Over-50

Free from Regret: When shoulda, coulda, woulda leave us alone

Yesterday I made an amazing discovery.  For the first time since I was 11, and had lost my self confidence as I entered womanhood, I was free of regret.  Instead, I had the awareness and the confidence to frame a situation as completely positive.

A little after 8 A.M. yesterday I had packed my attache case, including laptop and smartphone, put $50 of gas in the car, and headed from New Haven, Connecticut to Boston. I was in one of those beauty contests - that is, competing against a lot of other qualified people for a full time job with benefits.

The interview went pretty good, I thought.  When I ponied up the $32 for the 1.5 hours in the parking garage and scanned the list of Boston rentals on the Internet, I got the sinking feeling that maybe just maybe relocating to that city, if offered the job, wasn't in my financial self interest. 

The good news is that I was saved by an email.  A long term lucrative assignment for contract work was being offered me.  I called on my trusty smartphone and said yes, yes, yes.  I notified the company in which I had interviewed that I was now available for freelance but not full time work.  We had discussed the freelance possibility.

Halfway home I settled in at a truck stop which had pizza at $5 a slice, stale candy on sale, and WiFi.  I coulda had regrets at spending a whole day not earning a penny and putting out a lot more than a penny.  But I didn't.  I had test marketed Boston as a place to live.   And I ruled it out.  I had made more contacts. I might get interesting freelance work.  

In addition, at the truck stop I met a truck driver who had been taking the baby steps being a writer.  We talked for about an hour.  By time I had hit the road again I felt like, instead of wasting a day, I had done a useful day's work in terms of my career path.

Attitude is everything.   For me, being able to frame current pain as opportunity came late in life.

Aging: Yes, a variable but not necessarily the significant one

"In her 60s, my mother got her Master's degree and then a job paying $75,000."

That's what an acquaintance told me last night when I finally recognized that age is, yes, a variable in a job search but not necessarily a significant one.  For example, now that I have repositioned myself to sell a set of specialized skills I am in more demand. On interviews it's obvious that what I can offer overrides any of their concerns about my age.

The game seems to be about approaching our credentials in a way that's directly aligned with demand in the marketplace.  That could mean letting go of tasks we like to do but there is little market for.  We simply leave that out of resumes, cover letters, samples, and interviews.  

What I have ditched is my experience in being highly critical of whatever.  Several years ago when blogging was new, yes, there was a market for that.  Not now.  End of that story.

Mary Kennedy: Was she all of us who had lost our sense of self?

Mary Kennedy's suicide by hanging has touched a nerve, especially among us who are over 50.  One reason why is that, as some commenting on this death point out, she seems to have lost her sense of self.  There are ups and down in life.  Those downs can be harder to absorb and bounce back from as we age.  The lesson here might be to preserve our core identity no matter what blows comes our way from the outside.

At one time, Kennedy was an architectural designer working in Manhattan.  Then in 2010 we read that her husband Robert is filing for a divorce.  Not long after that we read that she is arrested for a DUI. Then we read that she could have been arrested for driving under the influence of a prescription drug but her lawyer got her off.  She did not have custody of her four children.

The reality is that anyone of any age can come back from whatever.  In his mid 60s, T. Boone Pickens lost most of his money and his marriage.  He's back, of course.  Clint Eastwood came back from simply making films which made money to serious work.  His "Million Dollar Baby" is a classic in the art of film.  Hillary Clinton got on the other side of her high profile loss in her campaign for the White House.   I came back in 2003 (Download Geezerguts).  Since I intend to keep in the workforce for another 20 years I anticipate several more comebacks.

Baby Boomers: Then one day we just skip worry and pass on to problem solving

Did we inherit the worry habit from our parents who lived through the Great Depression or at least what were recent tales of how it was?  No matter what, my mother and often enough my father went from what was, even if good, to how bad it could be.  The worry wasn't plain-vanilla.  It was downright end of the world.

