On my birthday, I wonder: How do you stay relevant as you get older?
From my archives: I wondered about this a few years ago. Not much has changed.
It’s my birthday, and I am thinking about getting older. I have been thinking about this for a while and used to write about it often on the Mother Nature Network. So much of my writing has disappeared over the years as websites were closed, but I archived many of the MNN ones and am going to republish a few of them today and tomorrow. I find this one from 2017 to be particularly timely; I am seven years older, many more of my posts have been deleted, and the last major building I was the architect for is gone.
Watching a documentary about urban issues on the local public television network, I was surprised how much of it was filmed in front of the building I developed 20 years ago in Toronto’s Kensington Market. There was Mikael Colville-Andersen, talking to everybody who's interesting in Toronto — and I was a bit disappointed that he never talked to me (we have met a number of times). Twenty years ago, I was a player in Toronto, but after doing this building, I lost my company, and I could barely get out of bed for two years. I was saved by writing, which is why I'm here today.
The day after watching that show, I saw a post on Next Avenue, a site dealing with aging issues, titled Does Getting Older Mean You No Longer Matter? And I wondered, does everything I've done in this city no longer matter? The research behind the article notes that older people get asked for advice and opinions less than younger people do.
The connection between advice-giving and life meaning is most pronounced for late-middle age adults — even as changes during this part of the life course reduce the odds of advice exchange…. Yet opportunity structures for advice transmission also shift over life course, leaving adults in late-middle age and beyond with fewer opportunities to engage in such generative practices.
It raised a lot of questions for me. Having been an architect and a developer in Toronto, there are a lot of physical remnants of my life, and they are disappearing fast, so this may be hitting me harder than it would other people.
I’m no longer relevant in Toronto. I accept that, I really don’t work here anymore. My buildings are getting demolished, but I think that's a good thing. I wasn't a very good architect.
My online legacy is even less likely to survive, given that it’s almost entirely on the web. I spent a good three years writing what I thought was great stuff for a website that no longer exists, they closed it down and just pulled the plug, and all that work is gone. (And I thought the internet was forever.)
So here I am, a former architect and developer who built a lot of bricks-and-mortar stuff, and a writer who wrote some pretty popular internet stuff, and I'm seeing my legacy in both disappear before my eyes. In Britain, they have the Rubble Club, where architects who have lost buildings during their lifetime (it used to be rare that buildings were finished in an architect's lifetime) get together for a drink of Macallan’s. In North America, I suppose they'd run out of scotch.
How to stay relevant, regardless of your age
In her Next Avenue article, Debbie Reslock makes some good, universal points for everyone about staying relevant, and as an aging boomer I have to pay attention to them:
Team up with millennials instead of seeing them as a threat. Both sides have something to teach and learn from each other.
Don’t resist change just because it’s different. Be open to new ideas, even if that means letting go of the way things have always been done.
Keep up to date on new skills and the many ways now available to learn them.
Establish your own personal branding and market yourself and your skills.
Networking is still important, but it’s a two-way street. Don’t forget to ask how you can help those you meet.
Think more like an entrepreneur, by being a perpetual learner and accountable for building your own business life. Don’t rely on an organization to take care of you.
All good points. My position is a bit extreme; most people don't see a building they created come down, but their contributions to the world are no less valuable and their need to be relevant no less real.
But then Reslock concludes:
We’ll always have value to those who love and care about us. So instead of looking back to what we’ve lost, let’s look ahead to what we’ve gained. Because when we’re not being driven to prove to the world how much we still matter, we can let go and just engage with those who matter to us most.
She suggests that perhaps we should embrace irrelevancy.
Wanting to feel relevant is understandable. But refusing to let go when, and where, we should is pointless. Because there comes a time when we have to pass the torch. It doesn’t mean we don’t matter anymore, only that we accept that our roles have shifted.
I read this and I thought no, she's wrong on this point. That’s too easy. I don't accept irrelevance. I count my twitter followers (follow me here!) [update: I am now on Bluesky] and newsletter subscribers (subscribe here!) every day, relishing every retweet. But then I get on my bike and go downtown and realize I don’t know this city anymore — and it doesn’t know me either.
When it comes to what I did 20 years ago, I'm no longer relevant. But so many of us are doing different things, and in this different world, we still have a role to play. I still get out there and give advice; it's just different advice than I used to give. People are reading what I write and students are coming to my classes.
I've faced the fact that there are young writers with energy and drive who really know what’s going on in ways I cannot begin to understand. They can stay up late. There are young architects and developers who are designing buildings and using technologies that I cannot begin to comprehend. But I’m still learning, still evolving — and I’m not out of ideas yet. And I believe that's what still matters.
I don't mourn what I’ve lost all that much. (Frankly, I miss the words more than the buildings.) Most architects don’t live long enough to see their work getting demolished and I have, so perhaps I should count myself lucky.
But I will never embrace irrelevance. Never.
Happy birthday Lloyd! I'm a millennial who's been reading you for years and from where I stand, your work has never been more relevant. Please keep writing!
Happy Birthday!
You irrelevant? Nothing could be farther from the truth. If it were me in your shoes, I wouldn’t be worrying about it.
Next, I think of all the readers of “Carbon Upfront!” There must be a lot. I am one. Even if only one person read your posts, that should certainly eliminate any notion of your being irrelevant.
Furthermore, I believe I read earlier where you’re a university instructor, maybe even a professor (that’s what happens — at least to some — when we get older: we tend to forget things. With me, there’s a lot of that going around! Be thankful you don’t have that problem!), and by virtue of that, the fact that you have students to teach to, students that value the information that you impart to them, then in your being irrelevant, there is just no way!!
I remember when I used to teach electronics classes at California State University, Long Beach, for the two semesters part-time that I did, those were the best two semesters of my entire teaching career that I ever had!! Priceless!! That was in 1987-‘88.
I, too, went on to be a writer. I got my first paid writing gig in 2000. It was freelance. I wrote historical sketches, business and personal profiles, opinion/editorial pieces, reviews, magazine articles, etc., etc., etc. To be a published writer was one of my goals after I completed post-graduate studies. I’ve done that in spades. For me, I can’t get enough where that’s concerned.
Lastly, I also like reading. Though I prefer reading hard-copy books vs. reading them online. Weird, it seems, that I wrote a book, but it’s only available for reading in cyberspace. Go figure!