I’m an octogenarian suffering in the job market. I feel your pain, Joe Biden.
“His poll numbers just keep going down. Which makes me think – or at least consider – that minds are simply made up about him. That people have decided that his age is a major issue – and nothing Biden does will change their mind.” — Chris Cillizza
I’m a few weeks older than Joe Biden. As Biden did in 2017, I retired once – in my case, it came the year I turned 67. I used my free time to write a novel. But then, after a few years, I went back into the job market in search of a change of scene and some extra income.
I used to argue to anyone who would listen that early 21st century Americans were figuring retirement age wrong. I enjoyed proclaiming that “80 is the new 65.”
That seemed a sufficient mantra until 2022, when I turned 80, still working.
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Part of what happened then might be explained as accidental. Physical ailments seemed to have lined up in the hallway waiting their turns to enter and make life miserable. As I held forth at my 80th birthday dinner in Japan and, a few days later as I flew to Louisiana for the winter, I was wearing a catheter due to an enlarged prostate. (I’ll spare you further medical details but can advise that the fashion touch you’re looking for as you hide the tubing is not a WalMart grocery bag attached to your belt but a fanny pack, in a conservative gray.)
Meanwhile, my high school and college classmates and other close friends were leaving this world at a much faster rate. (Earlier this week, I was drafting an obituary for my latest dear departed.)
And that brings us back to Biden.
Biden, who turned 81 in November, has kept himself in far better shape than I’m in. And I haven’t read anything to indicate that, following his return to the White House in 2021, the Grim Reaper stepped up the disastrous, already way-too-heavy pressure on Biden family members.
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But there’s more to what’s happening than the inevitability of disease, decline and death. Whatever allowance is made for the ability of some individuals to postpone the inevitable, our culture has long since attached a number to the phenomenon. In the minds of our fellow mortals, when we reach a certain age, it’s not only a privilege but also a duty to retire. Three-fourths of American adults said Biden is “too old for a second term,” according to an Associated Press-NORC Center poll from this summer.
On the bright side, the number for workers whose labor is mostly mental is no longer 65. I’d argue that, over a fairly short period of change, it can plausibly be said to have hit 80. But don’t expect the number to keep rising after such a dramatic leap. It’s a good bet that, in the short term, there is no further upward elasticity, particularly during a year when American life expectancy is regressing and maternal mortality is increasing.
But the number is unenforceable, right?
Wrong. While there’s reason for imagining that employers are fearful of the official consequences should they get caught discriminating based on race or ethnicity, gender or religion, this 81-year-old doesn’t need the results of a social scientist’s study to be convinced that job ads’ boilerplate denunciation of age discrimination contains scarcely a scintilla of sincerity.
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As a frequent applicant for part-time editorial work, I can assure you that you don’t want to be within spitting distance of 80 when you test the good will of HR professionals.
My favorite example started several months ago when I saw an ad from a company called Remotasks: “Are you interested in teaching next-gen AI models about writing and deepening your domain expertise?”
Well, sure. Why not? Transferring my knowledge to chatbots would be cutting-edge work.
The company responded quickly, hiring me for a job with these responsibilities:
- “You will train AI models by crafting and answering questions related to your field.
- “You will evaluate and rank responses generated by AI systems.
In preparation, my new employers had me install multiple software programs (which gummed up one of my laptops irretrievably).
But then they cut me off. For weeks, I kept messaging to ask, gamely, when I would be getting a work assignment. Nothing came back, not a word. I had become a non-person.
The company didn’t go out of business. It has kept republishing the same ad, most recently just this week. The only reason I can think of for erasing this particular new hire is a belated discovery that, like Joe, I’m old. Not too old to have applied for a cutting-edge job but too old to be trusted with doing it.
Helping to make this an especially timely example of what awaits oldsters in today’s job market, my immediate supervisor – judging by her photo and remote location below the border – could have been one of those incredibly beautiful women who have begun showing up uninvited on American men’s social media pages, proffering friend requests.
As a bonus, I believe she was a bot. Following the discovery of the hiring error in my case, the supervisor along with an HR bot or two probably had to be retrained to read to the bottom of a resumé and calculate that the applicant would need to be an octogenarian to have done all that’s listed.
To little Donnie Trump, 77, I have this to say: OK, youngster, you’ve dodged age discrimination this time. However, assuming you lose again, you can certainly forget about getting off scot-free the next time, four years hence, when you attempt to run for president for a fifth time.
According to the revised mantra, 81 is the new 95.
Bradley K. Martin, a career foreign correspondent who has reported for the Baltimore Sun, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Asia Times and Bloomberg, is the author of Nuclear Blues.