How To Hire Old
To be very clear, you won’t want to do this.
As a not-old person, you will naturally want to keep older people well away from you, mostly so that no one will mistake you for being not young. Which would be deeply humiliating and profoundly preposterous.
Being around older people also carries the serious risk that you might unintentionally “catch old.” It’s a proven fact that if you work with someone who has thinning hair for a very long time, you too may experience the horrible ignominy of less hair. And if someone you work with has a bit of sag in the jowls, eventually your own droopy face bits will accelerate their embrace of gravity's inevitable floppy dangle.
All of this will 100% happen to you.
And you will not want to be reminded of it.
By far the biggest barrier to hiring old comes from the mind-boggling realization that you’d be hiring yourself, 15 years from now. Looking at older candidates makes us embarrassed by what we will inevitably become. At this point, it's best to avoid any further serious self-examination and blame other people.
I suggest distracting questions like “What if our clients discover that we have embraced not being young?” And perhaps follow this up with the panicked classic, “How will we ever convince them that we have a native understanding of not old culture?”
All of which is reassuringly justified. After all, no older person has ever been anything other than old. No older person has ever felt an obvious fraud, unprepared and unsure of their choices yet making them with unearned confidence. No older person ever felt that the world’s promise was inevitable and certain failure, packaged as limitless potential. Or struggled under the unbearable weight of pretending to be a successful adult.
In reality, the true barrier to hiring old isn’t in believing that older people have nothing new to offer, or even that they don’t get new things like hashtag#VR, hashtag#social, hashtag#influencer, or hashtag#trend. It’s the unendurable fear that someone else might think it of you.
And just like that creepy old man wearing Forever 21 who hangs around the lobby of the girl's freshman dorm, we think if we surround ourselves with enough youthfully firm youth, no one will ever notice that we aren’t all that young anymore. And maybe we can even trick ourselves into believing we will never become too old.
Only when we forgive ourselves for the inexcusable indecency of aging, we will stop thinking it’s a disadvantage.
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