Hi guys, I want to delve into a topic that I covered on my Instagram channel that I feel I cannot really do justice to in an Instagram reels format as that's limited to three minutes - it is about older people like myself taking ourselves out of our comfort zones and trying something new. As always this has also been recorded as a podcast so please click here if you want to listen to it. This is because of society's expectations of older people, we have been around for a lot longer by virtue of our age, so we have had a lot more time to learn whatever we want to do. This applies to everything from our professional careers to our hobbies to skills in our personal lives. So imagine if you're in a shopping mall and you see an older staff member training a younger lady how to process a refund for a customer, that feels totally normal. But what if we were to turn that around, if a member of staff in their 20s was doing the training and it was an older man in his 50s learning how to process that refund - you might be too polite to say anything, but you might be like, "Hang on a minute, what is going on here? Why is it this way around? Why is the young lady training the old man how to do his job?" We make so many assumptions based on age and this is not something that is unique to one particular culture. Let's take a step back and we shall try to work out why this assumption exists in the first place and try to understand the origins of it.
Our cultural beliefs and value systems are founded over centuries and the problem is that our world has changed so much in the last 100 years or so. If we go back a few centuries, then the average lifespan was a lot shorter, more like 40 instead of the 80 today. But it was not like all the people died around 40 years old, most would due to illnesses and accidents, but a small number would be able to live until their 80s, 90s and even over 100. Back then longevity was a lot more rare but not unheard of - if you were able to live that long, that was probably because you were very wise, rich, privileged and a combination of those factors. Conversely, if you were just plain average, poor and of the working classes, you were never going to survive into old age - the odds were stacked against you and remember, we're talking about a time when a simple cut could lead to a deadly infection, gangrene and a nasty death; you couldn't just run to the hospital to get a course of antibiotics like we do today. Thus simply being old was a status symbol in those days - it wasn't easy surviving into your 70s and 80s, so if you managed to succeed in doing so, all due respect to you. However, in these modern times, with the help of government subsidies in healthcare and modern medicine, it really isn't that hard to survive into your 90s and even past 100. The whole modern healthcare system is there to just keep old people alive and the uneducated, poorer, working class people are enjoying longevity in a way that only the rich, well-educated and privileged could over a hundred years ago. So our traditional assumption about older people being wiser, smarter or better at what they do is based on a fact that no longer is true, yet we have yet to discard this outdated belief system.
I am about to turn 50 in 2026, so I am placing myself in the category of an older person. I'm reflecting on my own experience as well as what I have observed of other older people. Firstly, I consider myself and my generation very lucky in that we have had access to a much better education and we have had a lot more opportunities than my parents' generation, so it is hardly surprising that my generation is usually a lot more educated and enlightened than my parents' generation. So we already know that in this modern day and age, you cannot use age as a reliable indication of a person's ability or status, instead it would boil down to each individual's circumstances. Nonetheless, in some industries, there is a strong correlation between your pay and your tenure - that means the longer you have worked there, the more senior you will become in that industry and the more you will earn. Good examples of these are train drivers, nurses and teachers - the reasoning behind this is simple. The employer has to invest a lot in training these train drivers and nurses to be good at their jobs, so they want to reward loyalty and prevent these people from thinking of leaving the profession even if they are having a hard time and facing some problems. Thus in these professions, seniority and age go hand in hand whilst younger entrants to the profession are frustrated that they cannot earn more and increase the amount they earn by performing their jobs better However, this kind of age-based prejudice also works in the private sector as well.
Let me give you an example - there is this company I deal with at work and they are one of my business partners. They recently hired someone whom we shall call Anna, not her real name and when I first met Anna on a Teams call, I was taken aback as she looked rather young. I was wondering, oh no, have they asked me to deal with some young person fresh out of college with no experience? Hence to get to the bottom of this, I quickly read her Linkedin and worked out her age, I realized that she looked a lot younger than she actually was and she has actually quite an impressive CV. So in this case, I was a lot more relieved once I realized that Anna wasn't as young as I had initially thought and perhaps I was guilty of a form of ageism, where I didn't want to deal with young people in business on the basis that they wouldn't know enough to deal with someone like me. Anna then introduced me to two experts she has been dealing with - let's just call them Mr G and Mr M. Once again, I had a quick look at their Linkedin profiles and I was very relieved to note that they are indeed older than me. So yes, I realize I am just as guilty of assuming that older people are going to be more experienced, knowledgeable and competent than younger people, even in the world of finance where we are not constrained by strict pay scales. Have I been wrong before? Yes of course I have - I have met people who are older than me but are a lot less competent and capable than I am once we actually start talking about the details of the projects we are working on. Hence I do know that I ought not make any assumptions based on age per se but it is hard to fight against that instinct and I always catch myself making such assumptions even though I know I'm not supposed to.
