A good read
Morbid? Maybe. But it lends perspective.
I don’t spend any real time contemplating my own death, nor do I spend time contemplating my professional decline, though I do spend time observing the vacancy where older, female product managers are not. There aren’t many older people to look up to in tech, and filtering for women cuts that down even more.
These lessons about getting comfortable with death can be adapted to make us comfortable with decline. We should not avoid thinking about the loss of our abilities. On the contrary, we should lean into this thought — contemplate it, consider it, meditate on it.
Perhaps the mantras can be adapted to apply to the unknown as well as the inevitable. Picturing feeling unsure, picturing taking chances in second careers, picturing failing, and picturing trying again could help an aging tech worker face the eventual reality that after being the only [insert identifier here] in the room, they’ll one day be the oldest one in the room. Will picturing it be scarier than living it?
