Verified by 
Key points
- There's no "expiration date" for earning potential, particularly for older individuals.
- The first thing to remember is to be yourself—not some made-up version.
- You can apply your decades of life experience to almost any job
Time is so incredibly relative. When you were 40 years old, you might have given no thought to how old you would be 30 years hence and still earning money. It was simply a bit of math.
But if you’re now much older, you might give a great deal of thought to your perceived expiration date as a working person. I do. How long will those in a position to pay me for my talents and services continue to do so? In other words, when might I be taken off the shelf?
OK. While I’m not a study in food viability, it’s a fair question. You see, I somehow never got the memo on retirement. I figured if I continued doing things I loved and kept getting paid for them, there would be no reason to stop. The coffee, as well as the roses, still smelled fine. What I do offers me a load of flexibility time-wise, and it wasn’t as if I advertised my age doing a job where looks were important anyway.
But soon, I’ll be going to my first big business event on behalf of my newer career path—voice acting. I’ll be meeting people face-to-face. Will they judge? Just because I don’t have the squeaky-cute voice and sport a mature-but-changeable sound, will they simply ignore the lady in her heeled boots and tunic-length blazer? Not if I can help it.
The first thing to remember is to be myself. I will wear what I always do when trying to make a good impression, even if it seems like overkill to the potentially high-end yoga-clothed younger generation I meet and mingle with. Then, I must let my voice and personality shine through to those in a position to add me to their lists of (faceless) actors.
You see, there is this phenomenon called “suspension of disbelief,” and you experience it all the time, every day. Whether it’s seeing a face on a cereal box eating a bowl of Wheaties, the movie Avatar entering a fantasy world, or a book of fiction where the protagonist seems more sinister than the depths of hell, audiences and readers can only become immersed in the idea or story presented to them when they don’t feel compelled to pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
No worries. You’re never required to bring suspension of disbelief with you because it’s the advertisers’ or moviemakers’ job to create it—to drag it kicking and screaming from deep within your sense of reason. It’s created through sheer distraction. And at this event, anyway, I plan to distract people with the real me.
A bit about how I look at things, in case you weren’t already aware by reading my other posts here: When I found myself eligible for Social Security, I did a happy dance similar to the one I did when finding out I was post-menopausal. It was just as liberating to know I had earned a monthly “retirement” check as it was to know the monthly “curse” was behind me for good. In my mind, both milestones presented new opportunities instead of a pronouncement of age.
My “earned income” was about to fund my new adventures, and my change of life liberated me. Face it: As I wrote about, people in their 60s have started up entire franchises (think the creators of KFC or IBM), and those who decided to explore their more creative sides, like writing, creating art, or acting, are taking their places within the happier-than-clams categories as well.
Why now? People our age can apply our decades of life experience to almost any job, and we now know ourselves better than we did in previous decades. That’s a recipe for success, and whoever tells you differently won’t matter anyway because our give-a-damn about their opinions got busted a long time back.
The moral of this story? If you are in your third trimester of life and decided it’s finally time to try something new, the same number of years exist between age 20 and 50 as between 60 and 90. It’s all a matter of how you want to use them. Want to get paid for playing pickleball? Shoot to become a senior coach. Want to write a book? Take some writing classes, join a writers’ group, and learn all about the beauties of the amazing tech that now makes it easier than ever before. Want to dust off that college degree and become an online therapist? We seasoned people are in great demand when it comes to helping others with their life struggles.
Just do it. And when you see my name on Amazon as the narrator of a book you just enjoyed, know that I enjoyed every second of it. Then I got paid.
