Last week, I refused a speaking concert because they wanted me to talk about “staying relevant”. The irony was not lost for me – a 43 -year -old man was invited to interpret young people for an audience who probably ceased to listen to anyone more than 40 years ago. I said no, politely, then I went for a walk in Marina Bay to shake the feeling that I had failed an invisible test.
It was then that it struck me: I spent these tests all my adult life. Performance reviews that never end. Metrics for everything – growth rate, engagement scores, enumerations of followers, net value. Somewhere along the way, I had internalized this idea that my value had to be constantly proven, optimized, defended against the inevitable decadence of time.
But passing in front of these shiny towers, looking at the tourists pose for their perfect plans of Singapore, I remembered something. A conversation in which I had had years ago A tiny coffee in Chiang MaiWith a British expatriate who was to push 70. He learned Thai, bad, and laughed at his own mistakes. “The best part of being old,” he said, “is no one expecting what you are impressive. Do you know how released it is?”
I didn’t do it then. I do it now.
There is this script that we have given somewhere in their twenties: establish yourself, build your brand, mount the ladder, accumulate proof of value. It is exhausting, this constant hearing for our own life. And then one day – generally somewhere about 40 years – you notice that the public started to leave. Algorithms promote younger faces. Industry events feel like high school meetings where you are suddenly the Riding Hood, not the student.
Your first instinct is panic. Double. Work harder. Maybe if you optimize more, produce more, realize more, you can exceed non-record. I looked at so many people my age caught in this trap, desperately trying to compete with their 25 -year -old self. It’s like watching someone arm fight their own shade.
But what happens if we are fighting in the bad battle?
I passed Two years in ThailandBuild a business ostensibly but have really a prolonged conversation with myself on what matters. In the night markets of Bangkok, the Mountain Cafés de Pai, the beach huts of Koh Phangan, I continued to meet two types of older expatriates. The first type was still happening – always talking about their glory days, their big business, their important relationships. They carried their past as armor against the present.
The second type had left it all. They learned to cook Thai food, bad. Take painting, terribly. Start NGOs for street dogs or teach English to local children. They had stopped trying to be impressive and started trying to be useful. Or happy. Or simply present.
Guess which group seemed the most alive?
The thing about the aging that nobody tells you is that it is not really a loss. This is to modify. When you are young, you are like a rough draft – everything is included, nothing has yet been cut. You are very potential, no form. But time, if you leave it, does something remarkable. It begins to remove what does not matter. The need to be appreciated by everyone. The fear of missing. The constant comparison with others.
What remains is essence. And essence is so much more interesting than the image.
I think about it when I catch myself in old patterns. When I feel this familiar anxiety about Follow the measures that measure nothing real. When I am tempted to inject my face with botulism to look like a strangely fluid version of myself, or buy something else to report success, or develop another humble bragter on business growth.
Then I remember: I don’t take anymore. The show in which I played? It was never so good anyway.
There is a moment in the forties when you realize that you know things. No wikipedia or ted talk things, but things have experienced. You know what a broken heart really takes to heal. You know what cost of success and if it is worth it. You know the difference between loneliness and loneliness, between success and accomplishment, between being seen and being known.
This knowledge did not come from optimization. It came from the fuck. To take bad turns. To stay for too long in situations that have not served you and that left those who could have too early. Of all the spectacular failures that Silicon Valley claims that they are learning experiences but are in fact only failures, until years later, when they turn into wisdom.
Young people are beautiful because they don’t know things yet. They have this brilliant uncertainty, this desire to believe that the world could be different from what it is. I am not nostalgic for that. I would not exchange my lawyer to the knowledge of their virgin possibility. Because here is what these anti-aging advertisements do not tell you: there is something deeply sexy in someone who has been places. Which has stories that required years to take place. Which can sit in silence without needing to fill it with performance.
My friend Sarah, who is 52 years old and has just started a ceramic studio after decades in business law, says it perfectly: “I spent thirty years becoming someone. Now, I spend the unfortunate rest.”
It is the true art of aging with dignity – disadvantage. The graceful screen of everything you have accumulated that was not really you. The recognition that your value has never been in your productivity or your beauty or your relevance for algorithms. It was in something much simpler and much more difficult to measure: your presence. Your particular way of seeing. The space you create for others when you stop taking so much space by doing.
I always live in Singapore, in an apartment that would have impressed the hell of my younger self. But I live here differently now. I don’t need it to say anything about me. It’s just where I wake up, I make coffee, and do the work that seems true rather than impressive.
Sometimes I call video my friends who are always in Chiang Mai, to continue the nomadic nomadic dream, and I see myself five years ago on their faces. This hunger. This jostling. This beautiful exhausting need of importance in a way that can be measured, displayed and validated.
I don’t warn them. Some things you need to learn by living through them. But I notice how our conversations have changed. They talk about growth hacks and conversion rate. I find myself talking about the taste of good coffee, the noise of the rain on the windows, the way my knees hurt now when I run but I run anyway because the injury is proof that I am still there, always in motion.
It may be what dignity is like after 40 years. Not the desperate maintenance of young people’s standards, but the quiet revelation that these standards were always bullshit anyway. Not the fear of becoming invisible but the relief of it. Not the performance of the value but the achievement mode of it.
The other day, I had lunch with a potential investor, half of my age which continued to check his phone and talk about disturbances. Halfway through his land on the reason why my business needed to “bias younger”, I realized that I did not listen to. I was looking at the way in which sunlight struck my glass of water, thinking of the way the same light had struck the Mekong years ago when I thought I had to be someone else.
“What do you know?” I said, interrupting his PowerPoint dreams. “I think we are good like us.”
He looked confused. People usually do when you stop playing the game they are used to.
But here is the thing age: You realize that there are only lunches. Only so many mornings. Only so likely to say what you mean instead of what is strategic. You can spend them on an audience that has already gone to the next show. Or you can move on to be present for the life you really have.
I chose the presence. It is less impressive but infinitely more satisfactory.
And if that doesn’t age with dignity, I don’t know what it is.