No, my old friend, you will never be irrelevant

Last week I received an email that deeply saddened me. It was from a friend who is a very talented journalist with vast experience. He told me he felt irrelevant.

Here is a man whose range of experience exceeds my own but with whom I share a number of common traits: We are both male, Pakeha, beyond the age nominally set for retirement, and recognised for what we were rather than who we are.

In his email he told me about a recent encounter which he said “does add to my sense of irrelevance”. In spite of the fact he had not been driven by monetary reward, he “never had so much as a cup of coffee” with those to whom he had offered his services. He was ignored.

I was saddened not only because I greatly value our friendship but because he is yet another casualty of systemic ageism.

I began my reply to his email with this: “Let’s get one thing straight: You are not irrelevant, have never been irrelevant, and will not be irrelevant for as long as you draw breath.”

That is the reality, but the perception is vastly different.

More than 20 years ago I encountered a bubbly, talented woman named Jacqueline Freeman. We both worked at the New Zealand Herald. I was Editor-in-Chief, and she was Key Accounts Director in the advertising department. We got on well, and later our paths crossed online.

In the days since we worked on the country’s largest newspaper, Jacqui has been made redundant five times. In a recent article in The Independent in London, she began by saying: “When I was made redundant for the fifth time, I didn’t just lose my job. I lost my footing. My financial safety net. And, for a moment, my whole sense of self.”

She went on to detail how redundancy and re-employment processes are now geared to automatically eliminate people over the age of 50. Online job applications automatically shelve such jobseekers: They do not even get as far as being vetted by a human. There is no ‘Thank you for your application, but unfortunately…” reply to older applicants. Just silence.

It’s called ghosting and it annoyed Jacqueline Freeman so much that three months ago she started a public online platform to ‘out’ the process and provide a forum for ‘victims’ whose sense of self-worth had been given a hammering by systemic age discrimination. Her platform, which runs on both LinkedIn and Instagram, is called 58 and Unapologetic. The feisty title is mirrored by her regular posts that show just how much is being lost by a belief that ability and value automatically switch off when we hit our half-century.

58 and Unapologetic is now in the top five per cent of LinkedIn platforms with more than 12,500 followers, ranked in the top one per cent for engagement, and recognised as a global voice on ageism. In its first three months it has attracted more than three million views. Its founder is about to also launch a podcast series.

In a post last month, she said: “Ghosting used to be bad manners. Now it’s built into the system”.

My friend with “a sense of irrelevance” was ghosted, not by a computer programme but by people who reflect why age bias has been built into the machine.

His sense that he had passed his use-by date resonated with me, in spite of the fact that he was wrong. Use-by dates are for milk and supermarket foodstuffs, not for people.

However, as I approach my 80^th decade at startling speed, I can recall numerous ways in which I have been ghosted, dismissed, and forgotten.

Emails, for example, can go unanswered until a second reminder that a request has yet to be met. Sometimes, that second reminder elicits no response and I give up. And, like my friend, I have offered advice and free services that are simply ignored.

Together, the two of us have more than a century of experience in journalism and related subjects. That is a storehouse of institutional knowledge, and if you think it has been surpassed by technology, you’re wrong. Much of what we know is immutable.

Both of us retain all of our mental faculties. We are no different to many ‘oldies’. An article from the International Monetary Fund posted on Jacqueline Freeman’s platform quoted a study of 41 advanced and emerging economies that revealed recent cohorts of older people have better cognitive capacities than earlier counterparts. A person who was 70 in 2022 had the same cognitive health score as did a 53-year-old in 2000.

However, we are still not out of the woods. We are assumed to have been vanquished by the latest iteration of technological change. Artificial intelligence is seen as the killer punch: How could we possibly know anything about AI?

Given the speed with which AI is developing, we could ask the same question of 90 per cent of the population. However, no-one is disqualified simply by age.

I have AI assistance on my email, use Copilot on my word processor, ask questions of ChatGPT, and now use NotebookLM as a research tool. My son is encouraging me to try Claude, an alternative to ChatGPT which has been developed by a company he says is at the forefront of ethical applications of AI.

Last week I took part in an international seminar on the application of AI. I was pleasantly surprised by two threads to the discussion that were inter-related. One was the need to ensure that older employees received the training and motivation to embrace AI tools, and the other was the key part that ethics and institutional knowledge played in ensuring AI was deployed within proper boundaries.

I hate to sound defiant, but to those who deny people like me the ability to understand and utilise artificial intelligence through some supposed age-related degradation of natural intelligence, I simply have this say: Get lost (or words to that effect).

Nonetheless, my friend and I are intelligent enough to know that logic and common sense will be insufficient to persuade the under-50s to sweep aside the systemic ageism that gives them a baseless sense of superiority. Nor can we rely on a reversal because for them, too, the clock is ticking. Ageism has a nasty habit of creating victims before they have time to blow out their birthday candles. Those waiting to fill their shoes crave their own moment of superiority.

In my reply to my friend, I said we could not rely on others to see our worth. We had to create our own relevance.

The superior beings who think sexagenarians are people too old to have sex (let alone jobs), forget that it was we old timers who ushered in the digital age. We know how to use its various forms as publishing platforms, and there is no better example than what (the slightly younger) Jacqueline Freeman has done with 58 and Unapologetic. Fellow former editor Jim Tucker continues to publish his own columns and the work of others online at jimtuckermedia.wordpress.com, giving insights not only on journalism but on a wide range of subjects.

If those with most to gain from institutional knowledge borne of experience are blind to the benefits of employing it, there is a ready-made public space in which the lessons of history can be laid out. Those lessons include the mistakes that only ignorance will see repeated, enduring principles that should not be lost in pursuit of shiny news things, and the benefits of hindsight. Ethical oversight is also greatly enhanced by actual experience. If the ageists do not want to take advantage of such things, they can still be held accountable by them.

We can also use our knowledge to look into the future. For example, I am the principal author (with contributions from some equally knowledgeable colleagues) of a discussion paper on news deserts being published this month by Koi Tū Centre for Informed Futures. The paper includes an international survey of countries experiencing significant gaps in coverage of local news, and the implications for New Zealand.

But the relevance of the forgotten goes beyond that. Creativity does not switch off with eligibility for National Superannuation.

My wife Jenny Lynch (another former editor) is an excellent example. Next month, at the age of 87, she will publish a collection of short stories entitled The Humiliation of Millicent Salmond. It will be her sixth book, and second work of fiction within two years. Last week, I met up with another octogenarian who has written a collection of short stories and is about to publish a second memoir.

The skills that took us through our working lives, and the experiences accumulated in living long lives, have not left us. They continue to be at our disposal…and at the disposal of others if they have the sense to use them.

The reply to my friend’s email ended with a commitment to conspire. Together we will plot how we will make ourselves relevant, shrug off the cloak of invisibility, and take the world by storm.