Growing Old Series #2

Effective Deception Disorder, Thinking We’ll Get Better At Playing Golf & Other Day Dreams.
By Jeff Jordan

Professional Golf Legend, Jack Nicklaus and I are close to the same age. He is wise enough to realize that he can’t play competitively anymore, so he rests on his laurels, which by almost anyone’s standards, are considerable. He still holds the record for winning the most major tournaments. His golf course designs are played all over the world. He and his wife are major sponsors of charity in their community and beyond.

On my side f the ledger, I still struggle to break 100 on the golf course. I mow my own lawn. I belong to AARP. My effective deception disorder exhibits itself in the following ways. I still think, in the deepest depths of my mind, that my game is going to get better, I can get someone else to cut my grass for no compensation and I’m going to win the lottery.

Letting go of the dreams of our youth can be difficult. We know we’re getting older. Our bodies do not respond in the ways they did when we were young. But in spite of this, if there is one emotion that overcomes common sense, it’s hope. If I just practice more, study in-depth,  and work harder, I might climb that mountain to success or whatever mind trap I’ve put myself in.

We’ve all read those articles where someone who has been replaced at work by automation, or downsized because their skills are no longer needed. In a recent article in The New York Times, the person interviewed pleaded that injustice was complicated by the fact that she was forty-five years old. She accepted this with a question. Who would hire her? Is forty-five now the age of becoming irrelevant in the job market?

A friend of mine lost his Vice Presidential position when his company was acquired by a competitor. He told me that if his company had bought the competitor, he would have held the job, but it was the other way around. Not only that but the industry he was in was shrinking. Larger operators were buying smaller companies all over the country. In spite of this reality, he persisted for quite a while. He could not believe there wasn’t one more brass ring for him to grab if he stuck to his plan of staying in the industry. He was good at what he did. Someone would look past his age, wouldn’t they?

Further down the trail, he took another look at the depth and width of this problem and the reality became apparent. No, potential employers didn’t honor his experience. The short term gains of cutting expenses were more important than the long term gain of acquiring his experience that might pay off in increased productivity.

I was a guest at a cookout being held at the home of a retired couple. There were six couples besides the host, the hostess, my wife and I. All of these people were in the fifties. I was the only man in the group that was working. All of these men were either a victim of mergers, downsizing, voluntary retirement or bonus severance agreements. In some cases, in order to get their severance packages, they had to train their replacements.

Some of these men were realistic enough to realize they had to remake themselves if they were going to be attractive to a job market that favored the young. Their younger competitors were cheaper and would conform to a new culture where the older employees tend to stick to yesterday.

The biggest problem is that most of these men were in upper-middle management. They were used to giving orders and having them obeyed. When you go from that atmosphere to automobile sales you are going to have problems unless you swallow a huge bite of your pride. Just having to wear some kind of uniform or a name tag is a blow to your ego. Having someone telling you no is unbearable.

Look at the statistics and you’ll get an idea what kind of problem this is. This was the cutting edge of the so-called baby boomer generation. How they fared in this new economy was going to be indicative of what would happen when the crest of the wave that started to break on the shallows that hid the new supply-side economy.

I was in sales. I knew and understood the, ‘ I don’t care what you did last year. What have you done for me lately?’. It’s an attitude that management often assumes. My contemporaries in management did not see how this applied to them. And despite their initial predictions of the failure of this offloading the payroll by firing the expensive upper management people, who, by the way, are accused of resting on their reputations and not producing, the corporate edict ruled.

What most of these displaced executives didn’t factor in is that any move in a large corporation will not provide immediate effects. There is the old analogy to a ship at sea. Changing its course will take a long time  The conventional wisdom in the sea of the unanchored was best understood with the belief that ‘Oh yes, they will beg us to come back and save their asses’. Needless to say, their revenge scenario never made it to Broadway.

To pile onto this mess, this generation was for the most part not ready to retire even if they had worked to the age of sixty-five. The lucky ones might have equity in their homes, a pension or even a 401k. That is unless they withdrew all of their pie-in-the-sky money and bought a boat or, worse yet, a time-share in Florida.

Ah yes, it was a good time to shop for a used Lexus, BMW or Suburban. Expensive golf clubs were going for ten cents on the dollar. Homes were a bargain even in a market that was tanking because for sure, the conventional wisdom predicted, the housing market would recover. In a down economy, cash is king. Until 2008, that theory worked very well.

(Off the subject but worth noting. The market reverse in 2008 was the beginning of the conversation that the free market needed some regulation. And even doubts about Capitalism started creeping in.)

This is not all gloom and doom. Some of these guys went on to produce some great home-brewed beer. Or struck it rich selling honey from their urban hives located on the roof of their high-rise. Or they wrote unsolicited letters to the editor about how the world was better in the old days. They quickly learned that the newspaper only published a few of those letters, Than they discovered Twitter where they could sing in the choir. The biggest downside was that this group had more time to try and ruin their adult children’s lives.

I tell young people, regardless of their willingness to listen to an old guy like me, “Don’t get old. It’s a waste of time.”