So with all this weight of expectation on older people to be good at what they do, it can have a very negative effect on some aspects of their lives. For example, they are far more reluctant to try to learn anything new later in life - let's use myself as an example. I'm currently learning Korean because I am going to Korea and I started like 2 weeks ago. It has been a struggle as Korean is a language isolate, it is not related to any other language hence my knowledge of Chinese is not really that useful, apart from when there are some loanwords from Mandarin or Hokkien. Whilst I speak quite a number of foreign languages, Korean has never been one of them and I'm using the opportunity to test myself, push myself to rise to the challenge and see how much I can learn in this short period. After all, I have spent years listening to K-pop and watching Korean dramas and films without actually understanding more than just a few words of Korean. I can't expect to master Korean to any decent standard in this short period of time but what I can do is 'baby talk' - so the difficult part about Korean is the very complex grammar structure which is so different from English and it will take learners years to be able to speak Korean to a fluent standard. Nonetheless, I can still get myself understood in what I call broken Korean or baby talk Korean whereby I throw together a bunch of words to communicate what I want to say. Hence an example of that would be the sentence "excuse me, do you mind if I charge my phone here please?" I would just use the key words like "sorry, I here charge phone okay?" It's not elegant, it's not articulate, it's certainly not grammatically correct but it will suffice when it comes to communicating. And I'd like to think that the other party would appreciate the fact that I really trying hard to speak Korean rather than just expecting them to speak English to me.
A lot of people wouldn't even try to do that if they were to visit Korea on holiday - they would imagine some kind of worst case scenario whereby the local would either react angrily at them or get offended if they spoke Korean badly. Some might even accuse the locals of mocking them if they spoke Korean badly, because you would come across as an inarticulate child talking like a baby if you spoke like someone who only knows a little Korean. Now this kind of worst case scenario is highly unlikely of course because Korean people simply don't expect foreigners to be fluent in Korean. In most cases, they are just relieved that you are trying to speak Korean instead of forcing them to switch to English and this is especially true with older Koreans who mostly don't speak much English at all. However, instead of dismissing this theory altogether, I am going to share with you a childhood memory to address the other side of the story. My father doesn't speak much English because he has always avoided speaking English for this very reason. I remember once when I was a kid, he encountered two Indian kids in Singapore and let me explain that my father would speak to the Chinese kids in Mandarin, the Malay kids in Malay but with the Indian kids, since he didn't speak Tamil he had no choice but to speak to them in English and on this occasion, he reluctantly did so and the two Indian kids laughed at the way he struggled with English. It was slapstick humour for them to hear my father speak English and of course, my father felt like that incident made him looked like a fool and he was embarrassed - so his reaction to that was to avoid speaking English if he could, but that also meant that his English would just never ever improve if he refused to even try to use it.
But if you think that my father had somehow found a cheat code to avoid embarrassing situations, well guess what? In refusing to speak English, he didn't maintain his dignity, people just assumed that he couldn't speak English (which was a fair assumption) and judged him for not being able to speak English despite living in an English speaking country. Nobody was going to reach the conclusion that this man is speak Mandarin out of choice but his English is perfect - no, everyone knew that he was speaking Mandarin because he couldn't speak English and thus there was judgment about his inability to speak English regardless. There is no cheat code - he was still being judged harshly by others. There is no 'better option' apart from actually making the effort to improve his English. Now staying with that case study, the two Indian kids probably mocked my father for not having made any effort to improve his English because he has had plenty of time to do so but he has not bothered whilst these two kids probably had an English teacher at school who would rebuke them every time they made a mistake in class, so if these kids were having to make an effort, they expected the adults to lead by example and when the adults don't, they get mocked and belittled. Yes, older adults don't get a free pass when it comes to this kind of judgment by children. It is interesting that these Indian kids were making a like for like comparison between their own ability to speak English and my father's - thus if I was struggling in Korean in Seoul, it would be unreasonable to compare me to how well the locals speak their mother tongue. Rather, a far more reasonable comparison would be to see how well the locals cope in a foreign language when they are on holiday. And if someone still insists on making a very unfair, unreasonable comparison, then the problem lies with them and definitely not me.
