Aging with resilience in an unstable era

With the U.S. feeling like a pinball machine flashing TILT and the white-collar job market informally closed to anyone older than 55, it's time to build "spiritual strength."

credit: PinballHelp.com

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Author’s Note: My unusually long travel period (Europe, Chicago, Los Angeles, Chicago again…), which made my regular weekly or twice-weekly cadence a challenge, is over. I’ll be posting on a regular schedule again starting next week. Thanks for hanging in there with me.

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“There’s a knife edge in the air.” That not-quite-coherent sentence spilled out as I began to write this post. The journalist in me almost erased it. It captures the sentiment I’ve been trying to describe for a while: Not much feels safe and secure now.

Not our country. Not our climate. Not our collective decency or financial future. Certainly not our careers. Our emotions are serrated; our judgments, barbed; our tolerances, filleted.

Some of the danger is structural: the staggering number of 50-somethings whose careers have been derailed and who haven’t been able to find a decent job to save their dwindling savings and self-esteem is, I think, an iceberg of which we’re still only glimpsing the tip. I’ve crashed into it, myself, as I explain below.

A lot of this is also, uniquely, political. When leaders of a supposedly representative democracy demonstrate that their priority is servile obedience to a vanity-addled master instead of able service to an electorate, the result is a massive rise in not GDP but GDS: gross domestic stress.

Nobody wants to live in a United States of Incompetence — run by either a narcissistic clown or a senile chief executive. So, whatever one’s view of what’s going on, whoever you may be cheering for or against, the polarizing uncertainty and mistrust that is settling like coal dust into our cultural alveoli isn’t just bad for business; it’s bad for our health and longevity.

Weak democracies age us faster than strong democracies

The result of all that stress is not only a low-level, continuous drain on our physiological batteries, it also, according to a study published this week, helps age us faster. How cool is that?

This massive wave of stress, like America’s $36.6 trillion national debt, is coming for us all. Previous research has shown that difficulty mitigating stress, in older adults, triggers harmful processes such as chronic inflammation and increased production of damaging molecules called free radicals. It's as if chronic stress puts older bodies in a constant state of "fighting mode," which wears them down over time.

So, how can we become more resilient without walling ourselves off from the outside world? I’ve included some specific strategies below.

But first, a word about the Gen X and Boomer white-collar career collapse trend.

What it’s like to be 56, laid off and unable to land a new job

In a word, it sucks. I know because in 2023 and 2024 I endured a long and painful transition from confident, high-achieving “knowledge worker” to laid off, flummoxed and silently self-doubting job seeker who couldn’t find another marketing role.

I hesitate to recount this saga here because AGING with STRENGTH isn’t about me but rather about your longevity story, and me doing everything I can to help you understand how to realize it. But I’ve come to see that my late-career implosion isn’t only about me; it’s a reflection of what a torrent of other middle-aged humans is also experiencing.

Which is to say, an existential test of our resilience — aka spiritual strength.

Spiritual not in the religious sense but rather to mean the often painful process of being forced to look inward for what we really want and who we were meant to become, instead of outward at what label is affixed to us. I call it spiritual because it originates by definition from our own selves to help us each discover what it will take to just keep going now, with so many blades whickering through the air.

What eventually rose from the ashes of my incinerated career was AGING with STRENGTH and the community I now share with all of you — some 16,000 people on a common mission to grow stronger over time.

But damn if that journey wasn’t painful.

A long, dark journey into failure, rejection and financial uncertainty

It started in August 2023, when the Bay Area venture capital firm eliminated the job (head of content) it had recruited me to fill only 16 months earlier. I had five months of severance and a full year of paid health insurance. I fully expected that to be enough to carry me on to the next great adventure in my upwardly mobile career.

(Remember “upwardly mobile”? A phrase that has aged like a Gordon Gekko suit.)

I’d never not found a good next job. And with The New York Times, a bunch of investigative journalism awards, a Fulbright Scholarship and an advanced degree from an Ivy-league school on my résumé, not to mention a strong professional network and impressive examples of my needle-moving professional writing, I decided to reframe my layoff:

This isn’t a rejection of my talent! It’s an opportunity to find a better fit.

Except the better fit never arrived. There’s no record that it ever left the warehouse.

Over more than a year, I cheerfully churned through dozens of job interviews (all done remotely on Zoom, because I had moved to Southern California just as many Bay Area tech and VC firms were transitioning back to hybrid/in-office work), fairly sure the next one would be The One. A few progressed to the third and fourth rounds. A couple included personal recommendations of my skills by fancy people with big titles.

