It happened just last Friday. Three days ago.
I finally reached the age where I can start collecting social security: 66 years and six months.
The hair is grey now and the eyes glaumy. And I know enough to delay collecting from social security for as long as I can--benefits increase eight-percent a year, and today, nothing pays eight-percent.
The point in all this, however, isn't that I'm old.
The point is how un-old I am.
Sure, I wake up with pains and go to sleep with even more. Sure, getting up from a chair I sound like I was recorded in Dolby™ SurroundSound in Creakaround™. Sure, I'm cranky, and on occasion I leave the living world in late afternoon and lay down to take a load off my feet for twenty minutes, but still.
Don't fuck with me.
At sixty-six-and-a-half I have more energy, more acuity and, more more than anyone else. More drive and ambition and combativeness than nearly anyone I know.
I work harder, longer, faster and smarter. And I've a bit of Bernard Baruch in me.
Baruch famously--even in his 90s--sat on a park bench across from the White House in Washington, DC. He advised every democratic president from Franklin Roosevelt to John Kennedy. Kennedy would flash a signal across the park when he was ready to see Baruch. It was reported that Baruch was found studying Latin at 92, while sitting on his bench. "Because he finally had time."
No, I'm not studying Latin again, hic, haec, hoc, after a forty-year hiatus. I haven't the time. But despite my aforementioned aches and pains and grumps, my learning ability, my curiosity, my breadth of information and retention remain prodigious.
But that ain't the point, either.
The point is about the throwing-out of people because of some asinine (and comfortable) belief so many people hold about the a) disposability of people and b) the obsolescence of people.
Because those who have gamed the industry through awards mania, and pillaged the industry through greed have determined that "advertising must shape culture," the industry has excised anyone over 40 from its midsts. In short, the industry has forgotten entirely that advertising must exploit (if it's to be effective) simple, timeless, human truths. Timelessness, it's sad that I have to write this, does not blow with the wind or with the latest binary digital hype cycle. Timelessness, you might say, is timeless.
And timelessness is universal.
The industry seems to have convinced itself that "personalization..." "Roger! We have 20% savings just for you!" is somehow more appealing than telling Roger something he might want to know in a way that's actually startling and interesting to him. Addressing Roger by name is a cheap parlor trick like Uncle Sol pulling a quarter out of a kid's ear. Understanding that kid, based on humanity, empathy, history, experience and more is what communication is about.
Everyone I know in the industry who's over 50 is now either out of the industry, er, undustry, or making a go at freelancing in the fringes of the industry, or like me, running their own thing. And happier for it.
Not only is this expungement of brains illegal, wasteful, stupid and cruel, it actually runs against about 4.5 million years of human evolutionary precedent.
As Henry Gee, a paleontologist points out in his great book, above, humans thrived as a species because, nominally, we learned from each other and from elders.
Now we've thrown out all the elders. Which runs against the tide of life of earth.
We're so busy sitting on panels, reading inspirational platitudes on Linked In and awarding ourselves for drivel, we've forgotten to look at actual historical reality. We're as dumb as teenagers who think they invented sex. We forgot, and worse, actively forget, that there are those simple, timeless, universal human truths. And they're not the domain, solely, of 27-year-olds.
Gee writes.
Or as Noel Coward sang:
Go shape culture.
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