Why a 1970's Conversation about "Old People" is So Relevant to Midlifers Thinking of Their Future Today

Last week, the Wall Street Journal got it wrong (as I outlined in my last article). They suggested that those in midlife and later should compete on the playing field devised for the young and digital. Nothing against this idea, but it’s sort of like George Clooney getting dressed up in drag in order to best Julia Roberts in a beauty contest.

Rather than being purely a critic, I wanted to follow-up that article with an old-school uplifting reference (isn’t it interesting that “old-school” has a positive connotation culturally at a time when being old often has shame attached?). Four decades ago, my friend Dr. Ken Dychtwald, gerontologist and founder of AgeWave, interviewed Maggie Kuhn. Let me set the stage for this “fly on the wall” conversation.

In 1974, at age 23, Ken became the co-founder of the SAGE Project and soon after that, started to examine how our population aging would impact America in the 21st century. Who studies these kinds of things early in their life? Well, Ken has always been ahead of his time. 30 years ago, he wrote a book Age Wave in which he suggested that a “wisdom worker” – someone with years of experience – might become a career path for those in midlife. I think we’re on the verge of that happening with the emergence of the “Modern Elder.”

Maggie Kuhn was a famous activist who founded the Gray Panthers movement in the early 1970s, after she was forced to retire from her job at the then-mandatory retirement age of 65. The Gray Panthers' motto was "Age and Youth In Action," and many of its members were high school and college students. She was an early proponent of the idea of intergenerational collaboration.

Ken is in the midst of working on his next book and recently discovered an interview he conducted in 1978 with Maggie (who died in 1995 at the age of 89). This section of the interview is almost like a time capsule for us considering how “Modern Elders” (those who have great experience and many more working years ahead) can best position themselves as both valuable in the workplace and to society. Enjoy this excerpt:

Ken Dychtwald: “Maggie, if you boil it down, what do you see as the role of society’s elders?”

Maggie Kuhn: “We, the elders, should be society’s futurists. We ought to be doing future testing of new instruments, new technologies, concepts, ideas and styles of living. We have the freedom to do so – and we have little to lose. There are increasing numbers of people in my generation who are equipped and ready to do that, if given an opportunity. I think that they would like to swim against the tide of fierce economic competition and try other types of arrangements whereby work gets done and common tasks are shared: cooperative living, communal use of property, barter, exchange for skills rather than money. Who knows? Out of such modest, small experiments, some new knowledge and economic systems might emerge.

We who are older have enormous freedom to speak out, and equally great responsibility to take the risks that are needed to heal and humanize our sick society. I repeat what I said before; we can try new things and take on entirely new roles. Let me describe some of them:

1)   Testers of new lifestyles: In old age, we don’t have to compete. We do need desperately to cooperate, to live communally; to reach out to other human beings we never knew before. Our society worships bigness, numbers, profits. I prefer to esteem smallness – small groups caring for one another, small groups of activists taking on giants. Small can be beautiful.

2)   Builders of new coalitions: Age is indeed a universalizing factor, enabling us to close ranks among the young and old, black and white, rich and poor – to form coalitions of power and shared humanity.

3)   Watchdogs of public bodies, guardians of public interest and the common good: Cadres of watchdogs can observe the courts, watch city councils, and monitor the public and semi-public bodies where critical decisions are made, often hidden from public view.

4)   Advocates of consumers’ rights and whistle-blowers on fraud, corruption and poor services: We need patient advocates in nursing homes, advocates for the hearing-impaired, advocates of elderly residents in retirement homes.

5)   Monitors of corporate power and responsibility: We can establish media watchers to monitor television and the press. We can organize protests in stockholders’ meetings, reminding the multinational corporations of the ultimate ethical questions involved in their operations, the need to protect their workers’ safety and the environment, etc.

6)   Healers of a sick society: We can use our weakness and deprivations as powerful social criticism and levers for change. I’m enormously struck with what antibodies in the human body do to combat disease and put down infection. I’d like to think of us as releasing healers – people working out of their own understanding, their own sense of history, their own freedom from some of the tyrannies of earlier years, to help heal a sick society in whatever way they can.

7)   Critical analysts of contemporary society and planners for its future directions: We can shrewdly assess our materialism and the values of our too-plastic world. In this age of liberation and self-determination, ministers of homes for the aged, coordinators, nurses, social workers, counselors and educators have to shift gears! We must overcome the massive paternalism that exists in the helping professions. We are performing best in the public interest when we are enablers, energizers, liberators.”

Maggie continued, “I think of old people as educators of the young, by our example and by our reaching out and sharing what we know. The experience and skills of old people should be valued and utilized. Out of our own remembrance of the past can come some very solid social criticism of the present, which is leading us to the future and a New Age. I believe that the wisdom and experience of old people, linked with the new knowledge and energy of the young, can be the basis for this kind of analysis, social redesign and improvement.”

Okay, this is Chip writing again, breaking in on this lofty 1970’s conversation. Although it may sound a little dated, there are a few key themes that are relevant to how our “young old” (those who are not yet elderly, but have the stature of an elder) can make a difference in 21st century society. We are stewards of the environment, of culture, of the young. We offer unvarnished insight as we’ve learned that the world could use a little more candor. We are master collaborators as we’ve tired of individual competition, we’ve outgrown our ego plus our emotional intelligence means we have the empathy to understand team dynamics and individual needs much better than we did when we were younger. And, we’re systemic, holistic thinkers as, what our brains have lost in memory and speed, we’ve made up in our ability to traverse from the left to the right brain (and vice versa) with “all-wheel drive” mental power such that we can synthesize the gist of something much more readily.

So, what kinds of future careers might exist knowing that Market Research Data Miner and Social Media Manager jobs didn't exist two decades ago? I forecast there will be a growing desire for In-House Coaches as companies understand that maximizing human capital is increasingly important in an exceedingly while collar world (or "no collar world" for the growing number of casual dressers at work). Companies will also hire In-House Collaboration Specialists who will help teams to work more effectively. We might see a "Modern Elder" role as exhibited by Procter & Gamble's "Masters" program in which long-time employees with grand institutional knowledge devote as much as 50% of their work time to shepherding new hires within the organization and stewarding the culture. There are already a few Transition Specialists out there who help people through midlife transitions, but they'll multiply by a factor 10x in a world where people transition more frequently and later in life. I bet there will be a few Cultural Curators who will help an increasingly-global workforce understand how to be more fluent with employees and customers in other parts of the world. And, heck, why not a VP of Wisdom or a CWO (Chief Wisdom Officer) whose role is to be the person who asks a lot of "why" and "what if" questions as Socrates did to Greek's youth long ago?

Ken Dychtwald and Maggie Kuhn were prescient. Now, it’s time for us to become the Modern Elders that they imagined we could be.

Chip Conley is a New York Times best-selling author and veteran hospitality executive who renewed himself in midlife by collaborating with the Millennial co-founders of Airbnb to create the world’s largest global hospitality brand. His new book, Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder, is now available.