I never received a single offer. I began to think something was different this time. I began to wonder: what if this doesn’t turn out the way I’d expected?

“Silence and Doubt”

• The fake job postings that you, blatantly overqualified, spend 3 hours applying to

• The robot-like recruiters who ghost you because they can

• The form rejection emails that start with “Dear ,” because they don’t bother to actually add your name but nonetheless still include a promise to keep your resume on file “if future opportunities arise”

• The “application windows” that a real person (who is 25 years younger than you) regrets to inform you closed hours before you sent in your résumé

After months of all the above, I descended into a semi-permanent state of stoic gloom for allowing my self-worth to be murdered in slow motion by keyword bots, resume-reading algorithms, job application sites that require you to type in your c.v., LinkedIn’s stultifyingly conformist commentary and, ultimately, by the humans on the other end of the Zoom interviews who — I finally, finally realized — thought I was too old.

I realized this after friend after friend told me they were hearing my exact same job-search anecdotes from many of their Gen X peers who couldn’t land even entry-level positions in industries in which they had 20, 25 years of blue-chip experience. My rage morphed into disbelief: Ageism is actually real? Surreal is not too strong a word to describe that dark epiphany.

I continued to reduce my salary expectations, eventually to roughly 50 percent of my original goal. I wrote yet more clever-yet-compelling cover letters — without AI. I made sure that, on Zoom interviews, my face was bathed in high-contrast natural light, on the preposterous half chance that maybe it made me look younger.

The result was nothing but more silence and doubt. The holidays came and went, and instead of Burl Ives’ classic rendition of “Silver and Gold,” I kept hearing him instead croon, “Silence and Doubt….”

“You’re going to have to write your way out of this”

That was the advice I eventually received from someone who knew me, my background and the current job market well enough to see how my story likely wouldn’t end, i.e., with a salaried “knowledge worker” job. That advice was ass-kickingly prescient. Writing my way out of this meant leaving the spirit-destroying job search behind to launch AGING with STRENGTH, which I did 10 months ago.

I’m still figuring out the business model and the path to financial stability, but I’m writing my way out of this huge setback, leaning heavily on my investigative journalism background, my creativity and my willingness to take smart risks.

This may be the best career move I’ve ever made. I hope you’ll stick around to find out.

Building resilience out of adversity in midlife and beyond

Resilience is a perishable skill; the more you practice it, the better you become. Think of it as a dynamic process to be developed, strengthened and experimented with throughout older adulthood.

Getting your butt kicked by an endless job search is one humbling way to build resilience, though I don’t recommend going that route voluntarily.

Whether it’s politics, career, finances, health or relationships — whatever may be provoking your massive stress responses nowadays, explore ways to manage that “knife edge in the air.”

Spiritual strength amid political and social instability develops from…

• Reframing stressors by identifying what you can and can’t control. Can I be as prepared and informed for a job interview as possible? Yes. Can I convince an organization relying on a keyword analysis of my c.v. to give me a chance? Nope.

• Limiting your exposure to people, news topics or current events that drive you batty. Since November 2024, I’ve had to become highly disciplined about what news I let myself read and listen to. (I rarely watch TV news…because it’s usually pandering, repetitive and built to appeal to our worst impulses.)

• Broadening your perspective of political events to account for previous historical challenges that have been met and overcome. The Vietnam War/Richard Nixon era, anyone?

• Heeding that old bumper sticker, “Think globally, act locally” — good advice in today’s political climate. Even small, civil expressions of your conscience matter.

• Being nice to people, especially if you disagree with their opinions. It allows you to demand the same treatment in return.

• Breathing deeply for 10 minutes without devices. One of the most powerful ways I’ve found to maintain a healthy, enduring equanimity in the face of major stress and rancor.

Spiritual strength in times of personal or professional crisis comes from…

• Practicing strategic planning by breaking large problems into manageable steps. Nothing is overwhelming if you can do it in one hour. Continue adding more “one hour” steps until you reach your goal.

• Using proactive coping — which means anticipating and preparing for potential stressors before they happen. It’s a bit like pretending to be an optimistic pessimist, gaming out how the worst outcome would make you feel, in advance.

• Knowing you did your best. As we tell our children, that’s all anyone expects of them. The same goes for yourself. Effort really matters.

• Breathing deeply for 10 minutes without devices. Yes, it’s repeated from above here, because it’s that effective. It’s like taking a resilience pill.

• Practicing self-forgiveness. I wrote previously about this powerful act of showing yourself the same grace that you would apply to your best friend.

What’s your resilience story? I encourage you to share your thought — any thought — in a comment. It might help someone else find their way out of a dark place.