Of course, when our little world went into an economic spiral down I defaulted into worry.  But it didn't help.  Somehow I got that.  I tried how things might go if I didn't worry.   The most recent test case has been a mostly work at home full time job I had a few interviews for.  There are still two more interviews to go, if I'm not already knocked out of the box.  I decided not to worry but just problem solve.  The latter took the form of putting my all into applying for other opportunities.  It would have been dumb to go into intense agita about what if I got the job and what if I didn't get the job.

Maybe hard times were sent to us to get the hang of seeing the world as a situation to navigate, not to be overwhelmed by.

Over-50 Career Paths: Whistleblower?

Should the over-50, restless for a new career path, press that "send" button?  That one act could turn them into a whistleblower.  They might be transmitting an opinion-editorial critical of their former company to brandname media such as THE WALL STREET JOURNAL or TECH CRUNCH.  They might be providing a memo that has been leaked.  Or, they might be sending a video they made of the lousy working conditions at Company X.

Whatever.  That could be interpreted as whistleblowing. 

Recently, some whistleblowers have done well for themselves.  For example, there has been former Goldman Sachs employee Greg Smith who now has a $1.5 million advance from Grand Central to do a book.

On the other hand, the fate of other whistleblowers is up in the air.  Former Fox employee Joe Muto got paid $5,000 by tabloid GAWKER to give a not-like to  the place, including a photo of the drab surroundings.  Fox canned him.  It also hired a law firm to warn him to stop and to inform him that his activity could be construed as criminal and civil wrongdoing.  GAWKER also was warned.

Whistleblowing has become a legitimate career path.  But it is a risky one.  I take a look at what the whistleblower can signal about the dysfunction of a company for financial information site Motley Fool. Here you can read about it.

Hang In or Start Over? - Post-50 decisions for workers, entrepreneurs

For a growing number of us Baby Boomers the long term future is all about getting and keeping work.  Given the high rate of change in what we're used to doing the issue becomes should we try to hang in there or start over.

A man in my residential complex made the decision to hang in there.  Yet he was unwilling to invest himself in learning all the new technologies his field depended on.  He wound up retiring early on Social Security.  Obviously technology was not his strength.  He could have started off in a line of work where success isn't tied to technology. 

On the other hand a pharmaceutical sales rep for psychiatric medications was laid off.  She decided to learn medical devices.  That paid off. 

There are no right or wrong answers. A woman was pushed out of an editing job in a glamour industry.  In both the glamour trade and in editing there is a glut.  So, she returned to her roots in residential real estate.  She had grown up in a family business renting apartments.  She decided to get up to speed by working as a leasing agent for $13 an hour.  Within 18 months she had the know-how and the confidence to launch a business cleaning apartments for move-ins and move-outs.   She said her best decision was leaving a line of work which there was so little opportunity, especially for an aging professional.

An acquaintance who had been in stand-up comedy is getting out of prison this summer.  He is about 75.  His family hired a career coach for him to explore if he should go to a trade school and learn a new skill.  Working has always been important to him.  But prison sucks the funny out of him.

What decision should you be making?

Baby Boomers Falling from Middle Class: So?

We Baby Boomers were the generation who attended college as a rite of passage which just used to be for the elite.  With that came an expectation that we would become middle class.  Maybe that's where we went wrong.

The global downturn has toppled some of us out of the middle.  And that was that.  The house, nest egg, white collar job - gone, likely never to return.

Others of us decided that struggling to hold onto a middle class lifestyle reduced our ability to take the risks we needed to operate our businesses during volatile times.  We embraced frugality and let go middle class habits like shopping for food in upscale supermarkets.

There were also a growing number of us who had to temporarily return to our blue collar roots and liked what we rediscovered.  A friend who used to work for a global corporation now drives a truck.  He likes his new employer and the employer likes him.  End of story.  No corporate politics.  He feels young again.

Middle class?  Why did that become our generation's goal?  The values I found there were superficial.  The lifestyle expensive.  The shame factor for not totally conforming high.  For 5.5 years I have lived in a blue collar neighborhood.  It provided me what I have needed to heal (Download Geezerguts).  With healing returned a middle class or better income level.  But, no, I will never return to where I maybe never belonged.  On the other hand, who really does belong to the vulnerable entity called "middle class," here in the U.S. and in emerging economies?

