Coming To Terms with Invisibility

This is the dawning of the age of irrelevance.

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

When did you first notice you were invisible?

Was it the first time you tried to speak up in a meeting and someone younger talked over you?

Was it when you stood in line at the bank, waiting for the two tellers to break from their chit-chat and finally offer to help?

Was it when the waitress pretended not to notice you seated in her section for 30 minutes?

Was it when your adult child rejected your best advice by saying, “Maybe that made sense in your day, but it’s different now.”

At a certain age, we don’t need Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak to feel unseen, overlooked, or irrelevant. Younger men and women gladly perform that service for us, gratis.

Women will tell you the invisibility is worse for them, and they are probably right. Paula Marie Usrey, for example, who appeared on The EndGame podcast several months ago, has written a useful book for women in midlife called Refusing to be Invisible. In an online reader poll of older adults, 64% said older women are more invisible than men of the same age. According to the same poll, women start becoming invisible at about 52, while for men it happens around age 64.  The difference is usually attributed to that potent combination of ageism and sexism. To be blunt, women who are perceived as unattractive are ignored, and in this culture, young is a critical component of the definition of attractive. Entire industries – empires – are constructed on the belief that older women can only be taken seriously if they maintain their attractiveness indefinitely.

But invisibility and irrelevance are hard pills to swallow for men and women those of us who identified ourselves as leaders, decisionmakers, strategists, partners, and wise counselors, only to learn that “out of sight, out of mind” applies in the work world. Once you step off the career train, it keeps rolling down the line with your former friends, colleagues, associates, and clients aboard. Somehow that world goes on without you, as though you were never there.

Part of a Transition

Perhaps we should expect this as we age. As Markus Schafer, a University of Toronto professor of sociology notes, the feelings of irrelevance happen at the same time we lose familiar roles – at work and at home. The work changes or disappears. Friends become distant. The children flee the nest. The spouse want to revisit old tacit understandings. It was in playing those familiar roles that we found visibility, relevance, and meaning.  

In other words, it isn’t you that’s no longer relevant; it’s the roles you once played.

I have mixed feelings about invisibility and irrelevance. Sometimes I resent them, other times I revel in them. I have not resolved in my own mind how best way to respond to this new fact of life. From my own reading and numerous conversations with peers, I believe there are four viable ways we can react:

1.       Fight it- “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Insist on your continued relevance and fight like hell to retain it. Stay current with new technologies and new developments in your industry. Keep learning all the time. Team up with younger colleagues to get fresh perspectives. stay current. Team up with young uns. Keep learning.

2.       Accept it – “That’s the way the world goes ‘round.” Acknowledge that it’s time for the torch to pass to a new generation. Acknowledge that you are no longer playing that role any longer. Enjoy the freedom that comes with irrelevance.

3.       Find new roles. “The resolution of all the fruitless searches.” Since the old roles no longer bring you recognition and relevance, find new roles. Look for other roles where you can be an important player – as a grandparent, for example, or as a volunteer. New roles can make you newly relevant.

4.       Go inside. “Try to realise it's all within yourself.” Consider the possibility that your feelings of invisibility or irrelevance are invitations to detach from the external world and seek to understand your interior world more fully. Read. Seek a teacher, a coach, or a therapist to help you navigate. Some contend that seeking wisdom is the true purpose of our final years.

Are we truly invisible? The better question is, invisible to whom? You may be invisible to your former work friends, but to the child you shower with encouragement and love, you may be a rock star.