Premier and Cabinet NSW.

But then Wood hits some kind of invisible wall. It’s not that she can’t get any work at all, but nobody will give her a ‘proper job’. Sure, she can write for Vogue, The Guardian and Good Weekend. But none of those publications is going to employ her on a full-time, or even part-time, basis. And even if they did offer her a job, the salary would be significantly lower than what she used to earn 10 or even five years ago. It certainly would not be sufficiently generous to allow her to continue living in the comfortably middle-class manner she has become accustomed to.

So, like many erstwhile media workers in their forties and fifties, Wood now finds herself having to survive on her wits and spends a lot of time wondering if she’ll be able to make the next mortgage payment and pay the next bill.

Among the middle-aged and underemployed
Not unreasonably, the general public feels little sympathy for middle-aged un(der)employed journalists who, as a class, never demonstrated much interest or compassion when other groups – blue-collar men, to take the most obvious example – were being hurled onto history’s ash heap.

But what saves Wood’s article from being a self-indulgent whinge is that she draws attention to a large and growing cohort of middle-aged Australians from a wide range of occupational backgrounds who are also finding it near-impossible to attract the attention of potential employers (or clients). Few of these individuals are erstwhile journos, but if they had Wood’s facility with words they would probably describe their fate much as she does:       

My working life has not been working for me. I am a woman in her mid-50s (there, I said it) who let her grey hair grow out during the pandemic (was that a mistake?) and I’m starting to feel as though I’m waving and running frantically after a bus vanishing into the distance. I catastrophise about my working and financial future, fear that sunset is upon me.

Before you get too judgey about Wood’s fate, you should be aware she’s not an entitled ‘job snob’. While she doesn’t explicitly state this, I suspect Wood believed that, as a well-respected but relatively low-profile writer in her late forties, her days were numbered at the Fairfax/Nine papers. That being the case, she took a redundancy. She then attempted to make the transition from journalism to a second career. Wood was fully prepared to, even eager to, “become less institutionalised, more agile, [to] refashion my career to suit the constantly shifting new media landscape”. As noted, things did appear promising for a couple of years. However, Wood then found herself trapped in the following hellscape:

I have also run myself into the ground, mostly working from home in a lonely, multitasking, all-hours hustle – exhausting, unsustainable and a road to despair and penury. While I have always had plenty of work, even the highest freelance per-word rates of pay have not increased in two decades and, out of diminished incomings, I need to allocate money for outgoings including tax and superannuation.

Wood goes on to detail how many other Australians of a certain age (the 61-year-old lawyer, the 48-year-old CEO, the 55-year-old graphic designer, etc) are in similar situations and experiencing their “own shades of anxiety, stress, fear, plummeting self-esteem and existential dread”.    

What is to be done?
With an economic downturn now almost certain, Wood warns that many high-achieving, middle-aged Australians might be about to discover that loyalty is almost always a one-way street with employer-employee relationships.  

Wood canvases the usual options for those about to join the ranks of “an increasing army isolated work-from-homers – consultants, contractors, freelancers”. Such as: taking early retirement; starting your own micro business; retraining; being humble enough to accept more junior and modestly paying roles; networking and job-hunting even more frenetically; remaining eternally upbeat; becoming more active on LinkedIn; inserting the right keywords in (AI-reviewed) cover letters; encouraging young recruiters and HR staff to be less prejudiced against people as old as they will one day be (in the unimaginably distant future). But even Wood doesn’t seem to believe these are anything other than band-aid solutions.

As many have, Wood also laments the loss of “collective wisdom, the institutional memories and the innate talents of the people who have stepped away from the employment market or continue to struggle in vain to find positions to suit their abilities and experiences”. But, once again, she doesn’t really explain how this situation might be turned around.

I’m running out of time and space, so let me make two quick suggestions before wrapping up.  

·       Wood and her interview subjects are all Gen Xers. Does anyone believe that Gen Yers, let alone the Boomers, would confine themselves to just muttering darkly if they were being discriminated against en masse in the workplace? I’m pessimistic that Gen Xers can abandon the slacker-nihilist habits of a lifetime at this late stage. Still, I suspect employers would be much less ageist if they risked substantial financial and reputational damage for discriminating against anybody over 40.

It’s now common for companies to be scrutinised over how many women/LGBT people/ethnic minorities they employ. How about some serious attention starts to get paid to age group diversity? And how about the relevant authorities get serious about enforcing the laws against ageism that are already on the books?

Fortuitously, this is one political issue where the interests of Gen Y, Gen X and the Boomers are in broad alignment. Most Boomers have now retired or soon will do, so ageist workplace discrimination isn’t a hugely salient issue for them. Nonetheless, they have almost certainly been subjected to various forms of ageism and have presumably taken umbrage. Given their economic interests wouldn’t be impacted by an energetic anti-ageism campaign, they have no reason to derail such a campaign. (After all, it’s not like Boomers would have to give up their franking credits or negatively geared investment properties for Generations X and Y to get a fairer shake in the workplace.)

The older Gen Yers are now approaching the career death zone themselves. Given they get notoriously worked up about any apparent instances of discrimination, I can’t imagine it would be difficult to mobilise them to fight a form of discrimination all of them risk experiencing firsthand in short order.

The only fly in the ointment is those young Australians who stand to benefit from the middle-aged being put out to pasture. However, as the current state of first-world societies amply demonstrates, most of those in the 18-35 demographic aren’t much interested in doing the time-consuming grunt work (enrolling to vote, writing letters to the editor, making calls to talkback radio programs, lobbying elected representatives, starting Substack blogs etc) necessary to advance their age-cohort’s interests.

·       Regardless of what happens on the legal and societal front, Australians need to accept that employers – both their current one and any potential future ones – have little or no interest in their wisdom, innate talents or institutional memory. If an employer can replace a middle-aged worker with someone younger, cheaper and hipper, they will usually eventually do that.  

Many people find the idea their employer will unhesitatingly throw anybody, from the CEO down, under the bus distressing. But that’s long been the reality, at least in Anglosphere nations. Once you accept that reality, you can proceed to make clear-eyed decisions about maximising your options, income and ongoing employability.