Baby Boomers As Worried Well: Heady times in therapy for "neurosis"

Circa early 1970s, we graduate students in the English Department at the University of Michigan and those in the Psychology Department found ourselves together at a party.  The hosts were a married couple, each getting a doctorate in 1 of those fields. Because it was a time when the meme was "get therapy, the more the better" most of us literature and linguistics scholars found ourselves in the same room with our therapists.  Mine was David W. Harder, now a Ph.D. and full professor at Tufts University Department of Psychology. 

Within about 20 minutes I fled.  I remained undone for weeks.  So did many of my fellow students in the English Department.  We talked about that seemingly forever.  After all, therapy came with the same overpowering mystique which had once been embodied in the progress GE made possible, the persona of Jackie Kennedy, and, of course, higher education as the tool for upward mobility.  We lived from therapy session to therapy session.  The only reality was what insights we acquired in that 50-minute hour.  And, the best of all, it was all about me.   Remember how we Baby Boomers became "The Me Generation?"

At the time, we who were really the "worried well" were primarily classified, at least for insurance purposes as "neurotic."  Mine read "Depressive Neurosis."  In his commentary in THE NEW YORK TIMES, Benedict Carey points out the term "neurotic" has fallen out of fashion.  Instead, given this time of upheaval generated by globalization and technology, what might have been diagnosed before as not-normal or dysfunctional has become, at least in many circles, the norm.  It is not necessarily aberrant to invest so much time on Facebook, be clever on Twitter, and blog compulsively. 

Actually, for me discovering blogging, with a bit of tweeting and connecting with my friends on Facebook  on the side, has been my new kind of therapy.   No matter how undone I become about clients for my communications boutique coming and going, paying or not paying, praising or being critical,  a centering force takes over through digital tools.  Those who follow my posts label me as "OCD," that is "obsessive compulsive disorder." They are right.  Did I always have OCD or did the syndrome take hold as blogging became more and  more the central force in my life - and mental health?  We will leave that 1 to the researchers in psychology and social media. 

Baby Boomers: We r becoming invisible

Sure, we may still have a good job or a successful business.  But, we begin to notice that in group gatherings, attention drifts to the young, even if they had not accomplished all that much, at least not yet.  There is deference to potential. 

The notion of the very late bloomer, brought mainstream by University of Chicago professor David Galenson, hasn't gotten traction.  The phenomenon of paradigm shifts accomplished by Hillary Clinton, Clint Eastwood, Betty White, T. Boone Pickens, and the late Christopher Hitchens is ignored.

After being the center of attention from the media, our confused parents, and bug-eyed employers when we made demands at work, we are now being ignored. So, what do we do?  Accomplish more so that we're noticed?  Sure, that's possible.  But another option is to relish the invisibility to try out what we want to do in our work.  After all, no one is really watching any more.  All eyes are on Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

College: How did we Baby Boomers get through that (even tho it was cheap)

The rant right now is that college is so expensive and saddles graduates with years and years of debt.  But the consensus is that not going to college is more costly professionally than going.

When we Baby Boomers did college it was cheapo.  At Seton Hill, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, the tuition was $700 a year and the board I could earn in a summer. (I had a full tuition scholarship.)  But I don't understand how the generation which changed social mores withstood that confined environment. 

To begin with, we showed up on campus dead ringers for Peggy Olson from "Mad Men."  You got it, hat, gloves, unstylish style of a hairdo, and totally compliant.  Attendance at classes was mandatory and roll call was done.  Better not buck the party line, even though this was supposed to be venue for critical thinking.  Term papers were done to demonstrate that we can follow research, including footnoting, methods.  Exams were geared to ensure we had mastered the facts of the course. 

Males and females were kept separated, as if spermwould pass through the air by some sinister force and make the females pregnant.  If that happened through the air or in some other way, the parents would come to have a showdown withe the hapless male and a marriage there would be. 

By time I graduated I was more stupid than when I had arrived with my hat and gloves.  My fantasy is to do college again, maybe at Harvard.  I want to find out what it is to go to school and grow intellectually.  Also, I want to stay over in some male's dorm room.