The fact is you can't stop people from being unreasonable but one would hope at least that if there are unreasonable people out there, they are in the minority and most people will be reasonable. But should you let your fear of unreasonable people stop you from improving yourself and growing by embracing new experiences? Of course not. Sure, I am more than willing to accept the possibility of a few Korean people laughing at the way I struggle on in Korean when I am there, but what I gain from exercising my mind this way and embracing a difficult new language benefits me so much that it is a risk well worth taking. After all, if you don't try to do anything new, you may think you're sparing yourself the possible embarrassment of failure but you will never be rewarded with the triumph of success. Those who have the guts to try and risk failure are the only ones who will ever taste the sweetness of success. In short, you need to have a thick skin in order to take these risks in life, especially when you get older. After all, what is the alternative? We have a Chinese phrase that I use amongst my siblings: 等死 dengsi - it means waiting to die in Mandarin. I use it to describe a situation where a person no longer cares to invest any more effort into their life and is thus just waiting for death to come. Now this attitude may arise if someone was actually going to die, like if they had been given a diagnosis for a terminal illness or if they had simply given up on life for any other reason. If an older person is paralyzed by the fear of failing that they give up trying to learn anything new, then they have effectively entered this dengsi phase of their lives and I have seen many older adults do that as early as their 40s and 50s. They stop trying, there is no effort whatsoever on their part to learn anything new and they want to pretend that time can just stand still, so they don't have to put any more effort into facing anything new in life. Of course, they don't have a machine to freeze time, so they are paralyzed in that condition whilst life goes on around them as time passes and they are effectively left behind by the rest of society.
Let's analyze this attitude in a bit more detail - imagine if you were told by the doctor that you have about 2 to 3 months left to live. This would really affect your decision making process when it comes to maximizing your time left on this earth. You would not plant a new cherry tree sapling in your garden knowing that you will be dead long before that tree can bear any fruit for you. Conversely, if you were offered a chance to do an experience with more short term gains like having a great meal in a really nice restaurant, you might be a lot more amenable to that as the satisfaction from that meal will come to an end the moment you finish eating and there is no long term benefits from that experience. So people who know that they will die imminently tend to be a lot more focused on short term goals and dismiss long term ones. But there is something desperately wrong if people who haven't been given a death sentence are taking on the same mindset, focusing only on short term goals that bring them immediate satisfaction whilst giving up on long term plans that may bring a much larger gain further down the line. I look back at the way my parents were behaving when they reached my age all those years ago and I realized that they had completely given up on any kind of long term plans by then - they were totally content with just doing the same job over and over again just to pay the bills and they had no concept whatsoever of any self-improvement that involved investing in themselves. Whether it was a decision they had actually taken or if they had just somehow sleep walked into that state, they had entered into that 等死 phase of their life very early, mostly because a lot of their peers were doing exactly just that. And this is when I'm going to repeat something I said in my last podcast but it is so true: two wrongs don't make a right. A thousands wrongs don't make a right. A million wrongs still don't make a right. This is actually a very serious problem affecting our society today and pretending this will somehow just become the new norm will not make it okay. No, we need a real solution instead and we need it fast.
The fact is we have an ageing population in the world today, there are many countries in the world from Japan to France to Australia to Canada where there will be a heck of a lot of old people around. Now what kind of life do you want all these old people to have after 50, if you know that they are going to hang around for a few more decades? Do you want them to constantly live in fear of embarrassment and be under constant pressure to appear good at anything they do in public? Or do you want them to be free of this fear, enjoy their later years in life and try out new experiences that may bring them a lot of joy? Can we fundamentally change the way we view the elderly amongst us in 2026? There needs to be a fundamental change in the way older people approach this issue and I think it starts with letting go of out of date perceptions from another era that no longer apply in the context of our modern societies. There needs to be a paradigm shift on a large enough scale that creates a new norm for older people to continue having this mindset focused on growth that doesn't end with them reaching a certain milestone in their lives. This change couldn't come fast enough in light of our rapidly ageing population situation and I remain cautiously optimistic about this situation. But what do you think? Who do you blame for the current situation and what needs to change for this paradigm shift to happen? What do you think your life will be like after you turn 50 and are you worried about the weight of expectation by society to expect you to be good at the things you choose to do once you become older then? Many thanks for listening and reading as always.
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