Skip to main content

Age Successfully

The pictures of aging celebrities on magazine covers makes me think of how much help they had over the years and every day to achieve that look. If your look is what earns your money makes every sense to invest in it continuously if you want to keep that paycheck coming for many years. This is no different that a good developer learning and keep up with current technology so they remain competitive in the market full of new and hungry talent. There are those who are the very gainfully and profitably employed into their 60s and 70s because of their level of investment. They are masters of the game and everyone in the business looks up to them. The truth is very few in the developer community have what it takes to age well. Most will fade out to irrelevance well before 60.

It would be unthinkable and absurd to feature developers who have aged successfully on the cover of top publications in technology. It is an even bigger stretch to imagine a not so well aging developer looking these covers and feeling inadequate. But at the checkout register at the local grocery stores, women are seeing the pictures of models and actresses in their 60s and 70s and asking themselves, why they are nowhere in the same ballpark. It often prompts them to take action to "improve" their appearance to that unattainable standard. They don't see this as an absurd undertaking with no redeeming value if the focus is on the look and not on the feel. This is not even going into the reasons why some parts of the population simply don't have the privilege to age well.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more