That is sufficient. It’s time to be relevant to yourself. It’s time to do things that were left undone.
All my life I have wanted a metal lathe. I bought one and it is not a disappointment. I have never really understood poetry. I’m learning. I would like to communicate with my great grandchildren, but they live in another world or planet or maybe another dimension. I’ll have to just enjoy them as kids.
All of what I would label as my accomplishments have been consumed by the scroll of history. So, I have few distractions and can concentrate on what’s important, even if it’s not relevant.
Maybe part of the reason you feel irrelevant (and why relevance is important to you) is that you’re still working. Age discrimination is real. I retired 2 years ago and all the company wanted was to hire people just out of college. Maybe after you retire you won’t have to give a shit about stuff like this anymore.
I run five or six music jams a month. The people who attend think I’m relevant enough. They range in age from 40 to 95.
I play music at an old folks’ home once a month. The residents think I’m relevant.
I work two days a week for the local newspaper. My fellow workers think I’m relevant.
I live with my girlfriend of 16 years. She thinks I’m relevant.
“What is it has a trunk but no key, weighs 2,000 lbs, and lives in the circus?”
I am in my mid-50s. and I thought I became irrelevant and invisible about 10 years ago, maybe more. It’s interesting to read perspectives on this. Still working for the foreseeable future, so maybe things will get better when that part of life has concluded.
When I was in my late 20s, I joined a golf league where I played with several guys 10-30 yrs older. I was so eager to hear what they had experienced/learned regarding family, homes, careers, finances… I still value their input today, 30+ years later.
I never understood the need to reinvent the wheel. In my job, I always felt it made the most sense to ask the right questions of folk who did something before. No need to repeat their mistakes.
I felt the same about my parents, and even older neighbors. I guess it’s just sorta surprises me that younger folk seem so disinterested in whether or not I have anything to answer. Especially when I see them making unnecessary and costly mistakes. But, like you said, I keep my opinions to myself.
Sorry for your loss. I have a hard time believing my best friend died in 98, when he was 60. By now, he’s been dead longer than I knew him. I still use his coffee cup at work. But in recent years, several of my friends, golf and music partners - or their spouses/iblings, have been passing. Pretty hard to ignore.
As far as “relevance,” I’m glad I have music. No one cares the color of your hair - or whether you have any, so long as you can pick!
Almost 71, and I don’t feel irrelevant at all.
My wife and I recently signed a book contract, and I’m about to send in the first section.
I took over as webmaster for a writer’s group my wife was in when the old one passed away suddenly, and when Covid hit I enable them to move online. I taught all these 80-year-olds how to use Zoom.
I still have a column for a journal. I’m still on the Steering Committee for a big conference. I even asked questions and made comments at some papers and panels. I’m on the best paper committee of a conference in India I catalyzed into existence a while ago, and which is very successful. (Thanks to the people who run it, not me.)
My daughter and I still talk about doing research. Our kids live far away, so we don’t see them that much, but we’re far from isolated from them.
Now I just have to find time to work on selling my completed novel …
I am 73, and I don’t think much about being relevant. I guess I’m a little self-absorbed, but for me the whole point of retiring, somewhat like the point of getting out of prison, is so that I could do what I wanted, when and where I wanted (of course, my husband has something to say about that, but let’s leave that aside).
I do volunteer work for a local non-profit, and most of the employees at the non-profit that I interact with are very young, in their 20’s and not long out of college. They have a lot of specialized knowledge about the field in which we work, but not a lot of practical experience. They also don’t have much experience working with people as old as I am. Eventually, they and I learn to respect each other’s strengths and to fill in each other’s knowledge and experience gaps. Then they leave or get promoted and I have new people to break in, as I get even older. Somehow this cycle makes me feel useful, and that’s a nice feeling. But it’s not critical to my existence, and it’s not the reason I do this kind of work.
I am 61, single father of two teenage boys. I worked for a university for twenty years but now, after five years of unemployment, I just started a new career. I intend to work until I am seventy if possible, to support myself and my kids, and to get them properly educated. I hope to have enough passive income by then to retire.
I’m five months out from sixty, and four months ago I bought my very first drum kit, a lifelong dream that I didn’t have time or money to do until now. I’m taking lessons; my instructor (a fellow in his late twenties) says it’s his favorite hour of the week.
