how old are you?
I am 47 years old. I made the Olympic swimming team when I was 14 years old and competed in the 1988 Olympics just before the fall of the Soviet communist regime. I was one of the youngest athletes to compete at the time. Decades later, I had my third child when I was 46 years old.
I clearly did not get the memo on what is considered “age-appropriate”.
Not having had a very conventional life, I never gave it a thought to what I should be doing, how and, most importantly, when. But, as much as we champion progressive views on societal norms, such as family structure and gender equality, there is still an enormous amount of expectations imposed on women on how their life should play out, especially in what order.
There is this term, ageism, that refers to discrimination based on age, usually targeting older adults (apparently, “older” is defined to be over 40), implying that they’re somehow less valuable or competent. So, to express our collective protest, we celebrate courageous and inspiring women who have a drastic career change and/or become entrepreneurs later in their life. Usually, the story goes something like this: a woman gives up or juggles her career as a mother of 2-4 children; she focuses her life on taking care of her family; and once the children have all grown and fled the nest, she finally pursues her dream and reinvents herself to become a successful business woman. The underlying implication is the approving nod and a wink for first carrying out her “duties” and then, when no one needs her any longer, allowing herself to create a career out of thin air (because no right-minded company is willing to hire her at that point.)
It’s as if we’re all born with an internal Waze app that not only tells you how to arrive at your destination, but also with estimated timing of each section of the route that includes: education (watch out for early-onset of gender bias), career (watch out for roadblocks, stopped vehicles and discrimination), motherhood (watch out for accidents along the road), and finally cruising into retirement of boredom and search for relevance (you’ve reached your destination). So, we are celebrated if we do something out of the ordinary as long as that “something” is still on the road map and in the expected timeline. On the other hand, we tell ourselves there are serious consequences of going off-road. There are even TV shows that serve up moral lessons for doing things out of order with a more than a tinge of voyeuristic schadenfreude.
Even algorithms and market data promote a rigid structure of what is expected of us at every age. As if it wasn’t bad enough that the society at large expects us to reach certain milestones at each life stage, we have the social media telling us what we’re supposed to be doing and consuming at every turn.
Even acknowledging the very real obstacle of our biological clock, we have, in theory, a vast expanse of life to experiment with and develop ourselves. But somehow we manage to diminish this literally once-in-a-lifetime opportunity into a series of compartmentalized, check-the-box exercise. We champion those who master this hamster wheel racecourse as if they’re Formula 1 drivers. Sure, doing things in the right order made sense back in the Bronze Age and the Iron Age when the global life expectancy at birth was 26 years (as opposed to now at around 67 years). And today’s structural limitations caused by the inequity of our work and family setup bear much of the blame for much of our social woes. But, aside from the systemic obstacles that define and hinder our options, we can be also be our worst enemy.
Self-doubt, fear, impostor syndrome, inertia, blame it on whatever you want - when we get on the road and roar our ambition, it is often one-dimensional and unoriginal, comparing and competing with men. So many of us define our goals and ambitions within the confines of professional success and accolades. And, even better if you achieve them all the while staying the course, especially as a mother (oh yes, I have 4 kids and I run a tech company!). In this sense, someone like the formidable Margaret Thatcher checked all the boxes of expectations - she fulfilled her great career ambitions, all the while playing the role of a long-suffering mother to her shady son (even sharing tears in public, gasp!) and being a dedicated wife to her Denis. But, this was in the 1970s and 80s. Surely we’ve come a long way since then and no longer need Waze for our roads?
As life has been put on hold during this pandemic and we’re all living in a surreal time warp, it’s a perfect time to throw out our internal GPS navigation and reconsider where and how we want to go.
How would you imagine your life without the roadmap that has been thrust on you? What would your true ambition be?