Modern Elder

Roughly 30% of the US population today hadn’t been born on 9/11. Nearly half weren’t born to see the stock market precipitously crash in 1987. And even fewer felt the fear of the most contagious years of the AIDS epidemic.

Am I an elder or elderly? This recent Wall Street Journal article amplified this question as the age of 60 became a new line of demarcation as high risk for COVID-19. I’m supposed to be thinking of Social Security at this age, but I’m feeling some serious Social Insecurity!

I was recently introduced to the word “Smeeze,” as in Subject Matter Experts (SME’s). I was talking to a doctor friend of mine in Seattle, who now works for Amazon (she said with a chuckle, “Someday, we’ll all work for Amazon”).

Not too long ago, I sat in the hot seat with famed podcaster and social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk, a guy who doesn’t hold back his F-bombs. I was a little nervous going into this interview but immediately realized that Gary looooves the concept of the “Modern Elder” and MEA.

I’m thinking about the ‘growing-up’ process, or rather the ‘growing-way-up’ process and how we name it. All of human culture necessitates naming; the act of naming makes ideas and forms manifest. Heraclitus turned ‘logos’ into a signifier connecting the structure of the cosmos and human reason. A primal ‘analogy’: as the universe creates, man creates. Naming has a generative effect. This is especially true of naming ourselves.

You probably didn’t know it, but “Yankee” was a derogatory term of the Brits to describe the new world upstarts but was soon adopted by New Englanders themselves (and many a baseball fan, centuries later).

This month sixty years ago, Gloria Steinem moved to New York to pursue her fledgling journalism career and, a dozen years later at age 38, started the pioneering Ms magazine. Given how influential she was in co-creating the modern women’s movement, the 85-year-old Steinem has some words of wisdom to offer those of us who are in the early stages of creating a “Modern Elder” movement.

Nearly 2,500 years ago, Aristotle suggested that a good story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The 3-act play (or life) has existed ever since. Five hundred years ago, scientists started studying the epic 3-part metamorphosis of the caterpillar-cocoon-butterfly journey.

While I’d love to know the answer to that question, the more relevant question is, “Who are the three wisest people in your world?” A growing number of companies are starting to track and cultivate wisdom by asking the following question on their employee work climate surveys:

In most companies, institutional wisdom walks out the front door daily, through retirement, layoffs, or ⏤ most often ⏤ when experienced, older workers start to feel irrelevant. A balance sheet can’t measure the loss of these culture-bearers who have more than just the know-how, but also the know-who that often helped the company get to where it is today.