Dude. You get paid by the lesson, not by the tip, but I love you for saying it.
Also, for the last two years I’ve had a new job with autonomy and the ability to make a life or two a bit better, at least for a moment – if I choose to go that extra mile. I work for the Federal government but go into peoples’ homes, and sometimes there’s something I can do for them to help with life. Just recently I wrote instructions for someone who didn’t know how to text. Then there’s the guy who needed to register for jury duty and couldn’t figure out how to fill out the form, so I used my laptop to do it online with him. I’ve also walked a dog or two. Granted, these are generally elderly folks, but I’ve also rocked a baby while a mom took a quick shower. They find me relevant. And, for the first time in my life, I feel like more than just background noise.
Unfortunately, there are some aspects of the job that have become deal breakers, and I may have to quit. But at least I know it’s not my age that made me irrelevant, it was my attitude.
I just turned 76 and my husband will be 77 next month. We might be irrelevant if we thought about it but we really don’t. I’m pretty healthy and walk an hour or two every day on a trail; DH had some heart issues but he goes right on rebuilding a boat as if he had no issues. He’s tough. I think the health is the main thing that either keeps you living or lets you vegetate and we have health and no desire to veg so it’s all good. Being retired really is swell.
We’re in our mid sixties, have been retired for a couple of years now. Resigned to being irrelevant. That’s the way things are supposed to work! You’re born, struggle, fall in love, spawn, and then die! Got no gripes on that score.
Well, only one. When we go to a decent restaurant we always—I mean ALWAYS–get shunted to the shittiest table they can find for us (next to the restroom, by the side station), away from the beautiful people, who are horrified to have to encounter the likes of us.
I’m nearly 86 and have been retired for nearly 23 years. I certainly wasn’t irrelevant at first; I was still active in research and have been publishing regularly until about 4 years ago. I also did some volunteer work for the university (chairing PhD final exams). And visiting kids and grandkids (no greats yet). Since the pandemic, visiting is rare. In the past month or so I have lost two colleagues (one a close friend) and a brother-in-law. Another close friend has lymphoma, accompanied by some undiagnosed nervous disease and weighs about 80 lbs (at 5’4"). I don’t know how long she has. My wife and I cannot walk as far as a km these days. Life is closing down.
I didn’t pay much attention to older folks when I was younger, and now I’m on the other end of that. It makes no difference in my life, so I really don’t care one way or the other. The only time that it ever bothered me was in Portland, where younger people mostly seemed to expect that I should step off the sidewalk to allow them to go past, something I refused to do. Very weird, considering how progressive and caring people there deem themselves.
Now I live in a retirement community, and the staff here treat us like royalty. It’s okay, but all I’ve ever asked of anyone in my life is to be treated fairly, and have tried to return as good as I get.
I had kids later in life so even though I do manage to belong to this catagory, most of my friends are with parents who are 10 to 20 years younger than me. It’s scary.
For now, I still have to make sure the homework gets done and they don’t kill each other, and get dinners, things cleaned up, etc., etc.
Were I to do it over, I think I would start off sooner and have the kids out of the house now and be more irrelevant.
I remember talking to a Japanese man once. He was in his early 60s and had made it to upper middle management, but not to top management. It was going to have to retire soon and he was reflecting back on his career, on how hard he had worked for this position, then suddenly it was finished and he was an “old man” to be kicked out to the curb.
At the time I had no appreciation for that. I was 30ish and it seemed another world.
For the past 55 years I’ve tried not to care about the opinions of others, so I actively don’t care about being respected. There are a few people who appreciate my skill set, and that’s fun, but I don’t worry about the multitudes who don’t.
As for relevance, my dogs need me to supply kibble and help them up on the bed. My wife likes it when I cook, go shopping, let the elderly dog out at 3 a.m., and help her when her shoulder hurts. Our daughter is mostly self-supporting, but appreciates that we help her with her annual IRA contributions. I vote, work the polls, and contribute more to political causes then I did when working full time.
I don’t contribute significantly to the economy, I can’t or won’t keep track of cultural trends. New skills are not easy to develop. Things are fine.