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There's More To Look Forward To After Peaking Professionally
When it comes to our working lives, there's a point when we're no longer in our prime. But science shows that we hit our peak professionally far sooner than we think we do.
That's the conclusion social scientist Arthur Brooks draws in a new essay in The Atlantic.
His research began after eavesdropping on a conversation on an airplane in 2015. At the time, Brooks felt at the top of his game as the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, and writing bestselling books. "Things couldn't have gone better," he tells NPR.
On the plane, he sat in front of a man and a woman. The man — who Brooks writes was in his mid-80s — told the woman that he wished he was dead.
"I thought it was somebody who must have been really disappointed about his life," he says. "But then at the end of the flight he stood up and I recognized him as somebody who's really quite prominent and who'd done a lot with his life."
He wondered what the man must have been doing wrong to feel this way.
"I decided to figure out how, after 50, life can get better and more fulfilling," he says. He tells NPR he thinks he found some answers.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @01:04AM
This attitude has been around forever, it isn't something that just happened to affect tech the last 15 years. I have done well by concentrating on mastery in skills likely to remain in demand long into the future: C, C++ and Java. Conversely, when it comes to boutique technologies that only my employer is likely to use, I actively refuse to become too good at it. Lest I become designated the last rat on the ship as they decommission that technology themselves.
And what successful person wishes he was dead? TFS sounds like he made that up. I see successful people start space programs, buy dying media outfits, or accidentally kill themselves with the airplane or sailboat they bought.